#2

21st Jan 2019 at 11:36 AM
Last edited by simmer22 : 21st Jan 2019 at
11:59 AM.
Posts: 9,285
Thanks: 3 in 1 Posts
3 Achievements
For
retexturing, you need
Bodyshop for making simple CAS Items (comes with your game). For anything else you need
SimPE.
If you want to edit CAS parts, you can do so in SimPE, but you can also use the
Wardrobe Wrangler (separate program, allows you to do a lot of edits to the files) and for hairs there's Cat's hair binner (this + their Milkshape plugins
here). There are a lot of player-made tools and plugins to make your life easier - you'll find most of those either
here on MTS or linked in various
tutorials.
You can use any picture-editing program you want, but choose one that can handle layering, picture resizing, transparency, etc., and gives a good quality result (some programs like regular Paint are not adviceable). I prefer
Photoshop, but there are cheaper alternatives, such as
Gimp (free, though the export for Bodyshop files is a little iffy but workable once you get the hang of it).
If you want to make
meshes, you're going to need a meshing program. You can use most of them, but I do recommend
Milkshape if you want to work with animated meshes (CAS meshes and animated objects, plus for making poses/animation), but you can also use
Blender (free program, there's also plugins for it to assign bones, but from what I gather the export is a little iffy). If you just want to make non-animated objects, you can get away with most programs that can import and export OBJ files (some exported OBJ files may give errors in
SimPE if you use the wrong export settings). Personally I use both of them, in addition to Wings3D (for more accurate slot numbers - bit advanced), and I have used 3D Max previously (but that's not cheap...). Blender is a bit difficult to learn, but once you get the hang of it it's pretty good for being a free program.
And that's really all you need. For anything else, make sure to read tutorials on the specific thing you want to do. Extra plugins and programs you need are usually linked in the tutorials, and I think all the player-made ones are free to download and use.
For modifying the UI I think you just need
SimPE and a picture editing program. You can download an UI mod and work off that, or extract the files from the game files.