This item was rejected because it's " Fake and unrealistic looking ". I would like to know what people here think. I'm fumed, I do not think that it is fake and unrealistic looking, and I spent a good 15 hours on the project. I was also told that it was " Photo Skinned " and badly at that... ... I never photo skin, I hate photo skinning. All my textures are 100% Drawn by me. I'm an artist: www.animeaikuku.deviantart.com ... so I was a little insulted by that. =\ Anyways, what do you all think I should do to make it acceptable for mod the sims? I'm really upset and will continue to be upset until it passes... I just...can't believe they accused me of photoskinning when I do everything by hand and then told me my 15 hours of work was mediocre.

Please give me feedback and CC. Thank you.

Well, they never said "fake" but they did say "The dress is very photoskinned and a bit unrealistic. Photoskinning is okay, by all means, it just has to be done in bits and pieces. As of right now, your texture doesn't really fit the mesh that it's on. The folds look artificial and blurry. And the lace bottom is smushed.

Over all it's a good effort, just needs some more tweaking. You may want to try hand painting some of the areas that don't quite fit with the mesh. Photoskinning is usually complemented with hand painting. "

It does look like what I would think of as photoskinned - it's not uncommon for photoskinned clothing to have folds and highlights that are too deep and sharp for the mesh, so that it looks like a photo has been copypasted on, rather than textured by hand. Okay, so in this case it's not photoskinned - either way, it needs some tweaking.

The dark part of the creases look much too dark, and probably a little bit too much for what is a very smooth clothing item. Especially on the upper part around the neckline, front and back, those areas would be very smooth from the fabric hanging down - the back has some black parts left and right of the neckline, and the front has a lot of smaller lines around the neckline (and seems to have a thicker edge to the neckline on her left side - our right). It overall makes the dress almost look like it's too big for her with all the folds and highlights, yet the overall size/shape fits the body. I'd say remove a lot of the folds/highlights around the top area so it looks smoother, and lighten up the darker shadow areas significantly, and try to go with smaller, more subtle detailing.

Also, is the lace recolourable? It seems like for a design like this, it should be - you should still have enough recolour channels to make at least the bottom lace and fishnet lace recolourable separately.

Ah, well I love high contrast. A lot of my art features just that. I'm fumed, but I'm not unwilling to edit it so that it's acceptable. Hence this thread. It's only my second creation, so I'm not experienced enough to do 4 color channels yet. As of right now the outfit is recolorable in three areas: The skull, The lace & Fishnet, and the main dress. That's about all that it is going to get...period... I'm not experienced enough to make anymore recolorable areas or figure out how to make lace recolorable on its own.

The problem is that the texture doesn't match the mesh. You have very very dark folds, which look at least four or five inches deep, on a flat mesh - of course, texture should be used to make a flat mesh look like it has depth and detail, but there's a limit to how much you can do in that regard before you really need to adjust the mesh too. The band around the bottom of the skirt, on the other hand, looks complete flat - fabric can't suddenly go from wavy to flat like that, so that band needs to be lightened up (since sims games have a tendency to render pure black to look like a black hole, thereby also obliterating any shading) and textured to match the rest of the dress. The skull and crossbones logo also isn't shaded to match the fabric, so it looks like it's laid out flat - that creates the impression that the folds on the main dress are just pasted on, since anything else is physically impossible.

I strongly suggest you work on this some more here in the Creator Feedback Forum - some elements are good, such as the fabric cross-hatching which creates a very nice effect, it's just overshadowed (no pun intended) by the problems with the shading. Texturing a 3D mesh is quite different from creating 2D art, since you have to take into account the dynamic nature of the way 3D can be seen from all different angles, different lighting etc.

If you want to retain the sense of very deep folds, I would suggest lightening the texture folds a little, then using the normalmap in addition, in order to make the mesh look wavy to match.

Yay! My sig is appropriate today. Also, using four channels is very easy - which tool are you using to make this, and which graphics editor?

Seeing as the lace is stretched, which is funny because it's not stretched texture wise, I'm trying to replace it... but replace it with what...that's the question. Here's a picture of the texture itself, see, not stretched. Not entirely sure why it gets stretched when applied to the mesh..


Sims 3 Workshop because I have no idea how to use anything else and CAS Unitool is severely outdated + Can't figure it out worth beans.

Photoshop for the work itself.


...whatsa normal map.

Versions two progress. Thoughts please? I tried to use liquify to make the skull look like it was part of the shirt, and I'm replacing the lace at the bottom with a sectioned off ruffle piece....Unless I can figure out how to make the lace not stretch. I also brought the contrast down on the piece using the exposure option.

Okay by the looks of it this second version is gunna need 4 recolorable parts...What color do I make the 4th color on the mask layer to make it show up? How exactly do I go about doing that....

It looks definitely better
I would suggest you to highlight and make it less wrinkly on the back, also your dress lacks some natural shading like EA's textures have. Just look at the game textures and you will see some spots where your dress needs to be shadowed (like under the armpits and such).

And if you need to create a fourth recolorable channel, you should color those spots in Alpha channel.

I finished the second variation, if it gets rejected then oh well..I Give up on the piece & I'll just move on to a new project and see if I can do better on it. I'm finding it very hard to go back and edit dds files... for some reason I always get " Too many channels to export " error and end up having to save as a png and then as a dds again and for some reason end up loosing all the transparency between the covnersions.

I always get the same error, I don't know what's causing this, but I always do this:
1. Select the whole Alpha channel and click "Copy" and then delete it.
3. Save your DDS as DXT3 or DXT5, close the file.
4. Open saved file again and paste Alpha channel back.
5. Save it again.

You can always save your textures as TIFF if you're using Workshop (that way you won't lose transparency).

You will always get some stretching on the bottom of skirts - just because it's a rectangular texture applied to a conical mesh. You can't fix that completely, but you can compensate by making a texture which won't look too bad stretched - sometimes even squishing it a little sideways will help, but don't go too overboard .

The easier way to fix the channels error is to right-click in the Layer palette and hit "Flatten image". Save as DDS, then undo so you get your layers back. Also, keep a PSD version, though you probably already do that.

Problem with flatten image is that it tends to loose the transparency when I do that.

It shouldn't do, if the transparency is painted onto the alpha. If you're automatically generating an alpha when you save, then I don't know how that would work, flatten image may indeed break it.

Personally I think you are being too negative while working on this project. I've seen people who have spent months on a sims, or people who have worked on their worlds for years without complaining. You've made a nice piece of clothing there and it looks good. It just needs some tweaking to look more realistic. Like the skull mark which is placed directly over a fold. That doesn't seem logic, because the mark itself isn't folded etc. It's these small tweaks you need to look through before uploading again

Good luck with this, I'm sure you can finish it someday. You just need to stay a little more positive while working with it. EVERYONE has gotten a rejection! Or several..