So for todays project I thought I would try and put something together quickly (spoiler it took a lot longer than it should have...), basically I just wanted to recolour some wall paints using a similar process to how I made the freckles.
Here’s my paints in game (you can download it here):
So to make these I used two tools -
GIMP photo editor (the download button didn't work for me, so I had to go into 'direct download here' and then select 'gimp-2.10.0-setup-1.exe'
sims4studio (you need to make an account)
To start in sims4studio, I clicked ‘standalone recolour’ underneath build. On the next page I selected the wallpaper I wanted (I chose a green from the dark basics paint).
From there you’ll get to the view where you can start to edit, add swatches and thumbnails. At the time of writing this, you should find 3 tabs:
Catalogue: Here you can set the name, description & price. These will show in game like below.
Texture: Here’s where you’ll choose the thumbnail and download the needed files & re-upload your recoloured files.
Tags: These are used in the in game search, in here for wall paints, all I had to change was the colour tags - you’ll find objects and other types of items will have way more tags to select from.
So with the basics under your belt, lets talk about how to actually recolour.
On the texture screen you’ll be faced with this:
At the top you have the swatch thumbnails, click on this and you can change the thumbnail colour.
In the texture box, you’ll want to hit the ‘export all’ button, this will download 9 files to your chosen folder, the 3 you’ll want to pay attention to are the 3 colour pictures. Each of these represents a different wall height.
Open up these 3 files in gimp, then you’ll want to go to select ‘Colors’ from the top menu, and then colorize.
On the next window click the big blue box - this will open a colour picker and you can choose your shade. Before you hit ok, I recommend grabbing the HTML colour code (this will be a 6 digit code made of numbers and letters which represents the colour). You can then do the same thing on the other two wall heights copying this code straight across.
Once you’re happy, on each image select file > export - this will save it as a png file. You can give it a new name or just overwrite the one you downloaded. Back in sims4studio, you can click though the different wall heights and hit import to upload each new colour.
And voila! Done! You've made your own custom wall paint!
You can add as many colours as you want by hitting ‘add swatch’ at the top.
Then hit save and it will automatically save it as a .package file you can stick straight into your mods file!
So I made a few mistakes that made this whole process take a lot harder than it should have been, here they are & how I would recommend avoiding them.
Choosing a light coloured wall paint with trim - basically when you're using the magic want tool to select an area in GIMP (so you don't colour the trim as well), you'll want a colour that contrasts so it's picked up easier - so if it's a white trim, go for a dark paint colour.
Losing the HTML colour code. Because of the way colourise works you need to basically apply the new colour once over the same background colour. To avoid losing the code I started using it as my thumbnail colour in sims4studio immediately after doing the first wall height. You can easily re-grab the colour from there, but it's not so easy to do in GIMP.
Hitting cancel in sims4studio - basically there's no warning message & I lost about half an hour of work I had to redo (thankfully quicker the second time round as I'd saved the wall paints as new every time instead of replacing). But my tip here is save often, you don't go back a page or anything so there's no harm in hitting save between swatches.
I hope this helped someone, although I’m mostly using this account to chronologize my own modding journey - and I will most likely refer back to this post a lot to do more CC in the future.
If you’ve read this far, thank you! & if you have any struggles or questions about making CC/mods (at my low level) feel free to drop me a message and I’ll try and help!
