[TS4 CC TUTORIAL] HOW TO MAKE A MULTI-TILE MURAL
HELLO THERE.
Here is my step-by-step tutorial on how to make a panoramic/multi-tile wall mural. <3
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but @baufive nudged me and honestly, it’s not very difficult once you get your bearings and a good workflow.
Recommended Skill Level: Intermediate-to-Expert
What You Need: Sims4Studio, image editor (I use Photoshop), & patience!
More after the jump! :D
This is based off the old tutorial on the S4S forum, but my method is an updated version as the S4S one just gets you blurry textures.
IMPORTANT NOTE: These murals can’t be placed anywhere. What I mean is, when you place the mural, the game just... generates where it’s centered. If you want to have more control over where you place multi-tile murals, you’d have to take your mural texture and segment it into separate wall tiles.
This tutorial, however, will teach you how to use one big beautiful wall texture.
Let’s get started.
WHAT YOU NEED: Sims4Studio, an image editor, patience
THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND: This is going to also require a little basic math, plus some concepts below.
A panoramic is simply a “wide, unobstructed view in all directions”, but not even the painted panoramics of the 19th century were all designed to be perfectly seamless. Panoramics or “panoramiques” are therefore, simply wide, long mural views. They CAN be seamlessly repeating, but often are not.
Seamless murals are what the word implies--seamless repeating textures.
If you find an old panoramique texture you want to use, you’ll likely have to do some ‘painting’ in your image editor to make it properly seamless (as I have started to do with my Mural Redux series).
And with all that out of the way, onto the tutorial!
(People who are comfortable/familiar with using image editing and textures can skip to Step 2.5, but I did try to include useful information in terms of workflow management.)
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STEP 1: FINDING A TEXTURE
Whether you’re using a tile-able wallpaper pattern or a big wall mural, it needs to be large/HQ. If it’s not, expanding it in your image editor is going to make it look really bad and it’s going to look even worse in game. For mural-making, Google is your friend.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I will be using this forest mural.
“How large does it need to be?” you might ask!
Well. These textures are based off EA wall sizes, so the size of the image will be based on the width of the wall tiles in game. This, in turn, should be set with the ratio of the image in mind--you don’t want to stretch or scrunch your texture too much, or it’ll look bad.
The wall texture will remain the same width, but will increase in height for each wall height (small, medium, large).
It’s important to keep in mind the tile length, and we will be coming back to that in a few steps!
For now, we’ll use this image and put it on canvases of the following sizes:
Small wall: 4608x768
Medium wall: 4608x1024
Tall wall: 4608x1280
These are on the longer end, closer to 20-24 tile-long murals.
I always start with the “tall” first so I can scale down as I go to the medium and small wall sizes, as opposed to up.
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STEP 2: IMAGE SCALING & PROCESSING
“Oh no! The ratio is off, it looks weird!” That’s ok! Just “free transform” until the image looks good, copy and paste, and...
Voila!
Use the eyedrop tool on the white part, and create a new layer. Paint bucket fill that layer, and drag it to the bottom of your layers, so you get this:
Pretty!!
Merge your layers--I do “Merge Visible”--then Select, Copy.
Now go to your Medium and Small walls and paste, scale the image as appropriate.
Here’s the medium:
Here’s the small:
Now, this is really important!!
Click FLATTEN IMAGE on each file. Just trust me!
Save each file as .png
I like to save mine in a specific folder as something I’ll remember. In this case, I’ll name them 1-small, 1-medium, and 1-tall.
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STEP 2.5: RESIZING & SAVING YOUR TEXTURE
Here’s where the math starts to kick in.
You want to resize each image and ONLY change each width to “256″ pixels, which is the width of ONE in-game wall tile. Do this for all three, and ONLY edit the width.
Example:
Now, hit “SAVE AS” once all three are scrunched.
I’m saving these new files as 1-small-RESIZED, 1-medium-RESIZED, 1-tall-RESIZED.
Time for the next step!
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STEP 3: UPLOADING TO SIMS4STUDIO
Open up Sims4Studio. Make sure the little radio button is on “STANDALONE RECOLOR.” Mash that “BUILD” button!
Find a Base Game wall, preferably an average painted wall. Select it, click “NEXT.”
Save your package file.
Upload the SCRUNCHED, resized images to each wall height’s DIFFUSE map by clicking “IMPORT” for the Short, Medium, and Tall wall heights. It should look like the image below once they’re imported.
Just to be careful, click “SAVE” (at the bottom right).
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STEP 4: WAREHOUSE VALUES
This is the part that gets kind of tricky because it involves a little bit of math.
Remember that bit earlier about image sizes and tiles? This is where all that comes in!
First, you want to click on the “Warehouse” tab, shown below.
The following is screenshots from the S4S forums tutorial.
HOWEVER.
The number you need to put in, for the purpose of this tutorial, is “0.05″
SO.
This is what my screen looks like now:
"Elizabeth!” you cry, perplexed, “How did you come up with that number?”
To understand where that decimal comes from, we need to know why the image sizes are what they are.
To quote bakie in the S4S tutorial,
So normally you would make a wallpaper with a width of 256 px This time, like Orangemittens mentioned in the tutorial, you'll have to make a width of 256 x 4 = 1024 px : 1024 x 768 - short wall 1024 x 1024 - medium wall 1024 x 1280 - tall wall Then place you whole mural/image on these wallpapers.
In short:
256px is the width of one wall tile.
The width of the images we’re working with is based on that number.
In the case of this tutorial, that’s 256 x 18, because the wall mural is 18 tiles long. That’s where I got the width of 4608px. The three wall heights, as mentioned before, are from the three wall heights in TS4.
For another example from bakie,
For a 10-tile wallpaper, you need to make a width of 10 x 256 = 2560px So: 2560 x 768 - short wall 2560 x 1024 - medium wall 2560 x 1280 - tall wall
Now that we know where the image size numbers come from, how do we figure that decimal number to put in the Material Definitions?
Easy!
You divide 1 by the number of tiles.
Example:
1 divided by 4 is 0.25
1 divided by 10 is 0.1
1 divided by 15 is 0.06
Once again, for this tutorial, the numbers you should put in are 0.05.
The reason we divide 1 by the number of tiles is because we are essentially cramming all those tiles into the width of one.
Now...
Hit that “save” button again!
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STEP 5: IMAGE UPLOAD
We’re almost there!
Per the image below, while still in the Warehouse tab, click the first “DST Image.” As you can see by the height (the number in the red circle), this is the MEDIUM wall.
Click the IMPORT button at the bottom right, indicated below:
Import your 1-medium.png mural file. It should look like this, below:
Repeat this for the next DST Image with the squished mural image, which is the “Tall” wall, and the one after that, the Short wall.
HIT SAVE.
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STEP 6: MISC
Now hit the “Studio” tab at the top left. Your S4S should look like this:
Next, hit the “Catalog” tab and rename your file. This will show the title/description that shows up in the TS4 Build/Buy catalog.
Next, hit the “TAGS” tab. Make adjustments as necessary.
HIT SAVE AGAIN.
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STEP 7: TESTING
Take that package file you saved earlier and drop it into your EA/TS4/Mods folder, preferably a “TEST” folder. (I specifically have a folder marked for testing CC.)
Time to boot up your game! :D
It’s important to name your file in the catalog so you can find it easier when testing in-game.
I’ve pulled it up, and plastered it on the walls of a study I’ve been trying to decorate.
!!!! Look at that!
FANCY!!
LOVELY!!!
GORGEOUS!
You now know how to make wall murals! Congratulations. :D
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NOTES:
I didn’t go over things like adding trim or the specular and normal maps, as those are more or less part of the image editing process and there are tutorials out there for that.
I also highly recommend just doing a little bit of trial and error for yourself, seeing what works and what doesn’t.
If you want mural textures, once again: Google is your friend. For both trim, and wallpapers, it’s where I’ve gotten the murals I’ve done. Resource hunting and pinterest boards are both maddening and rewarding.
I’m sure there are other tips and tricks to wall-making, like getting textures to sit differently at different aspect ratios, but this tutorial is just meant to help acquaint the community with mural-making.
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Obviously, I don’t *own* the process of mural-making in TS4.
Feel free to reblog this if you find it helpful, and let me know if you need clarification on any of the steps!
You’re also welcome to @ me here on tumblr if you make murals with this tutorial, I want to see pretty pictures!
I hope this tutorial helps, and if you made it this far--thank you for reading!!
Happy simming. x x x
