#converting stuff for sims

[bellakenobi]

Tutorial - Extracting the assets from Shining Nikki for conversion for Sims games (or anything, really)

Finally! In advance I'm sorry for any errors since english isn't my first language (and even writing in my actual language is difficult for me so)

And first, a shoutout to The VG Resource forums, where I found initially info about this topic 😊 I'm just compilating all the knowledge I found there + the stuff I figured out in a single text, because boy I really wanted to find a guide like that when I first thought about converting SN stuff lol (and because there's a lot of creators more seasoned than me that could do a really good job with these assets 👀)

What this tutorial will teach you:

How to find and extract meshes and textures (when there's any) for later use, and some tips about how stuff are mapped etc on Shining Nikki.

What this tutorial will not teach you:

How to fully convert these assets for something usable for any sims game (because honestly neither I know how to do that stuff properly lol). It is assumed that you already know how to do that. If you don't know but has interest in learning about CC making (specially for TS3), I'd suggest you take a look at the TS3 Tutorial Hub, the MTS tutorials and This Post by Plumdrops if you're interested in hair conversion. Also take a look on my TS3 tutorials tag, that's where I reblog tutorials that I think might be useful :)

What you'll need:

An Android emulator (I recomend Nox)

A HEX editor (I recomend HxD)

Python and This Script for mass editing

AssetStudio

A 3D Modeling Software for later use. I use Blender 2.93 for major editing, and (begrudingly) Milkshape for hair (mostly because of the extra data tool).

Download everything you don't have and install it before starting this tutorial.

Now, before we continue, a little advice:

I wrote this tutorial assuming that people who would benefit from it will not put the finished work derivative from these assets behind a paywall or in any sort of monetization. These assets belong to Paper Games. So please don't be an ass and put your Shining Nikki conversions/edits/whatever behind a paywall.

The tutorial starts after the cut (and it's a long one).

Step 1:

Launch Nox, then open Play Store and log in with a Google account (if you don't have one, create it). Now download Shining Nikki from there.

After downloading the game, launch it. It will download a part of the game files. After that, log in on the game, or create a new account in any server (the server is only important if you want to actually play the game. For extracting it doesn't really matter since the game already has the assets for the upcoming events and chapters. It also doesn't matter if you actually own an item in game, you can extract the meshes and textures even if you don't have it in game). If you're creating a new account, the game will lead you through the presentation of it etc (unfortunately there's no way to skip it).

After that, click on that little arrow button on the main screen. There, you can download the actual clothing assets. Wait for the download to finish (at the date I'm writing this tutorial, it is around 13GB). When finished, close the game (not the emulator).

Step 2:

Now we're going to copy the assets to our computer. Click on Tools, then on Amaze File Manager. Navigate to Android > data > com.papergames.nn4.en > files > DownloadedBundle > art > character. This is the folder where (I believe) most of the assets are stored.

Now, where the stuff is located respectively:

Meshes are on the meshes > splitmeshs folder

Textures are on the textures > cloth folder

Tip: Want to really data dump everything? Just select the folders you want and copy to your PC! 😉

Click on the three dots on the side of the wished folder, then in copy. Then click on the three lines on the left upper corner to open the menu, and then click on Download. Now just pull the header of the app to show the Paste option and click on it. It might take a while to copy completely (the cloth folder might take longer since it's bigger, so be patient).

If you're confused, just follow the guide below:

The copied folder will be located at C:\Users\{your username}\Nox_share\Download

Step 3:

Now that we got the files, we need to make them readable by AssetStudio.

For this, we need to open the desired .asset file on a hex editor, and then delete the first 8 bytes of the file, and then save.

You can see it is a pain to do that manually to a lot of files right? This is why I asked my boyfriend to create a script to mass edit them. (I only manually edit when I'm grabbing the textures I want, because afaik the script won't work with .tga and the .png files, more about that forward this tutorial)

How to use the script:

Make sure Python is already installed, grab the nikki-fix-headers.py file and place it on the folder where you copied the folder from the game (mine is still the Nox_Share Download folder).

It should look like this, the meshs folder and the script.

Let's open the Command Prompt. Hit Windows + R to open the Run dialog box, then type in cmd and hit Enter.

Now follow the instructions pictured below:

The folder with the edited files will be at the same location:

Now, we finally can open it all on AssetStudio and see whats inside 👀

Step 4:

Open AssetStudio. Now click on File > Load Folder and select the folder where your edited meshes are (mine is "splitmeshs-fixed"). Wait the program load everything. Click on Filter Type > Mesh, and the on the Asset List tab, click twice on the Name to sort everything by the right order, and now we can see the meshes!

To extract any asset, just select and right-click the desired groups, click in Export selected assets and select a folder where you wish to save it.

Stuff you need to know about the meshes:

Step 4-A: Everything is separated by groups.

Of course you'll have to export everything to have a complete piece. Only a few pieces has a single group. When exporting, you have to select every group with the same name (read below), and the result will be .obj files of each group that you have to put together in a 3D application.

Step 4-B: The names are weird.

They're a code that indicates the set, the piece, the group.

Items that doesn't belong to a set won't have the "S...something", instead they'll have another letter with numbers, but the part/piece type and group logic is the same.

As for the parts, here are the ones I figured out so far:

D = Dress

H = Hair

AEA = Earrings

ANE = Necklace

BS = Shoes

ABA = Handheld accessory

AHE and AHC = Headpieces/hats/hairpins

AFA = Face accessory (as glasses, eyepatches, masks)

(maybe I'll update here in the future with the ones I remember)

Step 4-C: The "missing pearls" issue.

Often you'll find a group that seems empty, and it has a weird name like this:

I figured out that it's referent to pearls that a piece might contain (as in a pearl necklace, or a little pearl in a earring, pearls decorating a dress, etc). The group seems empty, but when you import it to Blender, you can see that it actually has some vertices, and they're located where the aforementioned pearls would be. I think that Unity (SN engine) uses this to generate/place the pearls from a master mesh, but I honestly have no idea of how the game does that. So you'll probably have to model a sphere to place where the pearls were located, I don't know 🤷‍♀️ (And if you know how to turn the vertices into spheres (???) please let me know!)

Step 5:

Now that you already extracted a mesh, we're gonna extract the textures (when any). Copy the textures > cloth folder to your PC like you did with the splitmeshs folder.

Open it, and in the search box, type the name of the desired item like this. If the item has textures, it will show in the results.

Grab all the files and open them in HxD (I usually just open HxD and drag the files I want to edit there), and edit them like I teached above. Then you can open them (or load the cloth folder) on AssetStudio, and export them like you did with the meshes.

Stuff you need to know about the textures, UV map, etc:

Step 5-A: The UV mapping is a hot mess (at least for us used to how things works in sims games).

See this half edited hoodie and the UV map for a idea:

So for any Sims game, you'll have to remap everything 🙃 Also, stencil-like textures all have their own separated file.

As for hair, they all use the same texture and mapping! BUT sometimes they are arranged like this...

Here's the example of a very messed one (it even has some WTF poly). Most of them aren't that messy, but be prepared to find stuff like this.

Shining Nikki just repeat the texture so it end up covering everything, for Sims you'll need to remap, and the easiest way is by selecting "blocks" of hair strands, ticking the magnet button to make your seletion snap to what is already placed (if you have familiarity with blender, you know what I'm saying). Oh, some clothes are also mapped with the same logic.

Regarding the hair texture, I couldn't locate where they are, but here is a pack with all of them ripped and ready to use. You can also grab the textures from any SN hair I already converted :)

The only items with a fine UV map are the accessories, at least for TS3 that the accessory has a UV map independent from the body.

"But I typed the ID for the set and piece and couldn't find anything!"

A good thing to do is to search with only the set ID and edit all the files with it, because some items (especially accessories) share the same texture file. But if even then you can't find anything, it means that there's no texture for this particular item/group because Shining Nikki use material shaders* to render different materials like metal, crystal, some fancy fabrics, etc. So you'll have to bake or paint a texture for it.

*I believe that those shaders are located on the other cloth folder in the game files. This one is way bigger than the other one and once I copied it to see what it was, AssetStudio took ages to load everything, almost used all my 16GB of RAM, and then there was only code that the illiterate me didn't know what it was 🤷‍♀️

So that was it! I hope I explained everything, although it is a little confusing.

If you have any questions, you can comment on this post or send me a PM!

[lexisimss]

Enzooo 🦖

[sunlight-shunlight]

pondering that falon'din is associated with an owl, and those are also messengers of andruil. and he's referred to as "winged death" which is also mentioned to be something that elgar'nan deploys against enemies. and both falon'din and andruil are referred to as venturing into dark places, where no one else can survive/wanted to go.

and ghilan'nain was not initially an evanuris, but was antagonistic towards them and making a bunch of weird creatures. she was given the offer to join them in return for getting rid of the creatures, and accepted. but with "pride stopping her hand" from destroying a few. and when asked about trusting people to share power, solas says "I know that mistake well enough to carve the angles of her face from memory."

solas also has nothing good at all to say about falon'din, mostly calling him a bloodthirsty tyrant who went so far in encroaching onto other evanuris territory that mythal had to besiege his temple and beat him up to stop him.

but he says nothing about dirthamen at all.

dirthamen is described as having gone missing unexpectedly, scaring all his followers, because they were now unprotected. and caught between their own high priest wanting to lock them into the temple forever like a cask of amontillado, and other forces outside that wanted to take their secrets by force. there is one note that a dirthamen follower defied the evanuris and took on a forbidden (probably a dragon) type of form, and was judged by elgar'nan harshly. he apparently also invented the varterral to protect his town from a high dragon? wack, but also could indicate that he had worked with ghilan'nain on making it, since she's the only one who's otherwise mentioned to be bioengineering stuff.

dirthamen has very very few surviving statues or depictions, and is more associated with falon'din than as his own independent figure in the dalish myths. even his own temple includes mosaics of falon'din. there's a few statues that are probably dirthamen, but the most striking is in mythal's section of the fade behind the eluvian, which is a statue of a hooded figure, doubled over with a giant sword sticking out of his back.

[aniraklova]

Capital Wasteland

[arcadewonder]

goodnight, sleep well stargazers.

[raiiny-bay]

:-)

[nonsensical-pixels]

my sfs and mediafire folders are such a mess that even thinking of adding new uploads to them makes me wince, but i'd rather crawl through the redlit ventilation system that is simpe and churn out dozens of new conversions than spend more than a minute trying to organise them 😍

[morrigan-sims]

The other post was getting long, and this is a different sword, so here you go:

I actually fucking finished a mesh edit!!!!! Well, at least the meshing part. This thing has parts from three different sword meshes. Tomorrow it's on to texturing hell. I've never textured anything before in my LIFE, and I just know it's going to be miserable, lmao.

Especially since I assume I'm going to have to make a new uv map and I don't know shit about that. But I at the very least need a texture for renders, and this sword is low-poly enough that I could probably make it an in-game accessory too.

[demonsfate]

omg y'all...... it's over...... they're fucking adding daily rewards to sims 4 😭😭

[sporco-filth]

I hope you go ahead with your cyoa slob game, there's so little stuff with slob goodness

i have left this project on the backburner so long i kind of considered giving up on it completely but you know what, you're right, anonymous tumblr user, there's not enough slob stuff.

I'm not promising anything, but I'll try to finish it.

If I'm not mistaken, the hard part of the coding is done, I just need to finish the artwork and make the writing better. It's a functional game (more or less) but it's just got a lot of placeholder text and images.

[eachuisge-cc]

enough horse announcement videos that start out "I'm not a horse person, I don't know anything about that, but I'll talk about everything else" I want to make my own video that starts "I am a horse person and know entirely too much about that and I'm about to make it everyone's problem"

[galaxytittus]

Thank you guys for 300 followers!!!! I really appreciate all the love you guys have shown me and my silly little OC fellas💖 I’m about to go on vacation but when I get back I definitely want to make a followers gift. Feel free to give me suggestions!

[chamisss]

[CHAMIS]SWEATER&SHORTS_TS4&3

THE SIMS 3

*Original mesh.

*Sweater - 9,7k poly, Shorts - 3,2k poly

*Recolor texture.

*Normal map.

THE SIMS 4

*Original mesh.

*All lods.

*Сompatible with HQ mod.

*Normal map.

DOWNLOAD (FREE ACCESS 16/02/2025)

If you want to post my cc on other sites, please include source.

Do not convert to other games without my permission.

Do not modify my CC stuffs.

[naturally-dazed]

i've been wanting to play vampire the masquerade (the video game) since i was 13 fr

[kaluxsims]

Happy merry!! Merry happy!! Jingle twinkle! Double well-wishing for channukah and xmas!! I usually give our sims some pj's for the holidays, but this time it's somewhere to wear those pj's. I might actually have gone "ooo" when I first saw @bostyny's Ageless Bedroom for TS4. It had to be my xmas set this year. A must. Then part 2 came out and I wondered if I'd bitten off more than I could chew. This is part of why my updates have been a bit sparse lately.

I mean...look at it though! Don't you just wanna snuggle in and wait for Santa?

Since this is a long post, you can download it up here or down at the very bottom. Choose either merged or unmerged recolors. Unmerged is almost 500 files total. Merged is 22. There are a ton of recolors and I could only repo some of it.

Download:

merged - SFS or MediaFire unmerged - SFS or MediaFire

Full details, credits, more previews, etc under the fold.

I love that this set is called Ageless. It's the perfect name. Depending on the colors and items, this set can be airy or dramatic. It's so versatile! Great stuff, Bostyny!

I didn't convert absolutely everything. I didn't have the time, and some stuff was beyond my skill level. I left out the mirrors, paintings, ceiling lamp, and jewelry stands.

Each object comes with 27-ish recolors. I only added some new recolors for the olive branches. Everything else is Bostyny's swatches. I repo'ed what I could, but there are still almost 500 files total in the unmerged folder. Yeep.

I reduced poly counts here and there, when needed. I also reshaped and tweaked some stuff. The table comes in two different sizes, a side table and a larger one you can use as a desk. The TS4 dressers I did as console tables, for multiple reasons.

Here's a list of what's included, poly count, recolors, etc:

Single bed - 1432 polys - 27 recolors

Double bed - 2240 polys - 27 recolors

Single blanket - 872 polys - repo'ed to double

Double blanket - 1166 polys - 27 recolors

Deco blanket - 730 polys - 25 recolors

Candle - 557 polys - 33 recolors

Candle 2 - 557 polys - 33 recolors

Chair - 2002 polys - 28 recolors

Console table 1 - 1486 polys - 30 recolors

Console table 2 - 1242 polys - repo'ed to console1

Console table 3 - 1486 polys - repo'ed to console1

Nightstand - 632 polys - 26 recolors

Nightstand 2 - 980 polys - repo'ed to console1

Olive branches - 1718 polys - 32 recolors

Olive branches small - 1718 polys - repo'ed to olive branches

Rug - no mesh - 60 recolors of NL 3x3 round rug

Side table - 566 polys - repo'ed to table

Table - 566 polys - 27 recolors

Slippers - 588 polys - 26 recolors

Slippers 2 - 436 polys - 27 recolors

Table lamp - 1662 polys - 19 shade, 11 base recolors

I've included a collection file.

And a few more previews, because why not?

The rug and bed blankets aren't in these previews, but you can see them in the ones further up.

Here's that download stuff again, because I'm not gonna make you go all the way back up.

Download:

merged - SFS or MediaFire unmerged - SFS or MediaFire

Credits: @bostyny for TS4 meshes and textures, @hugelunatic for the bed blanket that doesn't need cheats to place (I cloned it)

[thatonegreenleaf]

~WITCH'S WOODS~ CAS background room (with mirror!)

-

I DO CUSTOM CAS ROOM (and other) COMMISSIONS! fill out my commission form ♥

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I have had this idea brewing for literally almost a year and it's finally here! enjoy an outdoor cas room with some forest witch vibes :)

♥ Download the package file and put it right in your Mods folder! (up to 5 folders deep)

♥ You can only have one CAS background/room in your game at once, remove any other before putting this one in!

♥ Reflections need to be set to low, medium, or high but not OFF in your game's graphics settings for the mirror to be functional.

♥ Base Game Compatible!

♥ DX11 and DX9 compatible!

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Follow me on twitch!

Support me on patreon!

DOWNLOAD THE  "WITCH'S WOODS" CAS BACKROUND ROOM ON SIM FILE SHARE! 

WATCH MY TUTORIAL ON HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN HERE!

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TOU: do not redistribute, reupload, or claim my cc/CAS rooms/presets as your own! recolour/convert/otherwise alter for personal use OR upload with credit. (no paywalls)

♥ built using littledica's original CAS room files ♥

♥ inspired by a build i saw like last year, but cannot find now!! please let me know if you think you know what build it was/ who the builder is ♥

stuff I'm using here: reshade | cas lighting | (I'm wcif friendly if you want anything on the sim!)