The Easy Way to Create Terrain Textures

Thanks Jericosan!
This is very helpful, I'm bookmarking :-)

Sorry but some of them instruction I would disagree with:-


2. Click on 'Image', then 'Scale Image'
Resize it to 1024x1024 pixels and click 'Scale'.

Thou 1024x1024 is a good size to have if your going to use that texture a great deal, but you should be very aware of the total KB size of the pic file you will be useing. Most 1024x1024 size texture will be about 1200kb-2200kb each. this will be added to the total download size. Thou I'm not saying that there is nothing wrong with that size pic, but if you use a large amount of them, your setting yourself up for a massive uploaded world and long loading times. What I would do is consider smaller size files for less detailed area's of your world. For example say you where building a snow world, you might have one large 1024x1024 file for the main snow, but you might use 2-4 dirty snow textures that will only be 256x256 size, they do not need to be that big, if you find that size to be a little crap then increase to 512x512 size.
Just remember thou, what you add, will increase the size of the upload and loading.

5. Browse for your Documents Folder/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 Create a World Tool/User Tool Data/Source Textures
Now click 'Save'
A box pops up and the settings should be...
Compression -none
Format - RGBA8
Generate Mipmaps - checked

I'm not sure where you came up with them settings, I've found the following settings to be the best:-
Compression -BC3/DX5
Format - (Greyed out)
Generate Mipmaps -(Greyed out)
I've been using them setting since the days of the sims 2, when I was building glass tiles etc, I recommend that you compression be BC3/DX5, this will lower kb ratio of the texture, which should increase loading time, infact you will not go far wrong going into Documents Folder/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 Create a World Tool/User Tool Data/Source Textures and save all the EA textures to this format and watch your world spin with joy. :wink:

saving it in the RGBA8 format I believe keeps each textures size a little bigger than I'd like, but it seems more standard for patterns so that's why I went with it, plus the quality is great.

Here's my test with a pic to show you the diffrance the good and bad of each format, I used the same 1024x1024 sea blue jpg file one save in DX5 format and the other RGBA8, the size diffrance was big:-
DX5 version was 1025kb
RGBA8 version was 5462kb

This is the pics




In game I did notice that the dx5 format was sharper and looked better close up, thou the RGBA8 looked better when I used another texture on top of the texture.

The big crunch in all of this is that Dx5 is 1025kb, you can have 5 textures in your game for the same price as one RGBA8 format file.

I've currently got 135 textures in my source textures, many I've made myself and 75 of them are less than 172kb, Ive got loads of small 256x256 texture that will do the same job as a large texture file, I would consider taking this method than trying to go with extra large files that will sooner or later make you pay for them, with a increase in loading times.

Anyway thats my 10 pence worth, sorry for intrupt, I just felt it was a little wrong of me not to say something about this. If your intrested I can package up my texture files, I can upload them for you and test on how they look yourself.

Thanks for all the info about the different formats, I'm no expert.

The only reason I used the RGBA8 format was because that is what I was familiar with some work I did before. Plus, I did try a couple of other formats, and after testing them they didn't work at all.

As far as the size, I went by the default game terrains, they are done in 1024x1024 at 72 dpi. If you check their properties some were 10.mb!'s :shock:

I will definitely check out your suggestion on the different format hoping to keep quality and get the size down would be great.

Thanks for the info guys it will be very useful to this "world building newbie" ;0)

Make sure you installed the Gimp plug-in with the link I posted, that way Gimp will recognize .dds file format. Once the plug-in is installed, when you go to 'save as', look to choose the format you want to save in (.jpg, .png etc...)and you should see the DDS format option.

For the Gimp Plug-In (sorry should have been more clear ) click on the link I posted above and save the "win32 binaries" zip file to you desktop.

To install, extract the zip files to your GIMP plugins directory.
This directory is usually located at:
C:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins

What about the problem of images tiling (repeating), has anybody found a program that will take an image and make it so that it doesn't look like it's simply being tiled?

As an example, If you take the game supplied shale texture and just lay it out in a huge area you can obviously see that it's the same image tiled over and over again, this is what I have a tough time trying to have not happen with my own custom textures.

Are there any third party programs or plugins that can help with this problem?

What about the problem of images tiling (repeating), has anybody found a program that will take an image and make it so that it doesn't look like it's simply being tiled?

Jalida, over the course of my goofing around with TS3 I have used quite a few in-game textures for various projects and as a creator of custom content for something like seven years now I am downright shocked at how horrible the in-game patterns are when it comes to obvious repetition. That's not to say I haven't ended up creating a few patterns that didn't look too hot from time to time, but for crying out loud, I'm a regular old person who has had to learn all this stuff without the benefit of a college degree in graphics, and even I can do better than those designers.

So far I don't know of any quick and easy way to fix patterns. If there is one, I hope someone will clue us in, but normally I use the clone brush and do a lot of cloning bits and pieces of not obvious parts of the pattern randomly to the places that repeat the worst. It takes some care because in the case of something like a rock texture it's easy to lose the entire design.

One thing I have noticed that helps in C-A-W is to turn down the opacity on the pattern you're laying, and don't stop with just that. Lay transparent patterns over other patterns and you'll get less of a repeated look. When it comes to that shale, it is definitely best used in small doses and preferably over some terrain that's been stretched. Avoid using it on flat surfaces in large doses or be prepared to spend the time to fix it up.

When saving to a DDS, it really enhances the look of surfaces wrt tiling when zoomed out far if you individually edit each mip level rather than accept the automatic scaling (which is basically a cached bicubic resample). Reduce the color variation and level-out/reduce the color saturation to increasingly smooth out the smaller mips. The higher resolution mips retain the detail, and the lower level mips lose the tiling. You'll find your trading detail for smoothness. For my tastes, smooth looks better. Sometimes much better.

Oh, wow! Now if I can figure out how to do that I might give it a shot. :D

OMG im sooooooo confused !!!

can some one please post step by step procedures to get the dds plugin and where and how to get it to right place
ive tried everything and cant seem to get it ........************** im so frustrated ........CANT WE HAVE ONE STICKY ON HOW TO's???????

im on windows 7

thanks for any help you may provide