#1

13th Aug 2006 at 1:41 AM
Last edited by tiggerypum : 16th Aug 2006 at
7:38 AM.
Basic Clothing Recolour using The Gimp
Beginning Clothing Recolor using The Gimp
This Tutorial uses Bodyshop and The GIMP graphics editor (available for free on the web, for installation instructions see here).
With those tools, you can customize your sim's clothing to have new colors and designs on it.
This series of tutes normally live at
http://www.sublimesims.net/ and are being posted here at the request of the lovely Tiggerypum. This is a series of tutorials; each tutorial teaches another technique in making changes to sim outfits. See the end of this tutorial for the link to the next one.
1. Hi Guys, today we are going to learn how to do a very basic recolour of an outfit. A basic recolour is a type of skinning where you don’t actually change anything about the texture or the shape of an outfit; you just alter the colour by using a combination of layers and filters in a graphics program.
2. This tutorial uses the most current version of the Gimp available as at 30 th October 2005 (version 2.6.9). The Gimp is an excellent and free image-editing program that can be downloaded from
http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html. If you have any questions about the basics of using or installing this program, please see the tutorial
here or visit the help files on the Gimp site.
3.Ok, now let’s begin. Open up Bodyshop and Click Create Parts.
4. Click on Start New Project.
5. Click Create Clothing
6.Ensure that you have the Female and Adult categories selected, then select Formal.
7.Find the Green hippy formal dress, then click Export Selected Textures. (See circled)
8. This brings you to the Export screen. Write a title for your project in the box, in this case call it something like tutorial_dress so your project is easy to find for our next stage. Click the tick to export.
9. The screen you come to now allows you to preview your work in progress, or change the category of an outfit. At this point we just need it to help us find our project. The path to find your completed project is written on the top right of this screen. (see circled). The path will probably be My Documents/EA Games/ The Sims 2/ Projects/tutorial_dress/. Keep Bodyshop and open up The Gimp.
10. In The Gimp click on the File menu choice and select Open.
11. Find your project folder following the path provided by Bodyshop earlier.
To explain what you are looking at, the three files below all do different things. In simple terms
body-stdMatBaseTextureName.bmp determines how a skin is coloured or textured
body-stdMatBaseTextureName_alpha.bmp determines what part of body-stdMatBaseTextureName.bmp is visible.
body-stdMatNormalMapTextureName.bmp helps to render bumps and shapes on the sim.
As we are only working on the colour of the outfit today, find and open up the file entitled body_stdMatBaseTextureName.bmp.
12. On the floating toolbar Click on the paintpot Fill With Colour or Pattern. Doubleclick on the black upper square about half way down the floating toolbar (see circled). This will allow you to select the foreground colour. The foreground colour is the colour that you’re going to tint your outfit.
13. Use the sliders to chose a colour you want to chose and click ok.
14. Ensure the paintpot is still selected, that the option FG color fill is selected and that you have selected Fill whole selection. Leave opacity at 100 percent and the mode as Normal.
15. Click the menu choice Layer. Chose the option New Layer.
16. This brings up the New Layer box. Be sure that the Layer Fill Type Transparency is checked then click ok.
17. Fill your layer with your chosen colour. At this point you’re probably panicking going “Eeep! Kathleen! It’s covered over the top of the dress!” Don’t panic guys, it’s supposed to look like this at this point. It will reappear within the next few steps.
18. Select the menu choice Dialogs and the option Layers. This brings up the layers dialog box.
19. Click on the Mode box and slide it down until you pick Hard Light Mode. (I will mention that the mode is entirely a matter of personal choice, the Gimp defaults to Normal and any choice other than that will create a variation of the effect we want, for the original outfit to show through). Click the red x to close the layers box.
20. The dress is now recoloured red. Save your file and close The Gimp once you are happy with the colour. (All I can suggest is if you look at your first go at this and go “Ewwwww” just keep fiddling with it until you’re content.)
21. Click the refresh button towards the bottom of the screen (see circled). Your modified dress will now appear on the podium.
22. Your recoloured dress will now appear among your Sims outfits.
If you are happy with it, click the 'Import' button to bring it into your game. If not, you can edit and refresh again until you are (then remember to import)
Congratulations, you’ve just done your first basic recolour! I hope you have enjoyed doing this tutorial as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Take care Kathleen (Vashti)
For the next level tutorial, please see GIMP Clothing Tutorial #2, Using a New Texture