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 particular wall if that’s all you want to know. The variations within the border are endless so what I am attempting to do here is give you the boundries for the borders along with a few ideas to get you started.

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. 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:

w = width of the sticker h = height of the sticker

x = horizontal placement of the sticker on the worksheet) y = vertical placement of the sticker on the worksheet)

I encourage you to use your own stickers. You can use a photo, graphic, clipart or any other type of image you have. You will need to down size( to maintin image quality) some images to required size of 256 x 256 pixels in your graphic imaging program.

Always test your patterns to make sure they are seamless.

The Wallpaper

These are the wallpapers we will be working with. The full flat wall has be included in order to show the pattern repeat on the full wall. You cannot make a one pattern that will fill the whole wall. Lengthwise the 256 square pattern you create is repeated three times but is the cutoff on the ceiling. Width wise there is a way to create a pattern that goes 1 & 1/2 times the width of the panel. There are other possibilities and if you have any additions to add please do...the more info the better.

A wall mural is our grand finalie!!

Patterns

Pattern 1 Repeat

This one is good for a photo,painting or single image. It is one complete square so you will need a good seamless background. To create the effect I used you will need a background colour or sticker. For this one I used an image search of a square frame and an image of a swan found on google. If you using a sticker resize it to fill the entire middle square:

w = 256 h = 256

x = 128 y = 128

You could use this alone for your border or center your picture sticker on the first sticker or background colour:

w = 128 h = 128

x = 128 y = 128

Pattern 1 wall is the flat wall with dado here are a couple of examples:

Pattern 16 Repeat

This one is a good demonstration of the measurements and the sticker placement. The pattern used here is a quilt pattern found under google. In photoshop I added a line at the top and on the bottom, resized it to 256 x 256. In order to get the exact placement of the stickers start with the first sticker in the upper left hand corner. The coordinates are:

w = 64 h = 64

Sticker 1:

x = 32 y = 32

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.

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

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