Editing wall mask?

[The Regal Sim]

Hi everyone, so i have been working on this window's wall mask, the window at the top is in the shape of half of a circle, the wall mask is very hard to work with, i have been trying to get it right by editing the original mask by hand and this is just an epic pain. http://thumbs2.modthesims2.com/img/5/1/9/3/1/3/8/MTS_TDC95-1293113-Capture.JPG

Is there a faster way to get this done? The window is 2X1 in dimensions. So i know i have to do it by half, someone told me something about doing a print screen while in milkshape but not sure what i would do from there :/

HELP please!

[Inge Jones]

Well if you get your mesh in milkshape showing in one of the orthographic windows (rather than the 3d window) then take a screenshot. Then trim round 3 squares high by 1 square wide. (You'll have to do this in two parts for a 2-tile window). Then change the size of your resulting cropped picture to - whatever the normal size for a wallmask is (this will squish it a bit shorter as wallmasks are ratio 2:1 not 3:1. Now use that as the shape to trace around for your wallmask. Try to make the join between black and white in the middle of your frame to allow for slight error.

[BloomsBase]

you could create a mesh, a cilinder with the same ammount of stacks as your window.
Scale it the same size as the outline of the window mesh.
Save its uvmap as bmp and use it as template.

edit,
You can create the template also directly in your texture editor but im not so good at that.....

[whiterider]

When I was making wallmasks, I found that the game would forever mangle them if I used a lowish DDS compression, which basically resulted in the edge of the wallmask magically migrating 2 inches to either side. Very frustrating, as you can imagine. Using DXT5 was the only solution I managed to find, and it may help you somewhat (although of course you still have to battle with making a curved mask in the first place).

[The Regal Sim]

I'll attempt this, but it still sounds confusing lol

[The Regal Sim]

Well if you get your mesh in milkshape showing in one of the orthographic windows (rather than the 3d window) then take a screenshot. Then trim round 3 squares high by 1 square wide. (You'll have to do this in two parts for a 2-tile window). Then change the size of your resulting cropped picture to - whatever the normal size for a wallmask is (this will squish it a bit shorter as wallmasks are ratio 2:1 not 3:1. Now use that as the shape to trace around for your wallmask. Try to make the join between black and white in the middle of your frame to allow for slight error. After i take the screen shot what do you mean by trim 3 sq by 1 sq?

I tried taking a picture with my object in texture and when i turned it i not a wall mask it was to high for my window.

The 2nd time i did i used my old as a base and just moved that curve part down and it still wasnt perfect 0.o why is this happening -_- we really need to make a tool for this :lol:

The 3rd time i finally got it right, or atleast i can live with what i have ;)

Thanks for the help

[Inge Jones]

What I meant was, using the grid squares you got in your screenshot from Milkshape, crop your image around the gridlines, so that it has 3 Milkshape squares high by 1 wide. After cropping, your image will be too tall to be a wallmask, so again using your image editor, use its resize function to make the image the same size as a wallmask should be.

[The Regal Sim]

What I meant was, using the grid squares you got in your screenshot from Milkshape, crop your image around the gridlines, so that it has 3 Milkshape squares high by 1 wide. After cropping, your image will be too tall to be a wallmask, so again using your image editor, use its resize function to make the image the same size as a wallmask should be. Just wondering, should it always be perfect around the edges? Or do some very small pixels go though the trim of your window sometimes?

After i finish this wall mask i need to start re-mapping this thing, some of the patterns go diagonal on parts of the trim :cry: I'm going to need help :rofl: Its a 3 pieces window set, the wall mask on the other 2 parts are ok this one was hard -_- i need to remap them all since on all of them parts of the trim has geometric patterns going diagonal on it, i have UV mapper pro though ^^

[Inge Jones]

The curve can be jagged as long as the jaggies only happen where the frame part is, because your frame should always be a little bit thicker than the wall so that it covers this sort of thing. If you think that the wallmask is sort of like a wallpaper, that clings to the skin of the wall, then you can imagine how the frame lies on top and covers the rough edge, whereas the glass is *inside* the thickness of the wall and so you would see any rough edges of wall that happened in the glass bits.