The Secret Sauce: How We Make High-Detail, Low-Lag CC
We wanted to share a bit of our creative process with you! We’ve been crafting custom content since 2023, and thanks to your incredible support, we’ve spent that time learning, growing, and aiming for the one thing: delivering the best possible quality for your game.
What does "Quality" mean? For us, it’s about two things:
The Look: It has to match the The Sims 4 aesthetic (Maxis Match).
The Feel: It shouldn't slow down your game. No one wants a beautiful kitchen that causes a 5-second lag every time you rotate the camera!
"Baking" (High-to-Low Poly)
To keep your game running smoothly, we use a professional technique called High-to-Low Poly Baking.
Normally, to get tiny details like soft rounded edges or realistic indents, you need a "High Poly" model made of hundreds of thousands of tiny triangles (polygons). But if we put that directly into the game, it would be a disaster for your computer's performance!
Here is what we do:
Step 1: The Blockout. we create a simple, Low Poly base that the game can handle easily (Photo 1).
Step 2: The Sculpt. we build a hyper-detailed High Poly version with every tiny detail (Photo 2), sometime we do 3D sculpt for object that have fabric material, but not so much for this fridge.
Step 3: The Bake. We "shrink-wrap" the details from the high-poly version onto the low-poly base. Essentially, we turn 3D geometry into a 2D texture map.
The Result? Take a look at our recent fridge. The high-poly version has over 400,000 triangles - that’s enough to make most computers cry! But through our baking process, the final version in your game looks just as detailed while using only a tiny fraction of that power.
That's it, that's our secret out, the actual process is a lot more than this of course but we're committed to making high quality cc for you. We are so grateful for the community that has grown around our work since 2023. Your feedback helps us sharpen our skills, and your support allows us to keep pushing the boundaries of what we can create for the Sims! 🤗🤗
Comments (6)
This is so interesting, thank you for sharing. I would love at some point to learn how to make CC--it would be awesome to learn more tips if you have any interest in making this a series.
Absolutely, we've basically been figuring stuff out by ourselves (with additional help from the sims4studio forum, cannot thank them enough). But we would love to share more wip, and process like this in the future, and yes, maybe some mini video series ☺️
That's really awesome thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing! Love your work!
You guys have some of the best CC out there, keep it up! Thanks for all your hard work x
Very interesting!