Mariater55’ Tutorials

LESSON 1

Recoloring existing objects

 

This tutorial will teach you how to recolor existing objects for the Sims. Recoloring is usually one of the first activities of an object creator. You don’t need special abilities for recoloring; all you need is just a bit of fantasy and taste. In this example, we’ll try to do a new version of the cheaper kitchen counter.

 

For this tutorial you need:

 

1.      Cloning our object

 

A first warning: if your operating system is Windows 2000, you’ll meet big difficulties in following these instructions. Transmogrifier seems to have serious problems with W2K, at least in the simple recoloring routine. After Windows 98 (which worked fine!) and before passing to XP, I had to work with W2K and Transmogrifier, so I eventually found a complicated way to deal with these problems. I won’t waste time in explaining how. If you want to work with Transmogrifier, I suggest that you either stay with W98 or upgrade to XP, as they will make all the process much easier.

 

After launching The Sims Transmogrifier (I’ll call it TMOG) we choose the object to be cloned. If we want to clone a counter , we have to choose one in the list of available types:

 

 

Select the cheapest one, called Cheap 1, and press Clone Object File. The following window will ask you the name of the new object, and your Magic Cookie Number, if you have one. The Magic Cookie Number is a number you own exclusively, and it is assigned to you on your request. This number will be associated to every object you create, so that you are identified as creator. This means that every object you create will have your “signature” inside, some sort of fingerprints which allow to retrace the object’s creator at any time. My number is 114787 which is truncated by TMOG and expressed in hexadecimal as C063. Some sites gather Magic Cookies Numbers and the initials or special characters chosen by different creators (my signature is mt55). For instance, you can check Sandshifter’s list, Sandshifter’s IDenTify.

Let’s go back to TMOG.

We call our new counter  miocounter1 :

 

 

When we click OK, TMOG will clone the object. The window will display all the various phases, till the end of the process. Now, our object is listed among the others.

 

 

 

Now we have to export the file, to modify it. Click Export Object File. Since we just want to recolor the object and won’t change its shape, let’s choose Just Change Color and One Zoom, One Channel.

 

 

When we click OK, TMOG will ask the name of the directory where the file miocounter1.xml and its sprites (the images to be recolored) have to be saved.

Let’s spend some words about .xml files. First of all, if you are not expert creators, you shouldn’t modify them. These files contain a set of information TMOG will use to re-import the sprites correctly. A warning: if after importing the sprites you change their alignment (this happens especially with multi-tile objects, and I’ll explain it in another tutorial), if you wish to save the changes, you have to export the sprites again, otherwise you’ll lose all the changes made. Probably you think this warning is not so important, if you work on an object with just a couple of sprites, but try to imagine what happens when you work on an object with hundreds of sprites, like a bed…

Let’s go back to our counter. Now, if you look at the directory you chose for the export, you’ll find there the file miocounter1.xml and  the directory miocounter1_sprites, which contains two other directories: sprite103 and sprite 110. The first one, sprite103, contains the images of our counter when placed alone, the second directory, sprite110, contains images of the counter in a corner position, between two other counters. The images look like this:

 

Sprite103

 

Back view

Front view

Counter-Chp_large_back_p

Counter-Chp_large_front_p

Sprite110

 

NE view

NW view

SE view

SW view

Counter-Chp_large_ne_p

Counter-Chp_large_nw_p

Counter-Chp_large_se_p

Counter-Chp_large_sw_p

 

All the images are labelled with _p. Since we are just recoloring, we have only exported the color channel (p-channel), When we start changing the shape of our objects, we’ll have to deal with the a-channel and the z-channel, or transparency and depth channel. For now, we only need to know that the exported images are 256 color bitmaps (8 bits). To modify them, we have to increase the number of colors. So we open them in Paint Shop Pro, we choose Color > Increase Color Depth > 16 Million Colors (24 bits) and then save them. Now we can start to modify them. In my case, these are the elaborated images:

 

       

 

Now, we only have to re-import them in TMOG. So we select our object in the list, then click Import Object File, and that’s all. Our new counter is ready. We can take a look at it by clicking View Object, and this is what it will look like:

 

 

To modify the description, we go back to the main window. We click Edit Object: another window will appear, and we can write our own description of the object there.  

 

 

Now our new counter is ready to be used in game. Will our Sims like it? You can never guess. Our Sims have strange tastes, and they often shake their head disapprovingly in front of an object after we’ve spent hours of work on it…

If you are interested in finding the file of your new object because you want to upload it on your web page, or to exchange it with your friends, you can find it in the Transmogrified directory, under Downloads, in your game directory. It’s an .iff file, like all object files.

 

In our next tutorial, we’ll learn how to modify the shape of an object.

 

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