In this tutorial, I’ll be showing you how I create a useable texture from images on the web. You can google fabric sites using “fabric” or “plaid” or “paisley” or “cotton” or some similar word and doing an image search. Once you find a site, make sure to see if the images are large and clear enough to use. In this picture, you’ll see that the swatch itself is small, but you can click for a larger image. Look for an image that has a completely visible repeat, and is as straight vertically and horizontally as possible.



You hit your “Print Screen” button, open up your image program (Photo Shop is being used for this tutorial) and create a new screen. 1280x1024 pixels is a good place to start.
What you want to do now to preserve that size is to select the fabric image with the rectangular marquee tool, and then Add Layer Mask>Reveal Selection to get rid of the rest of the screenshot. You may need to double click the background in the layers box to create a new layer for this.



Obviously, we don’t want the quarter in this, so you use the rectangular marquee to select the portion of the image without it, then Edit>Copy, Edit>Paste and use the Move tool to move the pasted section. It will show up right on top, I’ve moved it off to the side so you can see it there. It’s also created a new layer.



Move the new layer until it lines up as closely as possible to the background. This is fabric, remember – it’s flexible, so you might not always be able to get it lined up perfectly. Zoom in using the Navigator window to find spots that need correcting where the two images lined up.



One of the tools you can use, depending on the print and the amount of blank space surrounding each element, is the healing brush. Use the selection menu at the top to make your healing area larger or smaller. Alt-click to select the source, making sure you can line it up correctly by placing a distinct portion of the image near the edge of the selection. When you click on the part you want to correct, the source image appears over it.



As you can see, this is a fine thing for small corrections.

However, you might want to fix a larger piece. . .



In that case, the Polygonal Lasso is the way to go. In a print this small, it’s easy to find one complete repeat element in a central area. The lines of the Polygonal Lasso should fall along solid color spaces between the elements, and along wide enough areas of the element to make it easy to line up.



In this case, the selected portion can be copied and pasted up and down the seam. Now you have a large enough image to actually use! However, I like to take advantage of every bit of that canvas, so now I select, copy, paste, move, and touch up the seams again to completely fill the window.

After that, it’s time to save it. I have an entire folder of textures, all set up to use like a fabric stash when the mood to recolor hits me. However, before we close it up for later, we need to make sure that the scale is right. On a sim, a too-large scale print or texture looks wrong, and too small becomes blurry and unrecognizable. So let’s put it on some clothes.




Well, if you were really lazy, you could get away with this, but IMHO, this looks very badly proportioned, so let’s go back and fix it.




If you select the entire image, then choose Edit>Transform>Scale, you can do this easily.




Once you’ve selected it, You can either change the scale manually by clicking and dragging the squares around the image (useful if you want to change the width or height only of the image) or you can insert numbers in the indicated percentage boxes and have the same proportions kept.




Of course, now you end up with that little image – too small to use – but we still have that 1280x1024 canvas, so a little more copy and paste, and we can fill that with the pattern in the scale we’ve decided to use.



See how much better that looks? Now you can continue recoloring, or just save your new texture to use later. Remember, too, that just a copy and paste is going to make the clothes look flat – that’s what you’re seeing here. Make sure you either play with the opacity the way I showed in the Adding Textures tutorial, or paint on your own shadows and highlights for depth and movement if you have the artistic ability!

This is the first time I've looked for tutorials on BodyShop, and I'm grateful that I've found yours. They look like they will be absolutely what I need. I've been working in SimPE to create a houseful of recolored objects with a certain theme, and I need to make some clothing to go with it. I've barely used BodyShop before, and every time I've tried, I've been frustrated. I think you have just solved my problems. Thank you very much (even before I actually use the tutorials). :-)

Linda

Faylen,
This is the first time I've seriously looked for this tutorial, having done very minor or basic recoloring. This tutororial isn't just instructional, but shows it step-by-step with good great screenshots. Since I am a visual learner, this is a great help. Thanks a lot. Who knows? I may actually find that I can recolor or retexture something that I think might be good enough to post.

I hope so. It's so much work for me to make my own, I love to download other people's stuff.

Oh wow! I have a huge folder of different images I have found on the web and saved which appealed to me for skintones & clothing for my Sims2 - and for printing my own wall/floor coverings for the dollhouse I am building... but I had no idea how to use them and when I tried in my untrained way they just didn't work. Thanks soooo much for all of your tutorials!

Thank you so much for your tutorials. I only have PSP 6, but even these work for me. Of course, I've had to learn how to use PSP, also...(LOL!). Even though my textures look good in my game, I'm not so sure how others would like them, so I pretty much keep them for myself. They're pretty simple designs, nothing fancy. Some day I might actually learn how to upload them to Mod the Sims 2. But, then again, that's another story.

To the people who use GIMP:

Look under Filters tab - there's a tool called Make Seamless. I've found it quite handy when creating textures.

Just a tip..

May google for "graphic tiling plugin" probably with "freeware" or "graphic seamless plug freeware download", one may find some cool plugins or tutorials for making seamless textures.

The pictures are not coming in are they in the download file?

very new to this

beehive the pictures should have been fine in the download, and I fixed them here online. Some of the image servers changed names and thus broke the inline references (although the pictures were at the end of each message that's too confusing to click on)

Thank you for fixing the pictures I really needed them to help me out.

Shy but blessed

Im New... Were is the print screen button? I bet it'll probably be somethin I use every day! Help would be great. Thanks! :D

Thanks for the teaching tutorial. I copyed and pasted it to do off line,hope thats ok.It say's no post's here for the last 15 months, so I'm breakin the silence here right now..LOL.......................well ............maybe nobody will ever see this post...........maybe i'm the last surviving moder! Naaaaaaaaaaaa thanks again

I am learning to recolor with GIMP. thanks for your tip! :D