I've put together a tutorial that walks through creating custom foods and recipes using CCLoader. It turned out longer than I expected, but I hope it's comprehensive.

I have a draft available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/...dit?usp=sharing

I was intending to include screenshots, but I'm waffling on whether that's useful. I did at least include XML examples. There are a couple of things highlighted in yellow that I need to look up. My sims machine is currently in the shop, which is part of why the tutorial draft is done now.

I would be grateful to anyone who takes the time to read through it and point out anything that's confusing or might have been missed.

What would you say someone needs to have achieved before taking up the project?

An ITUN / XML mod? A script mod?

It probably bears more resemblance to creating CC. I think a basic familiarity with S3PE and S3OC are most useful, along with some idea of what XML looks like.

Is that something useful to add at the beginning?

Yes I think it'd help self-evaluate if one is prepared for the challenge

Honestly before even diving into the code my #1 worry is: will it look good? I have this african recipe in mind that I want to bring in the game, but I'm worried about sourcing and implementing high quality textures for the food...

See the way the "default" baby food looks nothing close to tasty: https://sweetdevil-sims.tumblr.com/...anonymous-asked. I'm worried sick my end-result after long hours of code will look like that. I see a "texture" section in your doc but it says "This isn’t a texturing tutorial, though. I’m sure there’s lots more detail on this subject.".

I don't know anything about texturing in the sense of CC creation (or in a general sense for that matter) so any tutorial link you could provide in that section of your tutorial would help greatly to gain confidence in the custom food task. I would love extra links to browse custom food textures if that's a thing (fingers crossed).

Hope my feedback helps.

Thank you so much for looking at it. This is very useful.

Heh. I don't know much about texturing either. I guess I somehow assumed folks who wanted to do this would know more than I do!

That's something I can put in there. There really are a lot of models and textures that already exist in the game, so you can pick and choose to reduce the amount of texturing you actually have to do. Soups, autumn salad, and spaghetti are single images on a dish. Those are the things I've retextured so far, and I just Google Image Search to find images of a comparable food from the top-down. Using the image as I found it was usually too high-resolution compared to the game, so I reduced the resolution. Most food images are 64x64 pixels or 128x128, and that seems to work well.

For more complicated food models, like the grilled fish sandwich I was almost finished with before my computer went into the shop, you can often get away with just changing the colors of the source texture. The plan for that one is to use the hamburger model and its texture, but make the cheese green for kelp and use the breaded fish pattern from fish and chips to color the patty. I'm just using the foodCook from fish and chips, since it's already grilling a breaded fish fillet. The cooking process is a combination of hamburgers and fish and chips.

I don't know what image editors folks use or what level of expertise to target. Are there tutorials devoted to texturing I might link to?

I guess I can say that you need an image editor that can handle DDS files or a way to convert to and from DDS format (not the easiest thing to find, actually). Retexturing tends to come in two forms -- making small changes to the existing texture of a recipe with a complex model, or replacing the texture of a simple model (salad, spaghetti, soup, etc.) with a top-down image of the food you want at a resolution of around 128x128.

Does that sound like enough detail? I'll go back add add some more info in there. I was getting self-conscious about how long it was already.

If you copy/pasted the above I think it'd help someone who might have the same question I did!

Thanks for the detailed answer, this is very useful. I like the idea of finding the texture with a quick online search, I somehow assume it'd be a daunting task, so this is good news! There's hope

As of now the only note I have is to make sure you add a link to download the dummy OBJ file (that’s where I got stuck heh).

Hey good job

Here is the thread with more explanation

Oh, hey! I'm back after almost a month of being unable to use my computer due to a repair saga that was almost a Greek tragedy. But it's back. It works. I couldn't do a proper restore of my backups, but I was able to get the files off them that matter. I do have to make one of my kelp recipes over again, but that'll just help me work on this tutorial.



I was having a terrible time finding it! I'd just decided I'd have to put it up for download myself, since I have a copy on my harddrive. But HERE it is, finally: https://modthesims.info/showthread....640#post4669640

Looking over what it took to get this tutorial together, there are way too many crucial bits hiding halfway down comment threads.



Hihi! I was hoping you'd drop by and see this! I don't know if you do anything with Sims 3 anymore .

OK, I think I included all the feedback I received.