Tutorials:Making a Sims 3 Tattoo

Making a Sims 3 Tattoo

Want your sims to get some nice ink? Here's the basic steps to create a nice tattoo that works well in the game and looks good.

You Will Need

• CTU - To grab one of the game's meshes to import so you have a basic skeleton, and to look at the game's original textures.

• .NET 3.5 - Required for CTU. You need .NET 3.5, not 2.0 or any other version.

• Body Textures and UV Maps - To use in scaling and aligning your textures.

• DDS Plugins for Photoshop, GIMP, Paint Shop Pro, or whichever program you use to edit graphics - For creating and editing the textures you will need to make. Instructions are given for Photoshop CS3 - you may have to do some Googling for tutorials and tips on making it work in your program of choice. You will, of course, already need whatever graphics program too.

Difficulty Level

Easy to Medium - This probably shouldn't be your absolute first project, but is relatively easy to do once you get the hang of the basics of DDS files, textures, CTU, etc.

The Tutorial

Okay, let's get started! Please note that all images below may be clicked for larger versions and are not shown full-size on this page!

Your Tattoo Design

First, you need to have an idea of what type of tattoo you want to make. This is -much- easier if you use a "flash" tattoo design as your base. That is, a drawing of one, not a picture of someone's tattoo on their body. It's much easier to separate the parts of the image that way. If you -do- use a pic from a body, you'll probably have to do a lot more work to get it to look nice, and I'm not going into that here. Make it easy on yourself, and choose a flash design.

Here are the two designs that will be demonstrated in this tutorial:

Design #1: A tribal design with a tiger face. This will be done on the back. This will demonstrate how to do a tattoo that has colour in it.

Design #2: A tribal design in plain black. This will be done as an armband. This will demonstrate a single-colour design, and how to work on the UV map to eliminate seams.

Note that the images above are -not- shown full-size. If you click on them, you'll see that they're much larger. It's very important that you work with nice, big pictures. You can scale them down to fit on the sim's body, but you can't scale them up or they'll look blurry and bad. Also note how nice and sharp the edges look - it will make them much easier to cut out this way. Don't use small, blurry images - you'll spend more time trying to fix them than if you just went and found better source images to start with.

Colour Design

We'll start with the design with colour on it.

Setting Up

Open up your source texture in your graphics editing program of choice. Make a copy of the background layer, and delete the original background, so your image is floating on a transparent background.

Remove Background

Right now, the tiger image is on a white background. We need to remove the white background cleanly and neatly, so all we have are the black tribal lines, and the tiger face.

Magic Wand: Select the magic wand tool. The default for the Tolerance setting for it is set to 10. You may need to adjust this up or down depending on your image, so that you don't have any white bits around the edges. For the tiger, 15 is a good setting since it gets rid of all the white crud at the edges without grabbing too much. Contiguous is unchecked. This means that it will select everything on the whole image that is within a range of 15 of whatever you click, not just things that are adjacent in an unbroken block of colour. Again, whether or not you want to use this setting depends on your image. For the tiger, it's unchecked.

Select Background: Click once in the white background, and watch as it selects everything that's white, or nearly white. With contiguous unchecked, you'll see how it grabs things that are in isolated blobs even with black around them.

Deselect Any Overage: In the case of the tiger, there's some parts on the face that are white/near white. They need to be deselected. So use the Polygon Select Tool, set to Subtract From Selection (the third set of little boxes) to deselect anything that shouldn't be selected.

Expand Selection: Unless you have a perfect black and white outline, you probably still have just a smidgen of lighter pixels around the edges. So do Select > Modify > Expand. Set it to 1 pixel. This will add one pixel to the selection edges all around, to remove any lighter edge. This also makes it very important to have a nice big image, or losing that pixel around the edge might actually be an issue.

Delete Background: Press the Delete key on your keyboard, and you'll see the whole white background disappear, to be replaced by grey and white checker of the transparent background. If you've deleted too much, undo and go back and fix your selection. To check whether your edges look good, make a new layer behind your design and fill it with a wildly different colour. In the case of the tiger, you can see in the picture to the right that the edges of the black parts are quite nice looking, with no lighter outline. There are a couple spots where the edges aren't perfect, but that's easy enough to go in with a 1 or 2 pixel eraser and clean up any imperfections.

Once the background is removed, the design is ready to be placed as a texture.