SalemsRenderSchool

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[salemsimsrender]

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Hi & welcome to Salemssims's Render School!

I've been asked to start a community where I can help with sims renders. I'll be posting tutorials for various skill levels, as well as tips, tricks, and resources.

I am WCIF friendly My asks are open If you have a render, build or sim request, please feel free to reach out!

[salemssimblr]

Hi, how are you? How do you make your renders so smooth and glowing? It's okay if you don't want to answer ❤️

hey! I'm doing well and I hope you are too! & don't worry, I don't mind answering at all :)

the smoothness usually comes from my editing process, which is long and changes depending on the raw render's lighting/color/etc. I use and edit photoshop actions to suit my needs.

that said, SOME of it does happen in blender!

My computer is pretty powerful, so my settings are quite high, but here's my default render settings:

the most important parts are the samples, noise threshold, denoising and the transparent light paths! (but keep in mind that the higher you set your samples the more power your computer needs!)

as for the glow, I'm a magpie and if it's not shiny and glowy I don't want it! the glow is achieved through the compositor!

these are my default compositor settings:

the glow comes from the glare node, and some of the smoothness comes from the soften node

I know it seems redundant to use both a soften and a sharpen node but I find that using one or the other, even on lower settings is too harsh, and that using both lends to a smooth sharpness, if that makes any sense

[salemsimsrender]

reflagging this here too! :)

[salemsimsrender]

nothing like watching your blender stop responding on a file that includes three new poses you haven't saved yet 🙃🙃🙃

[salemsimsrender]

hi i was recently doing a render where i used alpha hair & cycles engine and the hair had a bunch of dark splotches on it, do you know any fixes for this? i've done the merge by distance thing and it doesnt do much.. it looks normal in the viewport rendered view and your renders look fine so i'd really appreciate your help!

Hey! let's see if I can help with this

Unfortunately in my experience most alpha hair will do a similar thing. I find it to be less noticeable with darker hair (and luckily most of my OCs have black hair... which I should probably diversify but anyway). Even I sometimes run into this problem and can't fix it. When that happens I'll use the clone stamp tool in photoshop to get rid of it, and the smudge tool to make it look more natural.

Merging by distance is the go-to solution, but it doesn't always work. You can also subdivide the hair mesh and then I find using the "shade smooth" modifier sometimes goes a step further in cleaning it up.

Unfortunately there is no one solution, and each hair will behave differently. The best advice I can give is to default to trying the merge by distance or subdivision solutions and if those don't work, clone and smudge in your editor of choice!

I hope this helps! & if you need clarification on any of this please lmk and I'll be happy to help further if I can!

[j3llyflesh]

I wanna bring a little positivity around here and try and turn this into a bit more of a learning thing, so if anyone is interested, this is how I make my stars in blender! (I'm using 3.6)

I've done it for the earrings, but also for my mooncaster hat and moon maiden set, its quick and kinda fun honestly :3

1. Under "Add", create a 'circle' mesh and under the add circle settings (bottom left), set the vertices to 10 (this will give you a 5 pointed star as the final result, you can play with that number as well! I did 8 for that 4 pointed star charm on the hat! The bigger the number, the more points your star will have!)

2. English is not englishing but like, grab a vertice (point), then skip, then grab the one after, kinda like a sequence, you'll end up with 4 selected. Press S to scale it until it magically forms into a star!

3. Press A to select all, then press f to fill. Now we have a flat star!

4. To give it volume, just keep the whole thing selected and press e, this will extrude the star, you can send it upwards to however thick you want it :)

5. Select that little loop cut tool I highlighted there, then hover on your star and aim for the center of the edge and apply the loop cut.

6. Unselect the loop cut tool (so you dont accidentally make more LOL) and make sure you have your newly made edge selected only, then press S. play around with it until it has the volume you want!

7. You now have a little star :D

Like I mentioned, you can set the number of vertices when creating the circle to get different stars like im showing here below, they make for very easy shapes to make maps for and they look cute when smoothened with the shade smooth :3

(in order here, first is set at 10 vertices, 2nd is 8, and last is 14)

[salemssimblr]

Hello, I hope you're doing well. I had a question about how you were able to get that glowing outline on your death flower's hand?

Thank you <3

Hello! I'm doing well & hope you are too (:

The glowing outline/skeleton hand for my death flower sim is a bit of blender magic and is not achievable in game!

But basically I separated the mesh for my sim's body, "cutting" the hand and half of the chest away from the rest and applying a different texture to it. Then I added in a skeleton body & parented it to my sim's rig as well, so it would sit under the skin.

A full tutorial may come later (if there's enough interest) but here's some closeup screenshots of just her hand.

I set the skeleton hand to glow and admittedly I used and adjusted a material from blenderkit for the cut out hand (in this case a material called "green glowing toon shader", which I obviously adjusted to be pink lmao). Both node trees are below:

As long as all of these pieces are parented to your sim's rig, they'll pose as normal!

I hope this helps! <3

[salemsimsrender]

I received this ask on my main account and wanted to share it here too! If there's enough interest I'll do a more in-depth tutorial at some point! (:

[salemsimsrender]

are there any photoshop tutorials you recommend? I usually just use procreate but now I’m looking for a faster process.

Heyo! I'm so sorry I'm replying to this so late, I was out of town!

What kind of tutorials are you looking for specifically? I can help better if I have a direction.

But as far as my own, I haven't posted too many except for this answer to an ask a while ago that outlines my typical editing process!

[acidheaddd]

Wipes out my nameFires up my veinsBites in my skinMy heroine

[ethelgodehel]

⚛ Atomic⚛ 

Oh, your hair is beautiful Oh, tonight Atomic

Thanks to all wonderful CC creators💕

[salemsimsrender]

Can I still follow your blender tutorial with the current blender 4.4 version? Thank you

Yes, you can follow my tutorials in newer versions. For the most part everything is mostly the same. The principled BSDF node is laid out differently but everything you need is there. And instead of the “alpha hashed” setting, you’ll have to change “blended” to “dithered” but I can’t think of any other glaring changes off the top of my head.

Also I’ll be reworking my older tutorials soon to support the newer versions of blender, so stay tuned for that!

[salemsimsrender]

FYI I’m probably going to be revisiting/redoing my earlier tutorials!

I’ll also be doing another lighting tutorial and a materials tut soon!

[salemsimsrender]

TikTok - Make Your Day

The reason all my tutorials are written 🤣

[salemssimblr]

Realized I never used this gorgeous halo by @gloomiegalaxie so figured I should rectify that (; for no particular reason (; (I did edit the colors & glow slightly but still, look at it it's beautiful)

Full size before/after cause I haven't done that in a min:

[salemsimsrender]

I wanted to share this render here and say that I mostly used the tricks shared in my most recent tutorial on environmental lighting!

For this render I didn't use the light disc, but I did use an HDRI, point lighting and the glare node! (:

[salemsimsrender]

Sims 4 Render Lighting Tutorial

"Environmental Lighting" won my most recent poll, so let's get right into it!

A few notes before we begin:

I render exclusively in cycles!

This tutorial assumes some basic knowledge of blender

Though this tutorial covers the basics, HDRIs can be used in conjunction with any scene/your built scenes

I decided to focus on environmental and other lighting in this tutorial, since they all kind of go hand in hand.

For this tutorial, I'll be using my recent Cupid Sim. Here's a render of her with no additional lighting:

1. Base lighting

In any full body, single sim render (like lookbooks, for example), I really like to use a glowing base. It grounds the sim a bit and casts some interesting lighting on them.

To do this, I add a circle under their feet by pressing shift+A and selecting circle.

An empty circle will appear, but we need it to be a solid disk, so go into Edit mode (by pressing tab while the circle is selected) then hitting F on the keyboard to fill it.

After that, you can go into the Materials tab and add in color and glow.

Mine is adjusted like this:

And gives this rendered result:

2. HDRIs

HDRIs (High Dynamic Range images) are extremely useful when it comes to environmental lighting, I always use them now to add better/more dynamic lighting to my renders.

HDRIs are 3D/panoramic, which makes them extremely useful.

You can find/download HDRIs online in a few diff places: PolyHaven, AmbientCO, and Blender Market.

There are also several available for FREE using BlenderKit (my preferred method).

So how do you use an HDRI?

We can add HDRIs to our render by navigating to the world tab and changing the color to "environment texture".

I chose this vaporware HDRI from BlenderKit, & here it is with no adjustments, but it's looking a little rough so let's adjust it.

By adding vector nodes, we can adjust how the HDRI behaves. Here I mostly use the Z rotation and the background strength:

Here's the same render with the Z-rotation set to 50, 150, 200, & 250.

You can put in any value for the Z-rotation, this is just an example of how the HDRI turns. This is maybe not the best example of the rotation, but putting her in a forest just didn't feel right lmfaooo, hopefully you can see how the light changes on her depending on the rotation.

You can also adjust the strength of the HDRI. Here's the HDRI (rotated to 150) set at .5 and 1.5 strength:

For this tutorial, my favorite lighting is the HDRI set to 150, and the strength set to .5, like this (this is a rendered image):

3. Transparent HDRIs + Point Lights

But I'm not fully happy with the lighting. I don't love how the HDRI is a bit blurry, so I'm going to set it to be transparent.

To do this, go to the Render Tab, scroll down to the Film option, and check Transparent:

The lighting effect from the HDRI will stay the same, but the background will be transparent.

From here, you can add a background (when I do this, I like adding a plane, & moving/shading it until I'm happy (kinda like this):

NOTE that you have to put the plane far enough behind your sim so it doesn't affect the HDRI lighting too much.

SECOND NOTE You can use this same method to use HDRIs in conjunction with scenes. They can provide the perfect backdrop!

This is still really dark, so I'm going to add three point lights: -Two on either side of her head/shoulders that will be smaller (in radius) and brighter -One in front of her to add actual light (so details aren't lost)

Here's how I set up my lights.

The pink light settings are for the two point lights on the sides The white light setting is for the light in front of her

For a basic render, this is almost good enough for me, but I really like the glowing effect I get in my renders.

To achieve this, we have to go to the compositing tab:

4. Compositing

Full disclosure, my compositing tab is set to glow by default (that's how much I love it), so all of the renders in this tutorial have it turned on.

I use the glare node and set it to fog glow.

Here's my preferred setting:

I prefer the fog glow effect, but bloom, ghost, streaks and star are also options.

Here's a guide to the glare node!

Tbh, I never use any of the other settings, so I'll leave this tutorial here for today.

Here's the final result (with no additional editing):

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to send an ask, message or join my discord (no minors pls) for help! <3

[salemsimsrender]

Next Tutorial?

I've neglected this blog for wayyyyyyyy too long, & it's definitely time to brush off the dust.

So!

What kinds of tutorials do you want to see next?

What's next?

Environmental lighting (HDRIs, world lighting etc)

Using pre-made scenes

Adjusting materials (metal, glow, etc)

Creating scenes (advanced version)

Something else (PLEASE tell me in the tags or comments!)

Voting ended onFeb 20, 2025

[salemsimsrender]

Thank you everyone who voted!

Expect a tutorial on environmental lighting within the next week or so!

& after that I'll do one on materials (:

Gonna brush the dust off this blog if it kills me lmao

LOVE YALL

[salemsimsrender]

Next Tutorial?

I've neglected this blog for wayyyyyyyy too long, & it's definitely time to brush off the dust.

So!

What kinds of tutorials do you want to see next?

What's next?

Environmental lighting (HDRIs, world lighting etc)

Using pre-made scenes

Adjusting materials (metal, glow, etc)

Creating scenes (advanced version)

Something else (PLEASE tell me in the tags or comments!)

Voting ended onFeb 20, 2025

[wistfulpoltergeist]

How to apply textures in Blender 4.0 For newbies (´｡• ᵕ •｡) ♡

So you imported your lovely doll into Blender 4.0, but the textures are messed or missing, here's how to apply base simple textures from the scratch!

I'm using Blender 4.0.2 (Sorry 4.3, but your EEVEE is currently nothing but tears for me) and my lovely Aidan is here to assist me. SO! Seat your bum comfortable and let's begin!

1 - Split your working space by pulling the corner of the screen:

2 - Then click on Material with your mesh selected.

3 - Pick Shader Editor on the left part of the screen and hit New in the Material on the right. You'll get something like this:

4 - On the left choose Add - Texture - Image Texture. We need three of them at very least :D

5 - First Image texture: Connect Color to the Base Color and Alpha to Alpha. Second Image texture connect to Specular IOR Level. Don't forget to upload your textures! Color - is well... color pics. Specular looks like Black/White pics and Normal is purple!

6 - Now add Normal Map. And connect it like on the picture below:

7 - Specular and Normal maps should be NON - COLOR in the Image Texture - Color Space

8 - Turn on the alpha. In Material - Settings - Blend Mode/Shadow Mode change on Alpha Hashed + You can check Backface Culling. In some cases it's vital :D

9 - Change the Specular settings in case of weird shining by changing IOR and Roughness parameters.

10 - You did it! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ:･ﾟ✧

[salemsimsrender]

An excellent tutorial by the ever wonderful @wistfulpoltergeist !