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A Fool’s Journey in Self-Taught Modding / Pt 1

Coming up on a thousand posts between MTS and NRaas in the space of a year, I sometimes figure my lack of uploads weighs negatively upon whether it seems like I know what I’m talking about.

So, it's time to start a devlog. If you were tagged, don't feel obliged to read it- just wanted to credit the names and faces behind this rabbithole I've gone down.

Tiny blips of my work are floating about out there- I made the geostates for @twinsimming's default replacement tree, cracked some of the mysteries of decrypting TS3 Store worlds, and I’ve shot a number of small CC items and tuning packages from the hip as needed for individuals in both forums.

Over a couple of days, I learned geostates from scratch to make the sprout and sapling.

I’ve also ended up with the shiny orange username at MTS thanks to contributing a few tutorials, which did wonders for my confidence. Said tutorials are quickly decaying as I outgrow my own methods, but I promise to revisit them when time and health allows.

Making GIF examples was a highlight of working on the tutorials, so far.

In truth, I’m always working on bigger things. Much bigger things. Half of the answers I give are ones I work out on the spot for the purpose of answering- and then I squirrel away what I learned into my growing reference pile. I’m happy to chip away at a hundred little problems, because I come away with a hundred little skills.

I’m just too stubborn to let my first public release be one of those small successes. It simply has to be the most ambitious project on my plate- the one made of months of work and half a dozen restarts from scratch.

What started as a simple 'find hairs to use as default replacements' project has turned into a 'repurpose mesh pieces into new hairs from scratch' project.

The truth about learning to mod any game is that a fair bit of it will (or rather, should) have nothing to do with the game itself. Being competent with Blender and XML in general- and familiarising myself with S3PE so thoroughly I could manually do anything that usually is automated by other tools- was the greatest favour I could have done for myself.

I started wanting to write a devlog- or whatever is appropriate to call this when it won’t involve programming for quite some time- to try and encourage this sentiment in others. Learning to make a specific creation vs learning to create is very similar to the proverb of being given a fish vs being taught to fish. The sooner you unlearn relying on for-purpose knowledge and dive into all-purpose knowledge, the better.

If you want to be a prolific creator of hair CC, I wouldn’t even recommend starting with my tutorials on making them for TS3. I’d encourage you to learn to create and edit meshes, work with morphs and bone assignments, so on- all concepts that neither The Sims nor EA invented, but if you are introduced to them for the first time through modding you may fall into the trap of believing a modder is the best person to teach you. The remaining jump to then get that work into the game is smaller than you think.

Manual bone assignments are the most recent trick I've put up my sleeve, and one of the reasons for another soft-restart of my project.

EA didn’t provide a single modding resource outside of CaW for The Sims 3, so I empathise with the DIY nature of the tutorials that exist. The familiar names of the 2009-2010 modding scene pulled the game apart themselves, wrote their own programs, and carried the community on their back with the effort of sharing what they learned.

Over a decade later, creators are less often programmers, computer engineers, and 3D artists and more often hobbyists following in their footsteps with no prior knowledge of these fields. You will lose sanity if you have big CC plans and try to learn all of it from a video tutorial recorded on an overheating laptop that didn’t edit out any of the times TSRW crashed or the person making the tutorial coughed directly into their mic- I can tell you that much.

The first thing I made was actually a skill for TS4, which I crunched through with Sims4Studio and a lot of squinting at @icemunmun-spicy-scalpel's Candle Making skill, and is where I first spat out the name CardinalSims for the sake of filling in the creator name box. Which, for the record, is supposed to be a pun on Cardinal Sins and not that I consider myself the cardinal of sims.

I'll come back around to release this one day if someone doesn't beat me to it, hopefully with compatibility for BrazenLotus' mods.

For that reason, a lot of TS4 creators are my largest inspiration even if I see myself focusing on TS3. Icemunmun and @brazenlotus are my meshing and modding role models- custom food is my passion despite my current workload, so when I finally get some of these projects out that is where I’d like to settle most. Preferably churning out hundreds of recipes and harvestables for the rest of my days.

After messing around with hair recolours, eye textures, and asymmetrical dog ears, I flipped back to TS3 (the far more intimidating of the two to work with) and haven’t stopped piling projects onto that plate ever since. Hair became the somewhat dominant topic of my expertise, but believe it or not it all started with a plate of scrambled eggs.

3D scrambled eggs, intended as a replacer for @echoweaver's recipe. All it's missing is a half-eaten state, but I got a tiny bit distracted: read, it has been ten months.

It’s not really a devlog until I go over what I’m working on, though, is it?

No matter how many things I try to juggle, I can promise that the first release will be a large something called BGHR. Which involves somewhere in the range of 45 hairs, give or take.

The first 'BGH' Redux I made + the most recent one- have fun puzzling over that acronym until release. I blame it on the fact I modded Skyrim for a long time before this.

Which is not including the dozens of variants and age/gender conversions I end up with along the way, which I export to a mesh dump that I’ll come back to later:

Once that floodgate is open, I will be prioritising releasing the smaller projects quite quickly- likely the 3D scrambled eggs and the default harvestable plant + vine to match the tree that have been sitting 99% complete in my project folder.

Thank you for reading, if you made it this far. I'm out of breath and I didn't even have to say all of this outloud.

Next devlog should be more focused on a singular topic.

#did i write a devlog or a journalistic article on the nature of modding itself #who can tell #ts3 #ts3cc #a fools journey devlog #the tarot references will only get worse from here on #simblr #the sims 3

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