Dev Diary: Adding a Piece Of Clothing To The Game
A good day to everybody! Jérémie here with this week’s Patreon post!
While we are still working on Live Mode features and designs, I wanted to take some time this week to show you the basic process of how we add clothes to the game, from the modeling software to textures to the control panel! This is not a tutorial, but a small glimpse into our current process and the workflow that will most likely be used for modders in the future. This post is for Patrons only, please do not share it :)
First off, we create the clothes in Blender, a 3D modeling software. There are a few subtleties to keep in mind when creating clothes that will work on our Paras, such as rigging them to make sure they animate with our character.
A piece of clothing in Blender, you might have recognized Sebastian’s jacket!
The next step is to create a texture that goes with the clothes. Texturing is where we add lines, highlights and other surface details to the model. This is done in Substance Painter, a software to directly paint on 3D models. There are subtleties to think about here too - you might notice that the texture on the right is flattened out on a 2D representation of our clothes - because of how 3D works.
The texture is gray, because it gets recolored in-game, allowing players to use our color wheel freely!
When we are done creating all required textures, it’s time to add them to the game via the mod system. You’ve seen a glimpse of the Control Panel in a previous post and you can see it at some spots in the roadmap, but here are all the options and settings you can currently tweak when adding clothes.
There are a lot of things we can tweak and customize in the mod system, clothes can be quite complex, ranging from simple shirts to hats to dresses and shoes!
Here are some settings you can use to control how the clothes behave in-game;
You can choose a name and choose which type of character can wear it.
Here we add the 3D model we created above.
Similarly, here we add the texture we created in Substance Painter.
Tags are used in the Paramaker to place the item in the right category.
The Swatch Tag is used to have colors specific to that kind of clothing.
As you’ve seen in a previous post about layering, Sebastian’s Jacket can be worn with different clothes under it - or a bare chest! - this is where we set that up.
And the result is Sebastian’s Jacket that you know and love!
Heyyyy, looking good, Sebby!
Hope you enjoyed this post! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask, and I’ll answer to the best of my ability! Have a great week!
Jérémie
Comments (25)
One thing I wish the Sims CC community had was more cross-gender dressing options. Many crop tops and skirts will not work with men, for example.
would you guys give others a chance to create clothing for your game ? 😁just asking like we would love to contribute if there is any chance
very cool!
🤌👍
Excited!
Thank you, as always, for sharing a glimpse into your process. I'm currently learning to create CC clothes for The Sims 4, and it's really cool to see the similarities and actually understand some stuff. (I don't have any previous experience with 3D art, so two weeks ago I wouldn't have known, like, what blender is. Or that the clothes are made out of a mesh + texture, or why the texture map looks so strange.) It's just cool to see I'm actually learning a lot, and that it will help me in the future to also make things for Paralives! Couldn't be more excited for this game ☺️
I really appreciate the effort that goes into some of this. It frustrates me some with Sims when I have sims wear clothing for the “other” gender, that it almost never fits right. This looks like it’ll actually fit regardless of body type.
Oh no I might have to learn how to use Blender 😂 I've done some minor retexturing in Sims and Minecraft but meshes scare me. I'm not a great artist. The modding system you've made looks so good and simple, I can't wait to try it out!
I really enjoyed this, it is interesting to read about the process of the creation of items in the game.
Can't begin to tell you how great it is that Paradevs take the time to walk us through these things. It both explains why dev time (for ANY game) is so long, and gives us a better understanding of how the game is made, not to mention how it works. Paralives really sets a standard for communicating with their [potential] playerbase like we're intelligent people, and a lot of other studios should pay attention.
Thanks for the informative post! Regarding the layering, does that mean CC creators can customize clothing pieces to go together? For instance, I love Tudor and regency style dresses. Could I theoretically make some and then make matching petticoats to go under the dresses?
It could be possible to create a dress and then petticoat options to go under that dress, yes. So far our layering experiments have been focusing on clothing worn on the upper half of the body - like Seb's jacket - but we can't wait to see everything we'll be able to do with that system in the future!
since whem sebastian got blue eyes?? OMG
I might have used a modified Sebastian, or modified the eye color by mistake. Don't read into it, haha!
I love seeing the process! So cool!
Love it !! 🙏🏻✨
I loving sometimes looking back and the beginning h and see how far things have come
Awesome! Definitely something I’d like to try and could probably succeed as someone studying 3D in uni.
This is very interesting, even though I have absolutely no experience modding/creating CC. It *looks* doable, assuming one can actually make something pretty for the mesh and textures. Don't know about anyone else, but I'd love to (eventually) see a tutorial by one of the artist. Wouldn't have to be very detailed, but perhaps a glimpse of them altering something in Blender (doesn't have to be from start to finish), showing how they add highlights etc to the texture in Substance Painter (perhaps with some info on when to use which tools) and then importing it to the game. Kinda like a guide for those interested to get started and from there on out, they can look up other tutorials for making meshes and textures. Just a thought.
Hello Zedef! It's true that for some of these things, tutorials are going to be a boon! We still have a lot of stuff to do beforehand, but at some point we will probably create these to help people. Like I said, this was more of an overview than a tutorial, so don't worry if it doesn't seem clear how it works just from that!
Love this post. Am a bit fan of a dev diary. :) Thanks Jeremie.
Thanks for showing us this tidbits about game developing. Also this made me have some questions. Are you going to develop a tool to be able to doodle or add pictures to the clothes? Like the one you already did for the paintings. It would be nice to be able to add a cute dumb drawing (ex: to simulate that a para kid draw a t-shirt as a school project) or to add a image to clothes so we can easily customise them (ex: putting an image of our favourite music band in a plain t-shirt). And maaaaybe a system where this draw/image gradually gets worse and worse every time the para uses it like it happens in real life with this printed t-shirts
Hello David! At the moment, there are no plans to allow for drawings directly on clothing, nor to be able to use pictures like with the frames we've shown in the past. The reason is that picture frames are usually simple shapes, or they can be made in a specific way to look good when you add a rectangular picture on them. Clothes are way more complicated and in most of the cases, trying to add a normal image on them would look terrible, the image would be warped and cut in weird ways. Using the mod system and some understanding of how textures work on 3d objects, someone could easily make a custom texture for a t-shirt tho! We might have tshirts and other clothes with various logos you can switch around - as item variants, perhaps - so that will probably be an option as well! As for deteriorating clothes, I don't think that's in the cards for now. Thanks for the ideas and questions!
Looks awesome and informative. Thanks for sharing this 😊
Really cool. Can't wait to see the clothes modders make