in the riotously expensive overconsumption hellscape that is 2025 I just love playing my free game, making cc for free, sharing cc for free and posting tutorials for free
Today's random project: manually reconstructing the cat skeleton in Blender.
(Neither the Blender nor MilkShape plugin where able to import it. I had to import/export the meshes themselves through MilkShape to make them compatible with the Blender plugin, too.)
Perhaps it could be useful in skinning custom cat accessories and bodies? 🤔 need to experiment.
Wonderful @somedaythesun recently made a post about her research on a way of converting Sims 3 Speedtree trees to Sims 2. You know, that impossible thing to do?
Well, I was very curious how she managed to do this and I suggested my help in this project.
We started branstorming ideas and new ways of making these trees work: from her post you’ll learn that the main difficulty is the fact that the leaves part only faces the front of the tree making holes in it if camera is turned, like this:
The picture above is the best we can do so far, with leaves having their undersides but still staying very low poly (this tree above is 1334 polys).
Another not so great part was that extracted textures were very small, we are talking 64x256 for bark and 256x256 (rarely 512x512) for leaves. Any sims creator (or not) will understand that it’s not good for overall look of the object, especially as big as trees. Somedaythesun however found a way to upscale these textures but it didn’t work well for all of them. Some additional color correction was also required because for some reason trunk textures were extremely bright and not like in the original game.
We also had to decide on the trees size, if you played Sims 3 (which I guess most of us here did), you’ll know that the trees in this game are absolutely HUGE! It’s 4 storeys for a bamboo and more than 6 for a spruce.
There were some trees however that were not made the same way, notably the palms:
Palms must have been made in an old school way so their leaves were fine. At least something worked as intended...
We continued searching high and low for a way to “fix” the leaves but eventually we found out that it would not be possible, and @zeussims who was the pioneer of Sims 3 trees conversion (that Glauer tree!), earlier confirmed our fears.
The main point of this technology, the Speedtree, is that the leaves always face the camera. When trees are extracted in other formats, their leaves freeze in one position and nothing can be done about it. So to make it work as intended, the game itself must understand the Speedtree format which is not the case of Sims 2.
So now that you know all of this, we need your help making decisions!
We don’t have polls yet so we’d appreciate if you could leave your comments (don’t be shy!) giving us your opinion on the following:
1. Should we convert these trees despite their look?
2. Should we make them all seasonal (keep in mind that seasonal trees are much bigger in filesize than their non seasonal versions)?
3. Should we keep their original height or adapt it to Sims 2 (make them smaller)?
