LittleDica's Cas Room Recoloring Tutorial
Part 1. Walls and Floors
I was asked by the lovely @faaeish to create a tutorial on how I recolor my CAS backgrounds, namely the one by LittleDica.
Now I want to make a disclaimer first: this is the way I go about editing this room, other creators may have different methods but this is how I do it. Idk if my way may be a little funky but I just wanted to make that clear lol. Also I didn't know how detailed to make this so I'm gonna put as much detail as I can without it being tooooo wordy.
Ok I'm gonna assume you have access to all of the tools you'll need to edit this room and some knowledge on how to use them:
Sims4Studio
LittleDica's Room package file and Recoloring Kit
An Image editing program (photoshop, paint tool sai, gimp, etc)
Google (or any site you'd like for images, if you want them)
First things first, open up the cas room in S4S it will look like something like this:
In the texture tab, navigate to the third texture down, that's the walls and floor texture, we'll be starting off with this.
After you've downloaded the Recoloring Kit for the room, extract the files (there should be walls and floor.psd, objects.psd and sky.psd). Open up the walls and floors.psd with your favorite image editing program. I will be using Gimp
it will look something like this when you open it and have a mess of layers and for me it has an empty group (I always delete it first).
I'll try to describe the different layers in case you want to keep them.
UV Walls -> the UV layer for the walls and floors of the room
Livello 4 -> extra layer that shows the main highlights and shadows of the room
Livello 7 -> a seam shadow for the back wall and the ceiling, in overlay mode
Horizontal -> normal layer in overlay mode with wood texture and layer mask to add texture to the base boarding around the room
Livello 5 copia -> layer in addition mode to add luminosity to the sunlight on the floor
Livello 5 -> layer in addition mode to add sunlight to various places around the room
Room Curve -> layer in overlay mode to add shadow and highlights to baseboards
Livello 6 -> Baseboard and ceiling layer mask
Brick -> Base game brick texture
Floor -> base game floor texture
Livello 2 -> base color for walls
You can keep and use these for your recolor but I usually delete everything except for the UV walls and Livello 4
Since I've explained the layers, here is a diagram of the UV layout and what everything represents.
Now is the fun part, once you've gotten use to the different layers and the layout of the mesh play around with different themes, choose what colors you want, whatever designs you like. Maybe you had an idea for a room design beforehand this is your chance to get creative!
*Another thing to keep in mind! The texture on the walls will stretch out and distort slightly once you import it into S4S
Example: What the image might look like in your editor vs what it looks like in cas.
Just scale down the height of your images and it should look better. I don't have a specific science for this, you'll just have to eyeball it till it looks good! (This goes for any other textures that may look stretched out/distorted in your room.)
Before/After
And finally -> The texture for the rooms and walls come in a default size of 2048x2048, if you want to reduce the amount of pixilation in any images you use (cause they will definitely lower in quality once you're in CAS), increase the canvas size to 4096x4096
That's it for now, the next tutorial will be Objects and Sky. Since walls and floors will have the most detail I wanted to get it out of the way first.
