Feeling Adventurous

So, I got this idea in my head about 3 o'clock this morning that maybe, just maybe I can do clothes. I really want to do clothes. As much as I love interior design, I love fashion even more. Which is sooo weird because I am totally a jeans and t-shirt kind of girl. I might lose the tee for a blouse once in a while but unless I'm going to church or a wedding I ain't ditching my jeans for a skirt, and dresses is a dirty word in my book. If I could have I would have wore a white Channel suit for my wedding day but my husband vetoes me cause he said he wasn't marrying a lesbian. Whatever, it would have been cute. Not to mention I would probly have kept the suit, unlike my husband. Anyway, so yeah, I'm gonna attempt a clothing item. Something simple like a bathing suit or simple top. We'll see.

I do have a little mini set I just uploaded. It's pending approval. I'm pretty proud of it. It's only 3 items, but I spent a lot of time getting the details just right. So I hope everyone likes it. The pic on the left in my 3 pc desk set and the pick on the right is the inspiration. Enjoy and happy simming.

Multi colored glass

So, I ran accross this really cool vase while looking for inspiration on something to create, but I had no idea about how to go about making this vase. I was one of those glass vases with streaks of color like blended in the glass. I don't think I am descibing it very well. Anyway, I posted a pic on the forum hoping someone could tell me how to make it.

http://forums.thesimsresource.com/showthread.php?t=389640

I didn't get any responses. I thought maybe it wasn't possible although that seemed silly to me, but maybe no one has thought about doing anything like that before but that seems even siller. I mean there are easily thousands of creators in the sim community and not one person has thought about doing multi colored glass. Really. Well either way I never got a response. No big deal.

Yesterday i was playing around with an idea I had for a piece of modern table decor. I'm making a modern laundry room set for my sister, and I decided to clone my vase with lemons from my studio living dinette set (which I am sorry to say is still not uploaded, I'm waiting for them to figure out the filestorage situation before I upload any more sets to tsr, although I do have a few individual items I am working on.) Anyway, so I closed this vase which, btw was cloned from Nickedemia's  Vase with oranges. i didn't use any of her original mesh but i did you her defuse map. I just changed the color from orang to yellow.

Well I was playing with this same mesh yesterday. I had an idea to make a glass bowl with a few multi-colored balls as a modern abstract piece of table art. It's not really  my style but I knew my sister would like. (on ana unrelated topic, my sister just found out she was pregnant which is really good knews because she is 29 and she has been with her boyfriend for almost 5 year and she hadn't had so much as a scare, so yeah I'm gonna be an auntie.) Anyway back to the point so I was playing with the diffuse map for the balls, it has a transparent alpha layer and I created this kind of funky multi colored disign using the smudgey finger. I though it was cool. i don't rember what made me decide to make the white transparent but I did so i basically had the streaked color over a transparent layer and when I loaded it back in to workshop, low and behold I had what looked like multi  colored glass but it wasn't a glass material it was the basic Phong material with a partlu transparent diffuse map. So I had to play with the tiling and I had to play with the actual image to make it seamless becasue at first you could clearly see where the image split and it looked crazy. I ended up with this. This isn't my finished product I just througha quick mesh together to show you what i was trying to accomplish. You can see between the color is transparent and you cna make it completey clear or kind of milky using various tools. I use paint.net mostly and I 've been experimenting with transperancy for a while.

Anyway I figured this out completely on accident, but I will be uploading a vase with a similar texture soon, I just wnat to practice the technique a little more because It's a little sloppy looking.

Needed: New Ideas

I think I'm simmed out. 3 weeks straight of creating has me burnt out. It's all I have been doing with my free time. I haven't picked up a book in a month. speaking of books, I am soooo excited about the movie " Water for Elephants". That was a great book, I heard a rumer back when they first talked about making it that Sean Penn was gonna play the August, the girls crazy boyfriend but I couldn't tell in the previews if that was him pr not. For some reason I pictured him bald with a mustach. I don't know, either way i can't wait.

I have a set to upload but I'm waiting till they figure out the file storage problem. I don't want to upload them as individual items. I also made a modern laundry room set for my sister. I didn't do the actual washer and sryer, just all the stuff to go in a really cool and modern laundry room. Who says l;aundry rooms need to be boring. She's made all kimds of request. Some of them are kind of out there and she keeps bugging me about clothes and hair. I'm actually a little more interested in making clothes then furniture but I'm not ready yet. I've played around with some meshes and I did make a skirt but it was kind of genereic and not that interesting. I'll keep trying. Anyway thanks everyone for downloading my stuff, I hope to have plenty more to share soon. Habby Simming

Beca (Kiska_Sims313)

approved

I'm soooo excited because my set was approved, although I don't think it will be posted as a set because I had problems with the file storage but thats ok, I am just excited to see my first uploads to TSR. I actually just uploaded another item a few minutes ago too. It's just a single item. It's a 1x2 work bench. I hated how big and gawdy the original drafting tables were so I made a smaller one. It was actually really easy, I just didn't realize that when I started. I expected it to be more complicated so it bacame complicated, and the more I messed with stuff that didn't need to be messed with the more I messed it up. Then I started over and decided to make one change at a timeto the foot ptints to see where it was that I was messing up and it turns out the first thing I changed was the only thing I needed to change. Ain't that funny. I thought it was funny. Oh well, this was only step one. The next step is to make another option for a workbench. I've been looking for antiquie drafting and writing tables for inpiration. Plus I am still working on my studio living dinette ser which is coming along real nice. I made my first glass object. Very cool.

This is what I have so far. As you can see it's close to done but there are a few kinks I want to work out. You can't see them real well but there is a plate set on the table thats pretty cool. I made it a bit too thin though so it looks kinda two dimensional, No big deal, an easy fix, also the glass vase isn't transperant enough also an easy fix. Also I don't love the shape of the cusion on the stool. Thats not really an asy fix, I'd pretty much have to start from scratch but it's a simple design so it would be that big of a deal. I haven't decided yet. I might leave it as it is, but I doubt it because it will annoy me. So we'll see. I have lots of ideas. Some of them are a bit ambitious and beyound my skill level so I have to try to make myself slow down and do one object at a time. I like to to do things that are a bit diferent, and not just astetically but like what I like about the table is it's a shlf too and the workbench I'm planning will have some shelves too and I'm thiniking of doing a murphey desk. I wish I could find someone who could add the animations to make it a true murphey desk. That would be cool. Ok well it's wayyy past my bedtime so good night and happy simming.

New Set

So I finally uploaded my new set, ThriftyChic. It looks really good, I ended up working on it some more last night and redid the mirror. I had to upload the item individually because when i went to upload my zip to my file storage nothing happened. I "trolled the forums" and found that there is a problem with the system and tech support is aware. no big deal. Now  am just waiting for approval. I tried to submit a set once before , but it was rejected and even though i know it was completely ametuer work (it was my first try) i was still devestated. Of course that just made me want to try harder and learn more. The image on the right is of my new set. Not all of it obviously, just the dresser, the mirror, the candle lamp and the rug.

The candle is my favorite part of the set. It just lloks so vintage and complicated btu it wasn't. I used pre-made spiral that can be found in the tools section ms3d and scaled them down and positioned them. It turned out really good. I'm pretty proud of the dresser too. I've redone it three timed. I was determined that I didn't want to do just a plain boxy object. I wanted to do a set that had personality. The first one I did came out too boxy and the second one was too curvy, but I think the final product was just right.

I've already started on my next set. I decided to go in a totally different durection. My personaly style is not at all contemporary. I am definently thrift store chic. I love Flea markets and rummage sales. It's that time of year. However I ran accross this cute little dinette set and just had to make. I've already done the table and a stool. I didn't do the same chair in the picture, i decided to go a different direction. Originally I thought about doing the shelf seperate then the table but Then. what fun would that be. The table looks great, it's boxy but it's suposed to be. I did a stool with a pillow top and and a flat shlf like bottom. I really like how it is turning out, it may be doen by the weeked. I want to add a coule paintings, I already have a print in mind, and I'm doing a plate set and a my first attempt at a glass vase with lemons and limes. I kept my table as the same slate blue color because I really like it amd the colors pop nicely, but I also did a wood recolor just to show that it recolors nice in cast. the patterns fit good, they don't stretch or anything. So thats whats up, for the three peopel I blackmail to read my blog. Happy Simming everyone.

Learning A New Skill

Learning to create custom content has been a real adventure. Some days I get sooooooo frustrated i just want to throw by computer out the window, but other days I feel myself swell with pride when I've succeeded. I'm still not as good as some of my favorite creators and probably won’t be for quite a while but I think I've come along way. I wish i had picks of my first few creations. Just thinking about them makes me laugh. I actually only started this a month ago. Wow, it seems longer, but I've become a bit obsessed, as is my personality. I want to be the best at everything. Well I probably won't ever be the best at creating Sims stuff because there are some amazing artists out there but I will most certainly be good. My advice to anyone who is interested in learning to create stuff is go for it!!. Its fun and Workshop makes it much less intimidating. At first it may seem overwhelming but once you get in the groove of the process, its like, "why didn't I do this along time ago?". I personally read at least a dozen tutorials. Most of them confused the heck out of me. Luckily my mistake is your reward. I'm gonna save you the trouble of searching endlessly for tutorials that all seem to contradict themselves and tell you the 4 main tutorials you should use and funny enough, they are all on this website. Well that’s because they are written by TSR creators and they use Workshop. Now I still use s3pe for painting because for some reason workshop doesn't import textures for paintings, it weird I don't know why, when I find out I will let you know. But for everything else I use workshop because it takes all the guess work out of it. With S3pe you have 15 million files all names with numbers and different file extensions which  have kind of figured out but it still give me a head ache and I was taught to work smart not hard, so if there is a simpler way, I’m gonna take it. Anyway, long story less long, these are the tutorials I suggest:

1.       A-Z Creating in Workshop by Apple

2.       Object Creation Part I: The Beginners Guide To Meshing by Riccinumbers

3.       Object Creation Part II: ObjectTextures by Cyclonesue

4.       Baking Shadows With Blender by Sim_Man123

The first 3 are available in PDF files and the last one is extremely invaluable. I had the hardest time with texture and let me tell you Blender solved most of my problems. It does most of the work, all I have to do is go in and add the little detailed like folds in fabric or engraved edges, things of that nature. it's very cool, and super easy once you learn the process. It takes me 3 minutes start to finish to bake my UV map. It's pretty cool. Anyhoo.

I've still got a few issues with slot, but I've figured out the bone thing. And I learned this one the hard way. You see I didn't really understand what bones were used for. I had a vague idea, much like when i first used UV mapping. I kind of got it but not really. Anyway. But then I was working on this hallway dresser for my thriftychic set (coming soon) and It came out real good. I mean the shading was perfect, I got all the slot set up and It looked great in workshop. (which is deceiving, always check your custom content in game, cause for some reason some things look better in workshop then in the game) So installed my dresser and waited in anticipation for my game to load and I went buy mode/ storage/ dressers, and there it was looking just so cute. Simple but cute. I placed it and it lined up perfectly. (this is not always easy but I use the footprints to make sure my objects hasn't went off center at some point, it's also what the original mesh is used fir, sizing and distance and stuff) I was so excited, it looked so good. The pattern fit perfectly. i just hate when the pattern is too big or too small on an objects. Luckily i learned from Cyclonesue's Tutorial that the size and shape of the pattern is directly related to the UV mapping process so now i know the size of my uv map and how it is place depends on the size of my object, but even if i mess that up there is an object in workshop that lets you change tiling options for a pattern so for instance the tiling option for my dresser was 1,2 but the pattern seems a little big (but not stretched) so i changed it to 2,3 and now it looks perfect. I also learned about alpha layers so my dresser is the perfect amount of shiny. Sorry, I 'm not bragging I'm just awfully proud of myself.

Okay back to the point. So, it was all good and I tested the slot, and they were all positioned correctly and I was just so happened. All i had to do now was actually tell a sim to use the dresser. I wasn't worried, it was just a formality at that point. My Sims was way across town so i turned my cheats on and had her teleport home and I clicked the dresser and told her to change into o her pjs. and waited anxiously for her to open the drawer. i really only wanted to make sure my overlay was positioned correctly (for the clothes you see when the drawer is opened) and freaking A, when she went to open the drawer, it stayed in place while the whole dresser moved out. I couldn't believe it. I was like, what the bleepity bleep bleep bleep. trust me I had all kinds of fun words. So I have learned my lessons about bone. I closed the game and turned off my computer and went to watch old Dr. Who episodes swearing I was done, It was stupid and a waste of my time. But then like 3 hours later, much past my bedtime, I went in and redid the bones, which really wasn't that hard, and loaded it back up and it worked. And it looks good. So now I make a list of the bones and what they correspond to so i hopefully don't make that mistake again.

It's a really cute dresser. the candle lamp i made to go with it is even cuter. I will be uploading it tonight when I get home or first thing on the morning while I have my coffee. i would have brought it with me to work but I thought TSR was blocked here, but to my pleasant surprise it was not. My first set got rejected but it really was barbaric. It was my first try but it was awfully cute for a first try. I will probably remake it. Well Happy simming every one.

pS. I didn't really go into it but i was having problems with my slot because i could place objects but when I moved my object the objects placed on it wouldn't move with it. well I think i found an answer here is anyone has had a similar problem. http://forums.thesimsresource.com/showthread.php?p=3931877

Thanks Angela!!!!