I know it has been talked about before, but I couldn't find those topics after searching.

It has been mentioned that there is some better way of importing texture files into SimPE that prevents the degrading of the texture. There were some files that needed to be installed, but I forget what they are called, where to get them and how to do it. I'd appreciate any help :).

I think you speak about the picture degrading with dxt, to avoid that you can use a photoshop or paintshop plugin at the nvidia website called nvidia dxt tools. When i discover that, I didn't need anymore to make all the picture size and the smoothing of pictures is better.

Here's a link to the nVidia DDS tools install here. Download it to your desktop or something and double click to install it.

After you install them, go to your Extras/Options settings in SimPE and fill in the path to them. This is usually:

c:\program files\NVIDIA Corporation\DDS Utilities

Then when you go to import your texture images, right-click on the image and instead of import, use BUILD DXT instead and go find your texture and let SimPE import it using the DDS compression which is much nicer than the internal one that ships with SimPE.

Deedee

Thanks a bunch, Deedee!

My related problem is with alpha channels. They alias really bad no matter what I do and my nice smooth curves end up looking ragged. :?

Are you doing a soften to the inside edges of the object area of the alpha?

When you get your more or less black and white sections marked out, do you then go in after and select the black outter part what I like to call the part from a sewing pattern that ends up on the floor, not in the dress... and you select that black part and invert the selection so it's now the selected object area. Then you decrease selection by one pixel and invert again. Then change that one pixel edge of white into 128 gray and deselect all. Then you select the black outter area again, and invert again and then do an edge preserving smooth so that the inside edge softens and the outside edge remains crisp.

This should give you a nice edge in game to any curves. If it doesn't then I have left over imagination from Sims1 methods and my eyes think it does. Another more obvious way to find out would be to study a maxis alpha and see how it looks up close... if indeed it's as simple as that.

Deedee

This is exactly how I do it for sims1 objects. But it doesn't seem to work right for sims 2. The edges look nice and smooth on the alpha channel until I import it into SimPE then it just goes into stair steps. Build dxt helps with th texture image but how can import the alpha texture with it?
I have tried re-importing Maxis alphas without changing them and they go bad during importation.

OK, I feel like an idiot because after making tons of recolors I still don't quite know what these "alpha channels" are. Would someone care to give me a brief explanation? :oops:

Alpha Channel=Transparence channel.

If a Pixel is black in the alpha, it mens it is transparent, white means it is solid. 50% white means 50% coverage and so on. :)

OK, thanks, Quaxi :). I just realized that you can export and import the alpha channels for objects, too. What I don't know is what people use this for. I don't imagine it's something you need to modify with most object recolors? I can see what it's used for with clothing, but not with objects, apart from something like glass parts.