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Srikandi
Eminence Grise
Original Poster
#1 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 2:57 AM
Default Scaling on wall patterns
If you've tried making a wall, you know that the pixel sizes for the images you need are 256x1024, 768 and 512 (for tall, medium and short wall heights respectively).

However, that's not the display size of the short and tall walls in-game, which means that walls with square or circular patterns will be visibly stretched/squished. This was an issue with TS2 walls too.

The solution we used for TS2 was to prepare our walls at a different size than the output size, with everything square, and then resize it before exporting. That would work here too, but we need to know what the right sizes are.

Anybody happen to know, or know a better way than trial and error to figure it out?
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plasticbox
Pettifogging Legalist!
retired moderator
#2 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 3:33 AM
I believe 256px width is displayed 1:1 on a diagonal wall? Going by the only formula I remember from school math (a^2 + b^2 = c^2), a regular wall would be the square root of 65536/2 then = 181.0193359837561662px wide.
Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.

In the kingdom of the blind, do as the Romans do.
Srikandi
Eminence Grise
Original Poster
#3 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 3:38 AM
@plasticbox,

Aside from the problem of displaying .01 of a pixel , I'm not sure I understand. We have three wall heights, and the stretching of the pattern is different on each height.

I'm kinda assuming that the WIDTH is ok, but we need to make our wall textures at a different HEIGHT.
plasticbox
Pettifogging Legalist!
retired moderator
#4 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 3:50 AM
Isn't a high wall exactly twice as high as a low one in game?
Stuff for TS2 · TS3 · TS4 | Please do not PM me with technical questions – we have Create forums for that.

In the kingdom of the blind, do as the Romans do.
Srikandi
Eminence Grise
Original Poster
#5 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 4:04 AM
Quote: Originally posted by plasticbox
Isn't a high wall exactly twice as high as a low one in game?


Apparently not, or we wouldn't see the stretching issues that we see The texture has twice as many pixels, but there is still distortion on both (stretch and squish respectively).
automedon
Test Subject
#6 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 5:54 AM
I was looking at the "Patterned Plaster" wall texture in the game, which looks like each rectangular block is 128 high by 256 wide. Short wall has 6 blocks, medium 8, tall 10. So my guess is that the textures need to be sized like this:

Short: 256 w x 768 h
Medium: 256 w x 1024 h
Tall: 256 w x 1280 h

Haven't tried it out myself yet, though.
peacemaker IC
Lab Assistant
#7 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 6:10 AM Last edited by peacemaker IC : 13th Oct 2014 at 6:38 AM.
Not sure how much this will help, but from what I remember, TS3 wall files in-game were 256x768, but the file sizes were 256x512. The reason for this is the DDS format can only be read as a 1:1 or 1:2 ratio. TS3 walls were 1:3 so they got squished to 256x512. It is also why patterns are 256x256, UV for clothing was 1024x1024 and all UV's are either a 1:1 and 1:2 ratio. Since TS4 also uses DDS format, the same rules would apply.

However, since the WallEz tool is out, I assume the size of the walls have been figured out.

edit: I just looked at the star wars file and apparently that ratio means nothing :/
automedon
Test Subject
#8 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 8:21 AM Last edited by automedon : 13th Oct 2014 at 8:33 AM.
I made a test wall with a grid pattern to try out the sizes I noted above (256x768, 256x1024, 256x1280), and it looks like they work properly. No stretching of the textures at those sizes.

Attached an image showing the short wall with the grid at a height of 768 vs 512, plus a view of each wall height to show that the grid stays the same on the good side.
Screenshots
honeysims
Test Subject
#9 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 8:22 AM
Through my own trialing I've found the best heights to minimise stretching are:
Small - 712
Med - 1024
Large - 1336

There's still a little bit of difference in the smallest size but it's much better than before.
Which produces these results
small
med
large
count_cosmos
Test Subject
#10 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 8:49 AM Last edited by count_cosmos : 13th Oct 2014 at 9:32 AM.
Quote: Originally posted by automedon
I was looking at the "Patterned Plaster" wall texture in the game, which looks like each rectangular block is 128 high by 256 wide. Short wall has 6 blocks, medium 8, tall 10. So my guess is that the textures need to be sized like this:

Short: 256 w x 768 h
Medium: 256 w x 1024 h
Tall: 256 w x 1280 h

Haven't tried it out myself yet, though. :/


I also confirm these dimensions / aspect ratios appear to work very well.

TALL 1280 pixels

MEDIUM 1024 pixels

SHORT 768 pixels
count_cosmos
Test Subject
#11 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 1:52 PM Last edited by count_cosmos : 13th Oct 2014 at 2:13 PM.
This method also makes it pretty simple to make custom walls for your sims. If anyone wants to make some rooms like this but has trouble I'd be happy to help.

peacemaker IC
Lab Assistant
#12 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 2:01 PM
yes, that would make sense, 768, 1024, 1280. Thy are multiples of 256px (the width) and do correspond to my expected values. It is so helpful that automedon and count_cosmos put a grid and circle pattern into the game. It has saved myself from doing it as well to visualise the tiling on the wall.

The question is, do you both scale down the height? I know in TS3 if you left a wall in a 1:3 ratio, the texture would blur since TS3 required the 1:1 or 1:2 ratio for the width and height of dds images.
count_cosmos
Test Subject
#13 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 2:11 PM Last edited by count_cosmos : 13th Oct 2014 at 2:48 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by peacemaker IC
yes, that would make sense, 768, 1024, 1280. Thy are multiples of 256px (the width) and do correspond to my expected values. It is so helpful that automedon and count_cosmos put a grid and circle pattern into the game. It has saved myself from doing it as well to visualise the tiling on the wall.

The question is, do you both scale down the height? I know in TS3 if you left a wall in a 1:3 ratio, the texture would blur since TS3 required the 1:1 or 1:2 ratio for the width and height of dds images.


The sizes I used for my circle patterns were exactly 256 pixels wide and then 768, 1024 and 1280 pixels high for the short, medium and tall walls respectively. So, rather than making a single texture suitable for stretching I think you need to make 3 unique textures at those dimensions. It works well actually because it means you can design your wall-coverings with three sections - the base, middle and top and then simply add one additional middle piece for the medium wall, and two additional pieces for the tall wall. This helps eliminate scaling problems. I did not notice any blurring of textures when I combined multiple wall-coverings to make the postered room in my previous post.
peacemaker IC
Lab Assistant
#14 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 2:17 PM
that is good to know. Looks like they fixed my biggest issue with TS3 walls which was the stretching.

Now, I just need to wait to add speculars and normalmaps, then I will be really really happy
Srikandi
Eminence Grise
Original Poster
#15 Old 13th Oct 2014 at 6:55 PM
Thanks all for the answers :-) Will test and add the info to the Wall Ez docs.
HugeLunatic
Me? Sarcastic? Never.
staff: administrator
#16 Old 14th Oct 2014 at 4:43 AM
simfeetunder
*not to be found on sims4forum*
retired moderator
#17 Old 14th Oct 2014 at 10:39 AM
I posted on the official forum also but someone might catch this sooner here.

"With the suggested image sizes when I go to save them as DDS I get the "Image width or height are not power of 2. Image mode only allowed." error/warning.
And then for some reason even after I hit ok no matter what I click on it won't do anything and just makes a chime/ding sound at me.
I have to ctrl+alt+delete and kill photoshop.

I've gotten that message before when making DDS files for the swatches for CM/s4pe when I forget to resize them to the right dimensions but it never does the rest of this stuff when that happens, it opens the DDS menu anyway and then I click cancel and fix it.

Ideas?

(also, thanks Grant! This is a weird cc process for me but if I get it working right and get the images to tile right it'll be worth it!)"
count_cosmos
Test Subject
#18 Old 14th Oct 2014 at 12:13 PM
Quote: Originally posted by simfeetunder
I posted on the official forum also but someone might catch this sooner here.

"With the suggested image sizes when I go to save them as DDS I get the "Image width or height are not power of 2. Image mode only allowed." error/warning.
And then for some reason even after I hit ok no matter what I click on it won't do anything and just makes a chime/ding sound at me.
I have to ctrl+alt+delete and kill photoshop.

I've gotten that message before when making DDS files for the swatches for CM/s4pe when I forget to resize them to the right dimensions but it never does the rest of this stuff when that happens, it opens the DDS menu anyway and then I click cancel and fix it.

Ideas?

(also, thanks Grant! This is a weird cc process for me but if I get it working right and get the images to tile right it'll be worth it!)"


This is strange - I don't have this error using Photoshop cc. Does this occur for every image size - even those that actually are powers of 2? Try the 256 x 1024 pixel size as it is 2 to the 8th power by 2 to the 10th power. As I said however I do not get this error when using image sizes that aren't powers of 2 in dimension. The only limitation I have is that the sizes must be divisible by 4, so I can't save say 437 x 256 pixel images.\ and use the correct compression for The Sims.

Could it be that your nvidia plug-in is outdated, or not properly installed? I know I had some trouble and had to manually move some of the plug-in files as they would not automatically install correctly on my pc (win 7 64 bit).
Volvenom
dodgy builder
#19 Old 14th Oct 2014 at 1:13 PM
Quote: Originally posted by count_cosmos
This is strange - I don't have this error using Photoshop cc. Does this occur for every image size - even those that actually are powers of 2? Try the 256 x 1024 pixel size as it is 2 to the 8th power by 2 to the 10th power. As I said however I do not get this error when using image sizes that aren't powers of 2 in dimension. The only limitation I have is that the sizes must be divisible by 4, so I can't save say 437 x 256 pixel images.\ and use the correct compression for The Sims.

Could it be that your nvidia plug-in is outdated, or not properly installed? I know I had some trouble and had to manually move some of the plug-in files as they would not automatically install correctly on my pc (win 7 64 bit).


I gave up on installing the plugin with Photoshop CC, it just wouldn't work. I make the images in CC and then use the plugin with CS6.

I have a problem with this tool, after it's process with the xml file I'm just being told it has a problem and will be shut down. I will try to redownload, I've heard about problems with rars, even though this is a zip.
Edit: It's now working when I open with 7zip either.
Davinia
Lab Assistant
#20 Old 14th Oct 2014 at 3:53 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Volvenom
I gave up on installing the plugin with Photoshop CC, it just wouldn't work. I make the images in CC and then use the plugin with CS6.

I have a problem with this tool, after it's process with the xml file I'm just being told it has a problem and will be shut down. I will try to redownload, I've heard about problems with rars, even though this is a zip.
Edit: It's now working when I open with 7zip either.


If you upgrade to Photoshop CC 2014, the plugin works. It does not work with Photoshop CC for me, either.
simfeetunder
*not to be found on sims4forum*
retired moderator
#21 Old 14th Oct 2014 at 7:37 PM
I'm using PS cs2, which isn't meant for this system (since my laptop is 64bit) but I got it to install through trickery and hasn't given me guff doing the DDS files for clothes and stuff...
It worked on the medium size just now but won't work on the small or large ones, gives me the "power of two" error each time. At least it isn't dinging at me anymore and forcing me to force-quit photoshop...
auntielynds
Forum Resident
#22 Old 15th Oct 2014 at 10:29 PM Last edited by auntielynds : 16th Oct 2014 at 8:28 AM.
Quote: Originally posted by simfeetunder
I'm using PS cs2, which isn't meant for this system (since my laptop is 64bit) but I got it to install through trickery and hasn't given me guff doing the DDS files for clothes and stuff...
It worked on the medium size just now but won't work on the small or large ones, gives me the "power of two" error each time. At least it isn't dinging at me anymore and forcing me to force-quit photoshop...


I'm also using CS2. The most recent .dds pluggins were not working for me so I searched and found THIS dds plugin specific to CS2 & CS3. Works like a charm, and I get no errors saving in the aforementioned sizes.
simfeetunder
*not to be found on sims4forum*
retired moderator
#23 Old 16th Oct 2014 at 1:04 AM
Quote: Originally posted by auntielynds
I'm also using CS2. The most recent .dds pluggins were not working for me so I searched and found THIS dds plugin specific to CS2 & CS3. Works like a charm, and I get no errors saving in the a fore mentioned sizes.


That worked! I guess it was just the version of plugin I was using, thanks auntielynds!
Meemo
Lab Assistant
#24 Old 16th Oct 2014 at 1:11 AM
ok what did I do wrong...?



Waiting for Sims4 so I can go all Halliwell again!!
missgothika
Forum Resident
#25 Old 16th Oct 2014 at 9:13 PM
i've used all the correct sizes. i'm doing some bricks wall with siding. There is the left side, right side, and regular bricks. When you place the regular bricks with shift, is ok. When you place the sidings on each side, i can spot a very very very thin line in the middle of both walls. Like if a pixel is missing.
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