Create a Pattern - Wallpaper Borders

Level - Beginners/Intermediate/ Expert

The purpose of this tutorial is to create picturesque borders for your Sims wallpapers with the Create a Pattern program from Electronic Arts (CAP). It will give you a more in depth knowledge on how the placement of the "stickers" work. Most of the patterns/pictures will look great on other Sims items as well..some will only be suitable for the particular wall paper. It depends on what you have and what you do with it. In this tutorial a pattern will be created for border types wallpaper in Sims 3 so you can just refer to that wall if that’s all you want to learn.

One important note about the program: the patterns shown on the wall in the preview area are not exact as compared to the wall in the game. An example is the largest 256 x 256 pattern shows 3 complete repeats lengthwise in the preview and in the game it shows part of the pattern cut off at the top because of the ceiling. With that in mind please remember we are creating patterns to fit in the contraints of the border of in game wallpaper.

So let's begin and I hope you have fun.

Requirements:

Create a Pattern [1] Available free for registered Sims 3 game owners. The basic interface is explained in the help documentation found in the upper left hand corner under the "?"

A Graphics program

Adobe Photo Shop (pay) Paint Net [2] (free) Gimp [3] (free)

Tutorial(s)

Seamless Textures[4] (optional)

The Workspace and Measurements

The inner middle square is your work area and measures 256 X 256 pixels. There is no way to get one pattern and no repeats on a wall. The wall repeat area depends on your pattern and its placement on the work area. The sticker sizes are 58 X 58 pixels and can be resized from the smallest 1 x 1 to 256 X 256. Placement is important in borders and can be achieved successfully by using the coordinate’s buttons:

You can make your own stickers in the graphics program or resize (down..always use larger to maintain the image quality)any image find to required 256 x 256 pixels. You can use any image size but how it will appear depends on its placement in your sticker and on the worksheet so you can make this as complicated or as simple as you want.

Patterns

The first one we are going to work with is an demonstration of the measurements and the sticker placement. See Illustration 1. The work space is 256 x 256 pixels, stickers are 64 x 64...a perfect multple of 256. The pattern I am using here is a quilt pattern found under google. In photoshop I added a border at the top and on the bottom in, resized it to 256 x256 and saved it in a specific folder for the custom made stickers, then opened it CAPS and opened the pattern). In order to get the exact placement of the stickers start with the first sticker in the upper left hand corner. The cordinates are:

w = 64 (width of the sticker) h = 64 (height of the sticker)

x = 32 (horizontal placement of the sticker on the worksheet) y = 32 (verical placement of the sticker on the worksheet)

To place the next stickers perfectly:

Sticker #2: add 32 to x = 64 and y remains 32. The third sticker: add 32 to x 64 to equal 96 and y remains the same. Sticker # 4: add 32 to equal 128 and y remains the same. The next row the y changes to 64 and so on.

Illustration 1

Once complete your pattern is like this and fits perfectly into the first wallpaper described in Sims 3 as:

Paint: Wall with Dado,Border,Chair Rail & Baseboard Moulding Wallpaper: Wall with Dado,Chair Rail,Trim & Baseboard moulding. Illustration 2