A Step by Step guide to creating a fully recolorable wallpaper

A Step by Step guide to creating a fully recolorable wallpaper for sims 3, for the easily frustrated, by the easily frustrated.

Step one: clone a basegame wallpaper.

Step Three: open tsrw and click 'create new project'

Step Four: Select "New import" and next.

Step Five:
Select browse and navigate to where you exported the cloned wallpaper to (mine was on desktop). You will have to select the file type as package because tsrw defaults to wrkshop files. When a pop up asks if this is a ts4 file, say no (obvs) and next.

Step Six:
 Here you can give your wallpaper a title and description. I don't generally worry about that at this stage because it's easily edited inside tsrw. Click next.

Step Seven:
You will get this notice pop up with wallpaper clones. Click yes because you don't want a whole bunch of variations anyway, they always make the catalog take forever to load. I only ever keep one variation of a wallpaper.

Step Eight:
You can see there are fourr texture types. Overlay, which in this case remains empty and blank, the mask which is the part containing the color channels that make an item recolorable, the multiplier which is the gray scale texture of the object (wall in this case) and the specular, also called a bump map, which helps give an object a more 3D look in game.

Step Nine: The next step is to open the package file of the wallpaper you want to edit in s3pe. Right click the _img file and export to file. I don't bother with renaming them. For the next step, you will need a program to open and edit DDS files in. Either photoshop or gimp, with the appropriate plugins, work fine for this.

Step Ten: in TSRW, click the 'edit' button on the mask file and export it to your documents. Don't rename it.  Do the same thing with the multiplier and specular.
 Now you need to open the original wallpaper, the mask and multiplier files in photoshop/gimp. Click do not show mipmaps. You don't need to open the specular file.

Step Eleven: The first thing we're going to do is make the multiplier.

In the original wallpaper file, desaturate the image. We want about 50% gray, not too dark (or your colors won't show up) and not too bright (they'll be washed out or white).

Because the baseboard and crown moulding of the wallpaper are darker, I had to select them and adjust the brightness and contrast until they matched more evenly with the rest of the wall.

Copy this image onto the flat gray multiplier file, flatten it, and save it as a DXT5 .dds file and remember! Don't change the file name.

 

In TSRW, select edit again on the corner of the multiplier file and this time hit the button that says import. Grab the new multiplier, hit done and select yes to override the existing image files because you don't want useless old images in the new file.

 

For the Specular, I usually take the image I edited for the multiplier and open it in a NEW 256x512 TRANSPARENT img file. The transparent bit is very important! I drop the multiplier image in, cut out the inside because I really only need edges emphasized on the wooden sections and then blur the image because if the specular is too sharp you'll get weird looking lines in game. Set the whole image to 50% transparency and click save as. Select the specular file exported earlier (it should appear black) and again, save as a dxt5 .dds.  Don't rename, this is the golden rule for sims 3 image files.

For this wallpaper, I'm only doing 2 channels, though 3 could also work, even 4 if you want to get fancy and pick out the details of the wallpaper pattern, but this is a quick tutorial so we're not going to get fussy.  Here I showed the selections I made and the finished mask at 50% opacity so you can see the areas.

Your finished mask should look like this! Flatten and save the image over the mask file exported from tsrw and import the new one to overwrite the correct image in the wallpaper, just like the earlier files.

When you've imported your files, it should look like this (I tweaked the preview pattern and color, but don't worry, you can't get a preview of wallpapers in tsrw, it just doesn't seem to render them correctly).

Say you masked for 3 channels. In tsrw, you will need to drop down to the patterns and make sure they are all enabled. In this one, only two are enabled from the original and I'm leaving it that way since I only masked for 2 channels. Turn it the red circled section to true if you need 3. If you need 4 channels, you will need to use texture tweaker.

Now export it to sims3pack, convert and pop in your mods>packages folder for testing!

Once in game to test the file, I see it turned out pretty good! It could probably benefit from a third channel in the baseboard and a little tweaking of the multiplier (clearly there is a little stripe that needs to be lightened) but overall, this should give you a good idea of how to make a CAStable wallpaper!