Monday 4 August 2014

Mod The Sims – Caster – Create a Style for The Sims 4!



Caster is an image editing tool allowing players of The Sims 4 (and of course, the Create a Sim demo) to quickly and easily create patterns and recolours for CAS parts and - hopefully in the future - build mode objects. Caster is based on the Create a Style tool for The Sims 3. You just input a PNG or BMP version of a specular file, select a pattern, and you’re ready to go! You can also adjust brightness, contrast and threshold settings, as well as convert non-grayscale speculars to grayscale.

You can set patterns using either the “1, 2, 3, 4” buttons, or by clicking on the pattern. If you want to use a solid colour, you can quickly generate one by right clicking.

PLEASE NOTE: Caster only edits images, it does not read or write .package files. You will still need S4PE and CAS Recolor Tool to export and import files. Maybe a future version of the program will be able to read .package files, but the current one can’t.




By default, the program will create the whole image using one pattern, but this can be changed using a mask of the same size as the specular. The program reads the mask, and determines based on the colours which design to use in which area.

White (#FFFFFF) - Design 1

Red (#FF0000) - Design 2

Green (#00FF00) - Design 3

Blue (#0000FF) - Design 4

Transparent/Any Other - No Design (just copy straight off the specular)

In order to work, the area of the mask must be one of the above solid colours - variations of them (example: darker red) will not work.




The program uses an algorithm that draws the entire image pixel-by-pixel using the specular, mask and patterns/colours as instructions. The resulting image will be the tiled design(s), but will retain light and dark spots from the original specular.

The brightness will be determined by the highest colour value (for example, if the pixel of the specular is R100, G200, B100, the brightness will be based on the green value).

A value of 128 will have no brightness effect. Anything above or below that will be lighter or darker.

This is more efficient than using a regular image editing program, and it actually redraws the image rather than just filling over it.



REMINDER: Caster does not read or write .package files, you will still need S4PE and CAS Recolor Tool for that.

The textures shown in the above pictures are all from grsites.com

The main hub for the tool is on my Tumblr blog: http://zerbu.tumblr.com/post/935950...-for-the-sims-4

The latest version of this tool uses DDSPanel from s3pi - http://s3pi.sourceforge.net/
Specifically, it uses the version stored with S4PE. I'm not sure if that was modified from the original or not.


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