Over the years of making cc i've picked up some tricks along the way. These are just some of them in a tiny format. So not a tutorial of any kind, just some tips and tricks! I'm sure many are already doing some of these things and some might require you to Know things already. This is NOT the only one way to do things, it's just how I do things. I wont go in to super detail since it's not a tutorial but i'll try to add as much info as possible and then let you figure it out. Or send an ask.
When naming things, images, packages, blends, whatever files in relation to cc making, create a naming system! Trust me when i tell you it will make your cc making process a lot more streamlined. My system is as follows: "BG maxi dress flower on shoulder pink fem". What we learn here is that it's a base game maxi dress with a flower on the shoulder, and it's the pink swatch. This way, if it's a blender file, i know i can export the diffuse map directly inside blender if i need it later without having to locate the dress in s4s. Fem is there to show what frame the mesh is from without having to open it. Same goes for "masc" items. For example "CL open jacket long sleeves turtleneck camo blue". This tells us it's city living and an open jacket with long sleeves in camo blue and has a turtleneck.
Note: sometimes a pack name will have a similar abbreviation, like Cottage Living. My way is just adding another letter or two, COL. Or if the pack only has one word like Toddlers or Strangerville, you could then call it TOD and SV for example.
Make folders! One thing i find that makes things a little easier is that i make folders separating things. So first i have the project folder inside my cc making folder. Let's say i'm making a short satin dress, i'll make a folder "Short satin dress". Inside there i'll make a folder for blender files and one for image files. Inside blender folder i make a folder for lods and inside image folder i make folders for swatches and one for maps. If you're making a fem and masc framed version of the same thing, separate folders by frame as well, so you have a main folder inside "Short satin dress" for fem and one for masc etc and so on. This is so you don't mix textures and blend files up, because for example, sometimes the diffuse map sits differently on a masc frame mesh compared to a female framed mesh.
One thing i hate about making cc (other than MAKING cc.........) is making textures. I'm not good at it and this d.o.a game eats textures like it's the last can of catfood in the world, compressing it to hell and back. One thing i've learned and my friend @faaeish told me about is that adding a bit of noise helps! What i like to do, once i have finished my base layer i know i will recolor later, i make a noise layer out of it using "Noise [Additive] with this plugin and i do Output mode: New layer(s) at the bottom. I use gimp but this plugin can also be used with nearly every program under the sun, including ps. It's also online based. You can play around with the settings but i like to use something like below. One thing i realized well, just the other day is that, if you use RGBA noise instead of gray noise, it adds a bit more depth and texture. But not too much! Just a smidgen, to give the texture and the color fill layer more pixels to cling to and it will minimize the risk of artifacts. Ugly blobs, essentially. Once i have that noise layer i alpha to selection on my base layer, invert and sharpen and click the noise layer to remove the access around that the filter adds. I'll also clean up any alpha channels, filling them with white if i need to. Then i play around with layer modes on the noise layer, add a color fill above that and maybe i'll duplicate the base layer and put above the color fill layer. Like below is an example.
Next is a thing for blender, tiny miniature tip but that i find helps me. And that's this little plus sign button when you "Save as.." in blender. So what you need to do when you FIRST save some edits on your mesh, say you swapped the sleeves out. You "File-Save as..-bg no pockets tshirt rolled up sleeves blue fem LOD0_edit0. 0. Zero is important. You need to save the very first save as 0. Next time you make any changes you Save As and click the plus and it will just change 0 to 1. Next time 1 to 2 etc etc. To me this makes it easier to go back in case i mess up. Which i sometimes do. Like the other day i noticed fingers were messed up and i had to go back to nearly the beginning of my edits to pull original fingers and sleeves from. And i always save right before i make any major edits.
That's all i can think of right now. I'll put a read more in case i think of more later. Hope this helps!
It's 2025 and i've got some more tips! 14/12/25
Firstly, my tutorial tag has a better updated version of the noise tip from above (base texture tutorial)! But technically even this is now outdated since the release of gimp 3.#. Now i'm making it more streamlined with the 3.# because of non-destructive editing layers. But i'm not able to make a new video on it as i don't have a video editing software anymore. Had to uninstall capcut since they wanna be super annoying about security and ownership.
A tool i found out about and love using is "Looptools". This is blender 3.6, i don't know if older versions have it too. You can turn this tool on by going to Preferences-addons-mesh-looptools. Link to the manual here. The way i found out about this tool is because i wanted to make Circle. i had Mesh and i needed mesh to be Circle. And looptools have just that! Among another 7 features. You can read about them above, i've only successfully used circle lmao. Circle doesn't work on ALL mesh parts, sometimes it might not Circle, reason unknown to me but it could work for whatever you're working on. The mesh should ideally be Flat for it to work best, i believe. With the mesh part you want Circle selected, right click hovering over 3D viewport (your mesh side) and LoopTools should be at the top of the list. Hover it and a pop up list should appear.
I learned that you can make mesh A the shape of mesh B! Fascinating stuff. So let's say you've made a Hat for adults and you wanna make same hat for kids, without having to hassle with age converting a mesh. This has only been tested on hats as of now, but it should also work on other accessories like bracelets maybe and the like. Basically as long as mesh B doesn't have chest or any other adult features, it'll work fine. (You can still do this tip, but it requires you to still alter adult features. like you need to still also replace the skin parts like neck/hands/legs etc). This should also work if you're converting to other frames but without the hassle of converting but again do note that you will still need to alter adults features, masc to fem you have to add breasts and fem to masc you have to remove breasts.
But again, this is UNTESTED on my part, i've ONLY done hats so far.
What you do is start with mesh A in blender object mode, the one you want to turn in to mesh B. (Both should be just 1 cut for convenience sake, you can just cut it later if you need to).
In edit mode, select the whole mesh with A, shift+D to duplicate, P+selection. Now you have a copy of this original position of mesh A, keep it for later, just hide it on the eye.
Then append mesh B like you normally would append something. remove any extra rigs .1 and bone .1 that appears. Click on mesh B and find the "Data" tab, it looks like a upside down triangle with dots in each corner. At the top inside that tab, there should be a "geom.###". Remember the geom number and click on mesh A, still being in the "Data" tab. Click on the "geom" to open the drop-down and select the geom number you memorised. Tada, your mesh A is now the exact same shape as mesh B. You can delete mesh B and scale and move up or down mesh A, depending on which age direction you're going for. You have the copy you made before to use as guide on where to place the new mesh A.
Again please note that this is only tested on HATS, i've tested in game and they work just fine. But be aware to test and poke this for yourself, this is just a little trick i learned. I'm sure there are limitations to this i've yet to discover. Unfortunately i can't find the forum reply i learned it from but i'll add if i do.
Another thing i found helpful is "face orientation". I've been doing a lot of transparent mesh parts lately and it's difficult to know which side is transparent or not. But by turning on "face orientation", you'll know. This works for when you're not sure if there's any normals flipped the wrong way.
At the bottom of the screen, below where 3d viewport normally is (where you see your 3d mesh), the same "bar" where you change between object/edit/weight etc modes. On the further right side of this bar, there's a button that looks like two circles, one is full and one is empty and the empty one overlays the full one. This is "Viewport overlays". Click on that and scroll until you see "Face orientation", your object should now be blue, or red, if any of the normals are facing the incorrect direction. Flip as needed. You can turn it off again if you need to.
I can't remember if i said this in another post already but, let's say you wanna make a pair of earrings with transparency! All you have to do is clone the base game hearing aids from SDX020 instead of regular earrings. The hearing aids have a pre-built in transparent cut layer. Also works for kids since they also have hearing aids.
You would just need to open hearing aid mesh first, then append your mesh, merge the transparent cut of the hearing aid with the transparent cut of your mesh, then delete the hearing aid mesh. And same with the non transparent cut layer. I've done this to the ghost earrings and the snowflake earrings.
If you're making a dress with transparent cut you can clone the SDX037DressAline item. They even made separate masc and fem versions of it! Same process as hearing aid. Please note that this requires people to have the game up to date up to these SDX drops.
But let's say you wanna make a hat with transparency? You can clone the EF20Firefighter hat! This is an event item and i'm not sure about how this works, i would hope that they added firefighters to base game without having to participate in an event? But i can't say, i haven't played the game enough to need the assistans of firefighters lol. But, what i CAN say is that as long as game is up to date until the EF20 patch, everyone should still be able to see items cloned from it. But i would just throw out a caution, maybe ask a friend to test in their vanilla game. I've yet to have any issues.
That's all i can think of at the moment. Cheers! ✨🍪
Edit later same day:
If you'd like to make a mesh piece more Round or Sphere, you can click alt+shift+s and drag your mouse right, all the way until it stops or until you like it. Or input exact numbers. It will make it more round. Works best of course on objects already mostly round and you just wanna "shape it up". At the bottom left you'll get a little pop up and you can open it and get more settings.
Hello, if it's not a bother, could you explain to me how you create CC in the sims 3, I want to start in the world of CC and Blender I already know how to use, but I don't know how to transfer the blender file to one for the game. Thank you. 💜
Hi!
Those are the tutorials that are helping me with creating CC:
Completely avoiding Milkshape (Blender 2.79-2.8+) / Manually editing bone assignments and morphs (Blender 2.8-2.9)
Hair Creation Start to Finish: Part 1 and Part 2
Smooth Hair Bone Assignments In Blender (written version) - It's a Sims 2 tutorial but the logic is the same for Sims 3
The Sims 4 to The Sims 3 Clothing Conversion Tutorial: A Complete Beginner’s Guide - useful to learn how to port your mesh for Sims 3
Polycount guide - A guide for beginners and advanced creators! - because it's all fun and games to make a pretty high poly mesh in Blender, but both the game and mostly PCs just can't handle meshes with absurdly high polycount
Someone soo helpfully over on MTS posted this tip regarding some of the mods that are made on Macs (like mine!):
Please make sure to delete the MACOSX folders/files that can appear after you extract the mod's files, otherwise the game may throw an error and not load at all.
This tip is relevant for my Occult Recipe Grimoire's recipes folder. 😊
Hey friends! I wanted to share one of the handy tools I use for making CC with patterns.
Sometimes I get new patterns and unfortunately, not all patterns are seamless and they neglect (or I neglect to read) to add it to the description! I try looking at them and visualising it, but some of them are hard to tell, especially if they have a lot of detail.
Instead of opening the pattern in GIMP or Photoshop and tiling it to see if it all matches up to be seamless, I just drag and drop it into the Seamless Texture Checker website
This saves me so much time, you can use the slider to make it bigger or smaller, and it helps me visualise if the pattern will work with what I'm making.
I hope this helps anyone working with patterns as it's been a huge help to me as well!
Now get out there and add some patterns to something!!
:. Many people are probably wondering - how do I use all of the amazing custom content created for The Sims 4? Well, buddy; I have a perfect tutorial for you!
TO DOWNLOAD (SKIP READING THIS IF YOU KNOW HOW): For obvious reasons, download your custom content. You can download pretty much anything! From toddler hair to men’s accessories, there’s anything you can think of! And don’t worry, it’s not just limited to CAS (create a sim) items. If you’re downloading with a virus protection service activated on the browser you’re using, try removing or using a different browser that it is not installed on. (Ex: I was using Google Chrome until my virus protection service started deleting the files I downloaded right after downloading them. I started downloading on Microsoft Edge instead).
To obtain these items, I first like to pay attention to how I'll download them. I like to download from Sims File Share, Mediafire, Dropbox, and The Sims Resource. Most creators use Sims File Share (Abbreviated as SFS), as it is easy to use.
Most of the time, some of these websites can include ads. DO. NOT. CLICK. No matter what you do, don’t click the ads. The Sims Resource has the most, and so because of that I prefer all of the other websites. Rarely, It will take you to the user’s personal website to download files. Make sure to use your best judgement with those: Although, most of the time it’s safe.
TO INSTALL: After you download your CC, open File Explorer and go to downloads. You should see your downloaded CC there, If not, try reading what I wrote about downloading above and please note: This is for Windows 10 only. Anyhow, I’ll be showing you how to install now. (Finally).
Go to Documents -> Electronic Arts -> The Sims 4 -> Mods.
(Make sure to pin the Mods folder to Quick access if you plan to download more CC in the future).
Next, simply drag your CC from your Downloads folder into the Mods folder, and you’re done!
:. I hope you all appreciate this guide and really have grasped how to do it, it’s quite easy! Please make sure to reblog this so your followers can see how. I’m a bit new to Tumblr / Simblr and would appreciate if you guys could maybe follow me? Just kidding.. Unless?
Around this time every year, we start getting amazing holiday cc from pumpkins and scare crows to christmas presents and cookies for santa.
The only problem with this is that when the holidays are over, we’re left with some themed content that we aren’t using anymore or at least not nearly as much. But by this time, months have gone by and you’ve downloaded tons of cc. So when it comes time to cull your mods folder of these items, you wonder…where do I even start?!
So here is a custom content organizing tip for the holiday season! (:
If you find that you want to download these items, put them in a new folder in your mods called ‘Holiday’ or 'Festive’ or just something easily identifiable. If you’re like me, then you probably have tons of folders and levels in your mods already so be sure to put the holiday themed folder in a place in your mods that you won’t forget about. This way, when the seasons are over and it’s time to move on, you can take these things out of your current mods folder quickly and without any hassle
Taking out items you don’t use on a regular basis, or only use for special occassions, is a good idea because it helps save on load times when you just want to casually game. It also helps when you’re decorating/building/etc, so you won’t have to sort through content you know you will no longer be using.
If these are items you’re positive you’ll want to use the next year around or sometime soon, you can put that folder in another safe place on your computer so you can plop it back into your mods when you’re ready to use it!
When you started making make up, did you learn from a tutorial?
i can’t exactly remember when i started creating makeup, but i never used a specific makeup tutorial in order to make them. i just got a sense for doing sims 2 lipblends by looking at other people’s work and just making a lot of horrible beginner makeup that never saw the light of day.
also come to think of it, even though i can’t hand draw lips (not enough artistic talent bleh), Nymphy’s old tutorial on drawing lips helped me a lot b/c it made me understand how they, um, worked. aside from that, i really haven’t gotten eyeshadows, blushes, or eyeliners down enough to share any tips on those. /o\
