For someone who wants to venture into the world of cc making, how would you suggest that I start? Also, do you have to use photoshop, or can you use an alternative like GIMP?
I suggest you start small/simple. If you have no experience and try to take on a huge project that you have to learn a dozen things to complete it, its going to turn you off cc making very quickly. It is best to try and master things one at a time rather then trying to learn everything at once without grasping the basics. Its much like Mathematics or any subject at school, they start you off simple, then build up to the more advanced stuff. Also don’t put any expectations on yourself that you know you wont accomplish. Goals are great, but realistic goals are better. I tried something new which each set I made, just one thing and I accomplished it then moved on. Its a great for boosting motivation too.
Putting the rest under a read more because of babble:
Grab blender right away. The more you play with it and experiment, the better off you are going to be. Just play around, look up videos or written tutorials and just get familiar with the program, you are going to be using it a lot. Same with GIMP. There is nothing I see more readily then people taking on a huge project and have no clue how to use the tools in front of them. Its much like a carpenter not being able to swing a hammer. It is overwhelming to begin with, but trust me, just focus on when you need to learn first and them do it in stages. Unfortunately this wont come by snapping your fingers together, but persistence and practice is key.
If you want to be a CAS creator, probably start with recolouring. Although it doesn’t seem glamourous as making meshes, it is an important aspect as the texture can make or break an item. There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to recolour as well. From there you can move on to mesh edits, then frankenmeshing, then from there you can do much more as you would have learnt UV Maps, weights and much more.
If you are more interested in objects , then I would again start with recolouring, and even mesh edits. You don’t have the complexity of weights for most objects so its a bit easier to start further along. Once you are comfortable you can try your hand at editing EA meshes. This will get you familiar with UV maps; one of the biggest pains in my ass when it comes to CC making. It takes a while to get a hang of them, and even longer to master.
When you get stuck and can’t figure out how to do it, I find googling the specifc issue (like UVMaps or resizing in Blender) gets you far more hits outside the community then inside it. Modding is such a vast topic and limiting yourself to just the simming community is seriously going to hinder you. Just make sure you are specific with what you are looking for, that helps a lot.
I think the biggest thing is make sure you are doing this for the ‘right’ reasons (totally subjective). If you are doing this because you are interested in the meshing for yourself, it is much easier to learn because you want to. If you are doing it for other reasons, it’s not going to be as easy because you are always going to have that little voice inside your head going “you could be doing something else.” Enthusiasm for a subject, just like at school, makes it more enjoyable and seem far less like work and more like a hobby.
As for the question about needing Photoshop? Definitely not. When I started I used GIMP (back in TS3 days). It is certainly capable of doing what you need. I do believe you need to grab the nVidia DDS plugin though (just like PS) so make sure you grab that. If any texture requires transparency of any kind, i feel PNG format kinda sucks for it. You can always revisit the idea of using PS later down the line. It does have some advantages (like being the default for texture tutorials) but it really isn’t necessary at all. There are actually some things GIMP does better the PS and wish i had those features back.
