Tutorials:Creating A World That Doesn't Suck/Painting

Terrain Painting

Terrain painting, although similar to the ingame version, is rather difficult in CAW and it takes a long time to master, and to develop your own techniques and style. There is always room to improve in this catagory, even if you think that you have perfected your skill, you will find a new technique or way of doing something, and it goes on like that.

Looking around, a lot of world builders will use the default paints that CAW sets you up with. That bright green grass and the grey, repetitive rock. This, however, is another way to make your world "suck". By using these, not only are you not taking full advantage of Create a World's customisation options, but you're making a world that looks like it has just come out of the sculpting stage and all that you have done is press auto-paint.

*Note* - You can use Auto-paint, but if you have any consious thought of how you want your world to look, you will only use it to get a feel and understanding of the terrain, and where your cliffs and grass are supposed to go.

Terrain painting is one of those few techniques that can never really be taught utterly and completely, as it relies too heavily on user input, and if you compare two worlds, by two different users, you will see that the styles are extremely different, and that it is rather difficult to copy a style. You can merge ideas, styles and techniques, but to actually make a carbon copy of someone's style is difficult for the best painters.

Fallout, Opacity and Size

The secret to both successful sculpting and terrain painting is heavily reliant on the fallout, opacity and size sliders that are located underneath the terrain painting and sculpting panels, on the right-hand-side of the CAW window.

• Fallout, which is basically how your terrain meets up with the rest of the terrain, is the bottom most slider. The higher you have this set, the more jagged your terrain paint will be when you paint over something to blend it in. Generally, unless you are erasing an entire area of painting, you will have this set to below 50 because if you do not, the brush will leave traces of the size of the brush where you are painting. In other words, if you zoom out after using a high fallout brush to blend, you will see big circles of paint, with blocks of the paint underneath showing through. This happens regardless of shade of the paint, because of the way the brush works.
• Opacity is exactly the same as opacity in Photoshop or Paint.net. It allows you to blend terrain paints directly with others by lowering the rate at which they are applied when you click your mouse. Lower setting equals lower opacity, which means a better chance that it will blend properly. For darker colors, you need to have it set slightly higher, but brighter colors will need nearly 1% opactity.
• Size is probably the easiest to master, and is definately the simplest to explain. Size is the slider you use to get a smaller or larger brush size. When you load CAW, your size will be set to 15, which is a decent size for regular painting, but when you want to add secondary and detail paints to cliffs, mountains, beaches, creeks, etc, you might be better off using lower settings.

Importing Terrain Paints

This is a feature that you will use a lot. If you use custom paints, your world will look unique, and whatever paints you choose will add to the overall feel and theme that you are trying to portray. To import terrain paints, simply click the terrain tab on your Utilities panel, then select the

The other thing you will notice when you're looking at layers is at the end of each terrain paint's name, there is a word in brackets. This is used to associate the sound that your sims feet make while walking on that paint. For instance, if you have a grass terrain paint, and you want it to be rustling, long grass, you need to select 'Long Grass' from the list when importing your paint.

Choosing your Colors

Choosing colors is extremely important, as not only can they make or break a world, but whichever colors you pick will decide what mood your world provides to downloaders, whether you want a happy, quaint town, or a depressing, grungy city.

• Happy, quaint towns would generally, if you want to portray a happy place, use lighter, more saturated colors, and, in a lot of cicumstances, brighter colors. A vibrant mix of greens is what you might pick for your surrounding hill and valley colors, with a light and playful tone for the beach and a brown or a greyish brown for cliffs. Although cliff color sometimes depends on what sort of climate or area of the world your town is based in, if any.
• In a depressing and grungy city, however, you would use darker, less saturated colours, like olives and tans, and the cliffs might be a darker, maybe even mossy grey tone.
• As a last example, an isolated desert town would be mostly sand, and you would not see bright green grass surrounding it, because then it wouldn't be a desert. You might see patches of olivey looking grass, probably a lot of deader grass. You would also see a lot of rock and dirt mixed into this. To get that isolated feeling, you need to surround the town by either expanses of nothing, or big cliffs of grey, red, orange rock.

Though, you have to remember that the above examples are just that; examples. There is no rule against using other sorts of schemes, but if you are trying to make a world that makes people feel things, you need to use the correct colors because colors portray emotion.

Terrain Layers

Organising your terrain paints into the correct layers is absolutely crucial to successful painting of a world. If you do not organise your paints right the first time, you will have no chice but to repaint your map after you fix the issue.

*WARNING* - You can not move layers between eachother. You can only switch which paints appear on which layers. This does not import the painting you have already done, for that paint. You have been WARNED.

Before you actually paint your world, you need to import all your paints, set your settings to about size 3-10, opacity 1-5 and fallout 0 and try and blend them. If two do not blend seamlessly, or if they blend very patch-like while on these settings, you need to re-order that paint so that it is ABOVE the one that you tried painting over. If you do not do this, your blending will not work properly, and thus, it is pointless to continue.

Techniques of Various Creators

As stated previously, a guide can only teach you so much about technique when you are painting. Below, I have interviewed a few experiencenced CAW creators, as well as myself, to provide you with some varying information about techniques each of us use.

• armiel from MTS.info uses what she refers to as a highlight and shadow painting scheme. In other words, for the dips in her cliff faces(shadows), she uses a darker rock paint, blended in with a size 5-10, opacity 5-10, and fallout 0 brush. For her higher parts in the rock(highlights), she uses a lighter rock paint, blended with similar settings. She then adds dirt and grass over and around the cliff faces to get a more realistic vibe.On more grassy areas she uses 2-3 different grassy paints that she blends together. Armiel recolors EA's paints using Photoshop to get her darker and lighter versions of each paint.
• TVRdesigns(me) from MTS.info uses a technique that is similar to armiel's as it tends to rely on very defined sculpting prior to the painting phase, to get the gullies and rises in my cliffs and hills. For my paints, I tend to use 4 rock colours, as well as sand, dirt and dead grass paints. For my hills and grassy areas, I have between three and four grass textures, and for my beaches and creeks/rivers, I have two different sand layers, and dead grass and dirt layers. To blend all of these, I use the same brush settings as armiel, simply because I find them easier to work with, and having to click more to get the blend looking good is better than it being too prominent. Generally, to set up to paint using my technique, you have your base grass layer, then your rock paints, then your dirt and sand layers, then your other grass layers.

This way, however, can get extremely complicated, especially when you want to add another color, as it might not blend with the others as well. So, to overcome this issue, you need to choose all of your paints before you start painting, and then experiment with their blending like mentioned in the previous section, Paint Layers.