i have a question..first off thank you very much. i have always wanted to do this and now i can...if i can understand it. i found a site to get a free trial of photoshop...now..where is body shop?? i see the picture of the maniquens and havnt the fogist on how to get there. I save the swatches i like and than put them in body shop after i fix them in photo??

Everything that I make shows up blurry in the game and in Bodyshop (once it actually loads it into the game, the preview before that seems fine.) The actual files themselves are not blurry at all. Even when I do a recolor using nothing but hue/saturation, it ends up blurry. I tried sharpening things but that didn't help. Could you give me any idea why? I'm using an older version of Photoshop but I don't know if that could be a problem. I checked the modes but they seem the same as the unmodified files. I can't change my BMPs from 24bit into anything less. I did try OS versus Windows but that didn't do much. If you can give me any help at all, I would greatly appreciate it.

ok i found body shop and i got photo shop..i did everytthing you said but when i try to get it into body shop no luck...i save as...and it wont go...al my pictures dont look like your do...all i see is big sqares of fabric...and how do i find samples of fabric to where i have to shrink and not enlarge??

Thanks!

Wow, this really helped me, thanks!

Body Shop is included with your game. Look in My Documents/EA Games/The Sims2. You can make a shortcut to it, as well.

If your clothes are looking blurry in-game, then your first step is to maximize the game graphics. The icon with the three dots in the lower left of your game screen will allow you to make changes.

i just recolored my 1st outfit using your other tutorial, thank you so much for breaking things down for people like me.

Unfortunately, I can't really maximize the game graphics without having horrible lag in refreshment rates and the potential of the whole game crashing, so I haven't tried that yet. (Plus, the Maxis made clothes still look significantly less blurry even on low graphics, so I'm thinking that may not be the problem.)

Another thing is that, in Body Shop, the preview of the item looks fine. It's when I put it onto a Sim (within Body Shop and in-game) that it suddenly looks terrible.

Yeah, that problem has been bounced around a lot. Unfortunately, there are only a few things you can do - maximize the game graphics (which you said was a problem for you) update your video card driver (not always possible, depending on what hardware you have) or upgrade your video card (which involves financial outlay.) I wish I could give you a better prognosis, but this problem has been around for a while, and that's basically what it comes down to. Sorry.

Emm right,
I use paint shop pro 9 and i tried to do this tutorial as my frist pattern recolour and i could not to this at all so by any chance you someone tell me how to do this is paint shop pro 9? plz

Well, I did run with all of those suggestions (I'd wanted to for awhile anyway, since I knew that the video card at the very least would improve gameplay overall) and it did help a lot. Some of my textures I think still need some sharpening (and perhaps more contrast) but a number of them came up more or less correct once the video card had improved the graphics enough for me to notice. I suppose most of that was common sense but I just wanted to make sure there wasn't anything else that might have been going wrong first. Thanks again and keep up the good work of helping out silly people like myself! :D

I have long puzzled over how people get such beautiful textures into their skins, and manage to get all the shading incorporated.... question answered! hehehe. Between you and faeriegurl, I'm eventually going to have some skins that I think are worthly of the boards here, which is saying alot, I can barely color within the lines in a coloring book, but the tutorials offered here are so simplistic that even I can figure them out which again says a ton! Thank you so much again!!! and again!!!

Mynxie

YAY! Thanks! I can now have a go at making something DECENT!

thank you so much, I'm enjoying your tutorials and playing around with clothing recolors.

Ok, have a swatch of material I like, has images on it. But when I go to paste it onto the outfit, the images are too large. Instead of a basic background of tiny images, we'll use paisley as an example, I have like huge paisleys all over the top. How do I shrink the images?
I followed everything step by step. any ideas?
or should I find material with smaller images? :sadpanda:

Hope - right at the beginning of this tutorial, Faylen scales down the fabric pattern to 1/4 of it's original size. Depending on the size of the fabric swatch you have, you might need to scale it down more, but I expect you somehow missed some steps there. Also, at any time during the scaling, you can make your fabric swatch larger by pasting parts together and doing whatever you need to to make it look as one continuous piece. I actually like to make my fabric swatch larger before scaling it, because when I scale it, small imperfections are hidden in the course of the scaling.

Or in other words, if you *did* scale the fabric down and it's still too big, follow the steps to make the swatch larger. Then go back and scale it down again and make it larger again until you have something that works.

ok thanks tiggerypum, I'll try it again. *keeps fingers crossed*

hey this is a great tutorial but one thing whats photoshop I can't find it I don't no if I have it please help

I dont see this option 7) Use your rectangular marquee tool to select only the image, drag down the Edit menu, and highlight “Transform” and click on “Scale.” This will allow you to change the print so it’s a sim-sized one instead of a people-sized one.) in my Psp8

are there any tutorials on clothes meshing for psp8 maybe, this is kinda of hard to follow for a beginner with a different version of paintshop?

Hello sadangel, here is one of many links to download the program

http://www.soft32.com/download_344.html

There are also other various sites who have it as well, just type in your search bar, "Paintshop Pro download"

ok tiggerypum, went to scale and clicked on it , and as far as I can tell, it didn't shrink it at all. when you click on scale isn't a box supposed to pop up?
or actually better question, which version of photoshop is everyone using?
i even searched the tutorials on adobe's website.

When I use photoshop to scale down a graphic (which is on a layer by itself) I have to drag the edges of the graphic (hold shift and drag a corner to preserve proportions..) There's also someplace - on my photoshop 7 it's part of the top bar, I think on photoshop 5 it was one of the many boxes/pallettes that you can open that appear on the right hand side - that lets you put in percentages. But in my photoshop 5 it didn't pop up automatically, I had to click around and find the window, as there are several all to the right side. It's one with several tabs in it that has various sorts of info.

If this doesn't help (it's only text) search the web for some photoshop tutorials till you find one for your version. Good luck to you!

And folks - PHOTOSHOP and PAINTSHOP (pro) are TWO totally different programs with different interfaces. They have very similar capabilities, and both will work - but please be very clear which program you are talking about - someone asked about photoshop and someone responded with a link to download paintshop. Faylen and I happen to own photoshop, so that is what we use. Paintshop is less expensive to purchase, and GIMP is free - but again, has its own interface that you'll need to learn.

Since you mentioned that, can you also use Adobe Photoshop if needed instead of the Paintshop Pro for clothing creations and textures, that wont mess up your game play?

Regarding programs - you can use ANY graphics editing program that can produce a bmp file to edit. Photoshop has been an industry standard, so many people have it (or have an older version they were able to get inexpensively). Paintshop Pro costs much less than Photoshop and there's a free trial, so many others have that. GIMP is free, and I found the interface a bit confusing, and I haven't followed up enough on it. There are people on this site who have done t-shirt designs with very careful editing using MS Paint. So it's possible, even if more limited. You should use what you can get access to, the end bmp is fully compatible.

Btw, Faylen is using PHOTOSHOP in all her tutorials, so I'm puzzled about your question.

The only reason for choosing say photoshop over ms paint is that photoshop (and paintshop and gimp) have a lot more features - including layers. Faylen uses layers to lay her fabric over a Maxis outfit and let some of the shading come through, which produces a much more realistic looking outfit. If you wanted you could also *draw* on the shadows yourself, but even then it would be better to put them on a separate layer so that you can make them darker or lighter or even redraw them without messing up your 'fabric'.

Where do you get adobe photoshop?