Insimenator.org

I'm still really new to recolouring, but I've started with clothes because they seem easiest (just changing textures/colours of things), and while I'm a fairly seasoned Photoshop-user (what with being a photographer IRL), AND I've read a few tutorials on recolouring beforehand so I'm not groping around in the dark, I just can't figure out why everytime I recolour a piece of clothing;
a) the clothing is blurry around the edges, even when I use a non feathered brush (i.e. the brush colours the pixels pretty darn straight)
b) the sims skin goes blurry and/or miscoloured when wearing my creation

Any help/pointers would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

You're making recolors with bodyshop, right?
Do you have any example pictures (like a full size texture map before importing, plus an ingame shot)?

Bodyshop is known for blurring out textures once in a while, especially if you import the clothing and then export it for later projects. The more importing/exporting you do, the more blurry the texture will go. The best is to use the same project for clothing using the same mesh, and keep a photoshop file with the layers you've been working on, copying in the layers each time you want to make a new item. That way you're working with the same textures each time, and much less goes away in the exporting/importing.

It's fully possible to change names after you've imported the clothing to the game, so you don't have to make a new project for each clothing item that uses the same mesh.

If you want really sharp textures, you can build DXT3 textures (PNG files with transparency, instead of BMP + alpha) with SimPE after importing the clothing. This might increase the filesize, so be a bit careful with that.

Also, in some cases the mesh has stretched UV mapping, so that colored picles are dragged away from where you really want them. Unless you re-map the clothing, there is not much to be done with this.

The texture for child-elder clothing is 1024x1024 pixles, so you will never get a super clear result unless you use bigger textures (which really isn't recommended). Sometimes you just have to work with what you've got.

Yes, with bodyshop (such an annoyingly slow clunky program >_>). I'm not sure what you mean by texture map, unless you mean the texture which goes over the alpha, which I've got here;

(http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n46/Beansprut/Sims/bodystdMatBaseTextureName.jpg)

I do use .psd files when I'm working with the textures, and I only export the original texture/alpha once from bodyshop and just leave a folder in projects to keep reusing. I'm not so much bothered by the blur on the texture as the blur which gets added to the edges (I don't know if thats usually called bleed, or blur?) of the clothes, and the blurring of the skin of the sim. This can be seen in this pic;

(http://i109.photobucket.com/albums/n46/Beansprut/Sims/Blur.jpg)

Please forgive the strangeness of the recolour...I just wanted my sim-ladys to have something er, shall we say pretty? I hope I've censored it enough to be acceptable on the site, I know that this kind of thing is usually kept away from the younglings.

I don't have SimPE (can you get it for Mac?), but filesizes (unless theres a game problem with big sizes) shouldnt be a problem for my comp, its got a nice hefty amount of Mem and good ole graphics card in there. Also, I'm exporting the BMPs as windows at 24 bits, its the only format that seems to work for sims that ive found *has played around with 32 bits* 

Thanks for your help by the way =] I really appreciate it.

Again, apologies for the nudity!

How are your graphic settings ingame? You might want to check if "sim/object detail" and "texture detail" are on high.

Bleeding textures will usually happen, I'm afraid. Pixles are square, while you want the textures to be rounded. Stretching the picles (like you do when putting a texture on a mesh) will cause edges to look pixely. The only thing that can fix this is bigger texture maps with better resolution.

Is the skin yours, too? It might be that the original creator of the skin imported/exported the texture a lot, or the next person who did an edit, and so on, causing pixelation in the texture. Not all skintones work good for edits... Do you have a (sensored, of course) version of the texture map for the skin?

And I don't think SimPE works for Mac.

For the sake of illustrating your problem, it's perfectly fine.

Yep, everything's set to high! The blurring only occurs once I've recoloured, other peoples recolours don't muck up the skin like that. I'm pretty sure I must be doing something wrong in the recolouring or saving stage as other people manage to make lovely CC that doesn't bleed/blur at all haha. Any ideas? Is it that way I'm saving it, or am I not using a true enough black on the "negative" texture space? I did edit the alpha a bit, but on recolours I've tried where I haven't edited the alpha its caused blurring/bleeding too. *scratches head* Its really confusing me as to why its happening.

EDIT: (forgot to type this bit haha)
Erm, I believe its one of Enayla's skins. I did try the recolour with a whole bunch of custom skins, and *shudders* maxis skins too, and it still seems to blur.

Just how are you recoloring the skins?
Blurriness or pixelation can in fact be caused by the hue option, especially if changing the color entirely (like from blue to orange). You'll often see it while working in Photoshop, and it shows up even worse ingame.

Only tip I can give you with those, is to use a desaturated version of the texture with some kind of layer-overlay, over a bucket-fill layer with the color you want to use. Doesn't always give a perfect result, but if the hue option fails, that's one of the versions to work around it.

I think Enayla also wrote something about her skins not being good to recolor.

I sometimes extract the original texture with SimPE, and put it over the BMP file from the project folder - just to be sure I've cancelled out all the blurriness I can. If you're on a Mac, that might be difficult if SimPE doesn't work on it...

And alphas like black/white best. If you're editing transparent parts, you have to play wround with grey tones. To me, that usually ends up with a lot of trial and failure  :-\

I haven't recoloured any skins (yet...), just clothing. Can I ask, how might one create a higher res texture file? I've just been sticking to the size that bodyshop chucks out at you! Do you just change it in photoshop so its bigger with a higher DPI, or is there some other way of doing it that I don't know about?

Sorry if my list of problems/questions seem to go on a bit. And thanks for your patience and advice.

You can resize to 2048 x 2048 with Photoshop (remember the alpha, too), but that's as much as I know. Not sure if it's possible to do any changes with the DPI. Computer graphics don't go much higher than 72ppi anyway.
Just remember that 2048 is 4 times bigger than 1024, not just the double.

However, adjusting the image size isn't much use if textures look great in Photoshop while blurry ingame. Then it's usually something else wrong.

Just how are you saving your files? Don't use "save as...", but instead collapse all the layers and save (ctrl+S) - just make sure you've got the layers saved elsewhere first. This doesn't compress the file in any way, keeping things intact.

Hmm okay, I'll give resizing a go, and see if that make a difference. And I'll take into account the layer merge rather than saving a copy. Hopefully one of these will bring about a bit of change! haha And thanks, its been really helpful to be able to talk to someone about it =]

Just remember that resizing up will cause a bit of blurryness (it will soften the edges), and you might have to do the texture over again if you drew it yourself.

Far as i know you cant resize your texture when working in bodyshop, only with Simpe afterwards.

Just make sure you save your file a 24bit bmp.
If you cant figure it out you always can try to rebuild the texture with Simpe after export from bodyshop with the help of the Nvidia plugin.
All discribed here:
http://www.insimenator.org/index.php/topic,11026.0.html

The pixelation you are noticing on the bare skin areas of clothing outfits is unavoidable to a greater or lesser extent depending on the mesh you are coloring and the graphics options set for your game, even with the creamiest of hi-res skin tones. You will probably see it to some extent on Maxis originals and many of the outfits you can download from sites like this.
Have you tried starting your game while holding the Windows/Apple key (I think, though it might be Alt or Ctrl)? This will bring up a graphics preferences pane where you can set your screen resolution more easily than in game, very important if you want things to look nice and crisp. Also try disabling the Optimized Rendering option. I found the results quite remarkable in improving the general look and performance of the game. If you are using a wide screen monitor, disable Use Stretched Resolutions.

As far as clothing textures go, 1024x1024 should be more than adequate and you seem to have been well-advised regarding creating your textures. I always keep a nude skin tone as the background layer for PSD templates as it is easier to visualize what I am working on. To reduce messy pixelation on exported textures, a flat color overlay with a suitably reduced opacity is a good tactic. You could also try a mild gausian blur on a layer copy, then do some fine eraser work to pick out any hard detail required from the original layer below, then merge the two layers. If you've already made a suitable alpha, any edge blurring won't be a problem, if that makes sense.
Transparent areas are best decided on your PSD template with the good old opacity tool, and when you come to make your alpha, use Create Clipping Mask, with your texture sandwiched between a black bottom layer and a white top layer and the transparent areas will come out as the correct shade of grey. Just make sure that the texture file itself is 100% opacity or you'll end up with a nasty, wishy-washy, excessive transparency!
By the way, which version of BodyShop are you using, or rather for which game version/EP?

Bloom, it's possible to resize, but you have to resize both the alpha and texture maps before you update the project - otherwise Bodyshop will start complaining. Works on projects with texture + alpha only.
I've tried it with bump maps, but those apparently has to be fixed in SimPE.

Thanks for all the advice guys! I can't wait to get back to trying recolouring again, and hopefully it'll go better this time.

As to your questions;

Yes, I do. I have it set to the highest for my monitor (1400x900) and with stretched off, but I haven't tried disabling Optimised Rendering. I'll give it a go. I'll also try the gaussian blur idea.

Unfortunately I'm stuck all the way back on...OFB....which sucks. Although I'm hoping my partner will buy me Bon Voyage for christmas haha. Does Bodyshop improve as you get new EPs?

I'm going to try making some new textures at the higher Res. Any other info. would still be appreciated, and thanks for all your help so far! If using a bigger texture works, I'll post back to say that my problem was solved. Thanks again guys!

Well, I only go as far as Pests, sorry Pets and the base game disc has gone walkabout, so I'm lumbered if I ever need to re-install everything from scratch. But there are definite differences between the original BodyShop and the Pets version, on a Mac anyway. I seem to remember a max of 512x512 textures on the old one that made everything look like crud when it was exported, especially hair. The later versions seemed more flexible and able to knock out some great quality hair and clothing, though the skintones are still disgusting. On the other hand, it tends to do screwy things with the thumbnails of items I created way back in the base game days, but I think that's just a Pets issue.

Anyway, try that disabling Optimized Rendering tip, it made a great difference to my game. You might also try re-calibrating your monitor to display colours more efficiently. Don't know how or if you can do it with Windows, but on a Mac it's a cinch. I use my home computer to process a lot of photographic images these days so getting the monitor set up properly was important. I noticed a positive effect on everything, including games.
Of course, if none of this works, you're back to textures and meshes, in which case it's sometimes useful to go back to basics and re-read the tutes!
Happy hunting.

The optimised rendering has helped, and so has the higher res texture! I'm not getting much blur on custom skins and hardly any at all on the maxis skins now! Thank you all for your help, you've been wonderful! I can now create happily hehe ^_^

Well, kewel! I do so love a happy ending 3yay