Um, Now what?

shorty943 · 06-05-2007, 12:18 PM

I think I am missing a tutorial.
The one titled :-
The Idiots Guide to making Sims 2 Stuff 101 for dummies.
"

See me smack self with trout"

I am trying to make a few simple things to upload to the community. Just recolours of standard Maxis or EA posters and paintings. No problems, they come up in my game beautifully. Now I want to get copies of them out, zip or rar them, and upload them. Ah.

Many thanks to Greg and his very fast response to my cry for help on uploading.

See results below, I used Greg's Wall tiles of my photo, ( I had to didn;t I.) then hung a recolour of the in game Sims Champions poster, in my original photo, along with the ship I was Engineer Officer aboard at the time. And a couple of 30 year old racing photo's, both same photo, to show the difference in poster formats.

Any way, I've got that far. Now how the hell do I get my recolours out for the rest of the world to use or not?

Miros1 · 06-05-2007, 12:44 PM

Remember the step in the recolor process where you saved the package files?

Go to that directory (probably My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Downloads).

If you sort by modification date, your new files should pop right up at the top of the list.

Assuming you have WinZip, WinRar, Stuffit, or another zip utility installed, right click each file and choose the appropriate option from the context menu (the little menu that pops up when you right click).

Most zip utilities default to the same name as the original file. If yours doesn't, rename them!

shorty943 · 06-05-2007, 01:13 PM

Thank you Lady M.

I shall zip the recolours up and post.

shorty943 · 06-05-2007, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shorty943

Thank you Lady M.

I shall zip the recolours up and post.

And it worked, I have just downloaded my own upload.
Just to check the link of course.
Now to see if the actual recolours are working.
Be back soon.

Zirconia Wolf · 06-05-2007, 01:58 PM

I hope so!

Those are beautifull!!!

Greg · 06-11-2007, 02:43 AM

Yeah, those paintings are great! Love 'em!

shorty943 · 06-12-2007, 10:44 AM

Hmm, HELP. Oh boy, am I having trouble with these recolours.

A simple SimPE recolour of champions poster, no worries. So it seems.
But, when I tried for a recolour of a 2 tile painting, ah. Very bad things happen.
I just cant seem to get the textures (.png's) in line properly.

I gather, that about 1\3 of the texture file, must be the paintings back.
Is there a border edge that needs to be included?
Can some one write a steam ship engineers version of what needs to be done?

shorty943 · 06-12-2007, 10:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shorty943

Hmm, HELP. Oh boy, am I having trouble with these recolours.

A simple SimPE recolour of champions poster, no worries. So it seems.
But, when I tried for a recolour of a 2 tile painting, ah. Very bad things happen.
I just cant seem to get the textures (.png's) in line properly.

I gather, that about 1\3 of the texture file, must be the paintings back.
Is there a border edge that needs to be included?
Can some one write a steam ship engineers version of what needs to be done?

Here Is just a sample of the SimPE Wizards generated file, and the original jpg\png.

Can you tell me what I have not got right please?

Miros1 · 06-12-2007, 12:21 PM

I'll write up a description of how to actually recolor with SimPE, not the Wizard, which I've never used. Stay tuned!

shorty943 · 06-13-2007, 03:46 AM

Thank's Lady M.

It seems, a lot of our younger folk, don't have quite the same comprehension, of the English language that we elders were taught.

I can plan, draw, and construct any damned thing you might want, in the way of small to huge scale engineering works.
I can wade through technical manuals on almost any thing, including industrial robotics etc.
My first commission, as an Engineering professional, was the installation of the very first, fully computerised automatic commercial laundry system in the Southern Hemisphere. I had to do a real quick time course on intergrated circuitry and logic systems, via Texas Instruments. Then a fast track course on robotics, through Pirelli Ericson.

But, for the life of me, I honestly struggle with some of the language concepts, used to describe what happens, and how to achieve the desired results.

So, once again, thank you Lady M.

Humbly yours,

Shorty, aka, Greybeard. Retired space pirate king.

Greg · 06-13-2007, 08:03 AM

Shorty, are you using Photoshop? If so, I might be able to send you a template that shows where the sundry bits of the painting are located on the texture image.

Wizards of SimPE ought to work. It creates a .package file that it puts into your Downloads folder with the filename you specify.

That .package file is all you need to zip up in order to share the painting.

shorty943 · 06-13-2007, 09:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

Shorty, are you using Photoshop? If so, I might be able to send you a template that shows where the sundry bits of the painting are located on the texture image.

Wizards of SimPE ought to work. It creates a .package file that it puts into your Downloads folder with the filename you specify.

That .package file is all you need to zip up in order to share the painting.

Got the .pkg files RAR'ed all okay. Sort of. Well the only 2 that have come up all right so far. Yeah, fluked 2 out of 7.

I use Gimp for graphics. Not sure if the Gimp.Org folks have got around to making Photoshop templates work. I could always drop a CS version in to try.
Or, just hit it all with a big hammer, until Gimp plays nice with Photoshop stuff.
I sure would like to try that template any way mate.
Use my registered email address.
A safe email attachment from a known and expected source?
No worries.

Greg · 06-13-2007, 06:39 PM

Hmmm... I have a guess: You might have had the wrong thing selected when you did the recolor in Wizards of SimPE. The texture image in your bounty.rar file is named...

paintinghorizontal-abstract-5358c171-933b-4258-b195-bb6563ea8f5b_txtr_512x256

... which is a large 3-tiled framed painting.

Were you trying to recolor the soccer-kick poster?

Miros1 · 06-13-2007, 08:58 PM

You might be right... I think Shorty said he was trying to recolor the 2 tile painting.

Greg · 06-14-2007, 03:35 AM

Up in message #8, Shorty mentioned that he was trying to recolor the Champions poster; but I don't have an object named Champions poster in my game.

So... the first step is to figure out what object we're trying to recolor.

shorty943 · 06-15-2007, 11:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

Up in message #8, Shorty mentioned that he was trying to recolor the Champions poster; but I don't have an object named Champions poster in my game.

So... the first step is to figure out what object we're trying to recolor.

Forget the poster importer recolours, Greg. Works okay for an installed game, but not for uploading. This is the original texture from the "poster". Came from University or some thing, more properly called, We call it football or some thing. Not worth the effort, after all. Only seems to work if the Poster Importer is installed.

The Bounty recolour, is the 500 simolean abstract 2 tile horizontal painting.
The ingame name you quote looks right, it's not easy to run the game, SimPE, Firefox, and my brain all at the same time. Ever since I installed Seasons last week, my old school 5500 nVidea card has suddenly started showing it's age.
Hang on,.....

Agh, bugger, the snapshot fell out of the ether. I just tried to upload a snapshot of one of the failures hanging on a wall for testing. Probably got rejected by the "Web Spiders" as utter rubbish.

The painting I tried to recolour looks like an orange coloured ball, with a splash of brown to the lower left, with a black stripe from near upper left to the middle. "painting-abstract horizontal-too many numbers-512x256"

Must be the sudden cold snap over here. Brain's frozen over as well.
East coast under storm surge, dozen or more people dead, towns and districts washed away in the biggest flash flooding in over 30 years.
On the bright side. Best start to the snow season in years in the Alps.
But that is all over 600 miles east of me.
Here it is just plain cold. No moon, no night cloud, no warmth, the world has gone all white and crunchy under foot. As I mentioned, I live a little on the rustic side. My ablution facilities are outside the house.
More specifically, our "Thunder Box" is out in the back yard. Two weeks officially, into winter and the water in the "bowl", was frozen over this morning. Dayum it's cold here.
Ooh, maybe, if I sit the big old computer box outside, I can overclock the crap out of the 5500 and get some performance back. Sub-zero ambient air should keep it cool enough.

Or, I could always, RTFM, and have another go at it.

Trouble is, lot's of them written, few in intelligible English.

If you can email those templates to my ISP email account, Greg.
My login name is universal, (I first used my Navy nickname, shorty, and my Navy laundry number, 943, for login name as a joke with a free MSN Hotmail account. It amused me to think of Bill Gates, being akin to my laundry man.)
ISP email is (@internode.on.net), apparently lots of people don't much like Google. Quite a few site registrations won't accept my gmail address because of past spamming attacks.

(shorty943@internode.on.net)

I have plenty of room on my 80 Gb apps drive, to install Photoshop if I have to. Like about 70 Gb of room to play.
Probably even have a downloaded version, some where in the bowels of the "Bigbox". It can get dark and echoey in there. Lots of hard drives to traverse.
120 Gb SATA for "\My Documents", raided, stripe and mirror, to 160 Gb sets.
Plenty of play room. Used to be a corporate networking research machine. Still has a server install of Mandriva Linux in there somewhere, and an experiment with Solaris 10. That was a melt down. Pity, Looking Glass was a treat, wow factor desktop and then some, just useless, because no apps actually work on it.

Clever.

Oh God it is cold. I just looked at the desktop clock, it has taken me over 1\2 an hour to scratch this out. I need coffee. NURSE, where is my caffiene drip?

Greg · 06-17-2007, 03:44 AM

Oh, it's that one! Yeah, I have that in my game but I've never recolored it.

I'm still confused. The picture of the ship is tall, and the picture of the football team is wide. I don't understand how the ship picture could work with the football picture.

Miros1 · 06-17-2007, 04:46 AM

Part of Shorty's problem is that Wizards of SimPE just tells you how big to make the image, not what area in the image will be used in the actual finished product.

shorty943 · 06-19-2007, 03:13 AM

Yeah, the Lady M, has hit it on the head.

Forget the football poster Greg.

The "Bounty" photo, is of a set I tried to put together, from scans of my personal sea photo collection. Not at all connected with the first attempts with the football poster.
The Poster Importer only works for an installed game, so I gave that a miss, and went for a Wizards of SimPE recolour. of the 500 Simolean 2 tile abstract horizontal painting. For the ship photo's.
The picture of Bounty, (it is "the" actual vessel built for the movie, now works out of Sydney Harbour), is about a 30% edit from a scanned 6x4 standard glossy print. I can make that, or any other parts of photo's any size or detail with Gimp, or any other graphics application.

I had to fool around with resizing the photo's etc, to make things fit. I figured out there was some jiggery pokery needed, to make the print fit the frame, and include the back of the frame. I ended up tearing into the original with SimPE to see what was in there.

Now my problem is exactly as Miros said.
Can some one please give me the pixel dimmensions they use, when doing painting and poster recolours?
I can do all manner of resizing and bizarre stuff with Gimp. And there is the rub. Boy don't some of this stuff come up looking bizarre. I even have the photo, over lapping somehow and colouring the fame, in a couple of "not quite ready for the world" attempts. Bizarre.

That is my problem folks, I don't seem to be able to work out the correct sizes and places to add the "custom" part to a recolour.
Greg, seriously. Please if you have a set of templates, that show the correct size and placement for these painting recolours, send them to me.
Email, snail mail, carrier pidgeon, thumbnail dipped in blood, I don't care, reverse charges, COD, what ever. Scratch them onto a sheet of tin with a nail, I don't care.
I need some help to get these things out, for the community I have got so much from.
And these are personal photo's, not a scan from a magazine or some thing like that.
These are my photo's, from my albums, of ships I have worked on. Some taken almost 40 years ago with a snotty little Kodak Instamatic. Some by Navy photographers, standing right there with me in the thick of it all. But every one, from my personal life collection.

Greg · 06-19-2007, 04:09 AM

Each wall art object is a little bit different. Some of them require reversing the image. Some of them require compressing the image horizontally but not vertically.

The "alien surfer" poster is relatively easy to recolor. Here is the original art for Anja's poster, the Happy Valley Edition:

Anja, the Happy Valley Edition

The overall picture is 256x512.

The front image area is 256x436.

06-05-2007, 01:58 PM	#5
Zirconia Wolf Reticulated MoonBat Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: My trusty computer in Issaquah WA, USA. Posts: 848	I hope so! Those are beautifull!!! __________________ Long Live All Wild Canines! Leader Of The Moon-Bat Revolution!

06-05-2007, 12:44 PM	#2
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Remember the step in the recolor process where you saved the package files? Go to that directory (probably My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Downloads). If you sort by modification date, your new files should pop right up at the top of the list. Assuming you have WinZip, WinRar, Stuffit, or another zip utility installed, right click each file and choose the appropriate option from the context menu (the little menu that pops up when you right click). Most zip utilities default to the same name as the original file. If yours doesn't, rename them!

06-05-2007, 01:13 PM	#3
shorty943 Banned Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 805	Thank you Lady M. I shall zip the recolours up and post.

06-11-2007, 02:43 AM	#6
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Yeah, those paintings are great! Love 'em!

06-12-2007, 10:44 AM	#7
shorty943 Banned Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 805	Hmm, HELP. Oh boy, am I having trouble with these recolours. A simple SimPE recolour of champions poster, no worries. So it seems. But, when I tried for a recolour of a 2 tile painting, ah. Very bad things happen. I just cant seem to get the textures (.png's) in line properly. I gather, that about 1\3 of the texture file, must be the paintings back. Is there a border edge that needs to be included? Can some one write a steam ship engineers version of what needs to be done?

06-12-2007, 12:21 PM	#9
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	I'll write up a description of how to actually recolor with SimPE, not the Wizard, which I've never used. Stay tuned!

06-13-2007, 03:46 AM	#10
shorty943 Banned Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 805	Thank's Lady M. It seems, a lot of our younger folk, don't have quite the same comprehension, of the English language that we elders were taught. I can plan, draw, and construct any damned thing you might want, in the way of small to huge scale engineering works. I can wade through technical manuals on almost any thing, including industrial robotics etc. My first commission, as an Engineering professional, was the installation of the very first, fully computerised automatic commercial laundry system in the Southern Hemisphere. I had to do a real quick time course on intergrated circuitry and logic systems, via Texas Instruments. Then a fast track course on robotics, through Pirelli Ericson. But, for the life of me, I honestly struggle with some of the language concepts, used to describe what happens, and how to achieve the desired results. So, once again, thank you Lady M. Humbly yours, Shorty, aka, Greybeard. Retired space pirate king.

06-13-2007, 08:03 AM	#11
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Shorty, are you using Photoshop? If so, I might be able to send you a template that shows where the sundry bits of the painting are located on the texture image. Wizards of SimPE ought to work. It creates a .package file that it puts into your Downloads folder with the filename you specify. That .package file is all you need to zip up in order to share the painting.

06-13-2007, 06:39 PM	#13
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Hmmm... I have a guess: You might have had the wrong thing selected when you did the recolor in Wizards of SimPE. The texture image in your bounty.rar file is named... paintinghorizontal-abstract-5358c171-933b-4258-b195-bb6563ea8f5b_txtr_512x256 ... which is a large 3-tiled framed painting. Were you trying to recolor the soccer-kick poster?

06-13-2007, 08:58 PM	#14
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	You might be right... I think Shorty said he was trying to recolor the 2 tile painting.

06-14-2007, 03:35 AM	#15
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Up in message #8, Shorty mentioned that he was trying to recolor the Champions poster; but I don't have an object named Champions poster in my game. So... the first step is to figure out what object we're trying to recolor.

06-17-2007, 03:44 AM	#17
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Oh, it's that one! Yeah, I have that in my game but I've never recolored it. I'm still confused. The picture of the ship is tall, and the picture of the football team is wide. I don't understand how the ship picture could work with the football picture.

06-17-2007, 04:46 AM	#18
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Part of Shorty's problem is that Wizards of SimPE just tells you how big to make the image, not what area in the image will be used in the actual finished product.

06-19-2007, 03:13 AM	#19
shorty943 Banned Join Date: May 2007 Posts: 805	Yeah, the Lady M, has hit it on the head. Forget the football poster Greg. The "Bounty" photo, is of a set I tried to put together, from scans of my personal sea photo collection. Not at all connected with the first attempts with the football poster. The Poster Importer only works for an installed game, so I gave that a miss, and went for a Wizards of SimPE recolour. of the 500 Simolean 2 tile abstract horizontal painting. For the ship photo's. The picture of Bounty, (it is "the" actual vessel built for the movie, now works out of Sydney Harbour), is about a 30% edit from a scanned 6x4 standard glossy print. I can make that, or any other parts of photo's any size or detail with Gimp, or any other graphics application. I had to fool around with resizing the photo's etc, to make things fit. I figured out there was some jiggery pokery needed, to make the print fit the frame, and include the back of the frame. I ended up tearing into the original with SimPE to see what was in there. Now my problem is exactly as Miros said. Can some one please give me the pixel dimmensions they use, when doing painting and poster recolours? I can do all manner of resizing and bizarre stuff with Gimp. And there is the rub. Boy don't some of this stuff come up looking bizarre. I even have the photo, over lapping somehow and colouring the fame, in a couple of "not quite ready for the world" attempts. Bizarre. That is my problem folks, I don't seem to be able to work out the correct sizes and places to add the "custom" part to a recolour. Greg, seriously. Please if you have a set of templates, that show the correct size and placement for these painting recolours, send them to me. Email, snail mail, carrier pidgeon, thumbnail dipped in blood, I don't care, reverse charges, COD, what ever. Scratch them onto a sheet of tin with a nail, I don't care. I need some help to get these things out, for the community I have got so much from. And these are personal photo's, not a scan from a magazine or some thing like that. These are my photo's, from my albums, of ships I have worked on. Some taken almost 40 years ago with a snotty little Kodak Instamatic. Some by Navy photographers, standing right there with me in the thick of it all. But every one, from my personal life collection.

06-19-2007, 04:09 AM	#20
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Each wall art object is a little bit different. Some of them require reversing the image. Some of them require compressing the image horizontally but not vertically. The "alien surfer" poster is relatively easy to recolor. Here is the original art for Anja's poster, the Happy Valley Edition: Anja, the Happy Valley Edition The overall picture is 256x512. The front image area is 256x436.