Starter Tutorial
For this tutorial you will need:
- The Sims 1
- The Sims Transmogrifier
- Blender
- TS1 Renderer
- TS1 Compiler
To replace the sprites in an object, you need to export an objects description from The Sims Transmogrifier. For this tutorial, we have cloned "diningtable2x1". You will need to export with all zooms and channels, and turn off bmp compression. Save the xml file in a new folder.
The add-on is used through a panel in the right sidebar of the 3D view. Select the "The Sims" tab, and then press setup on the panel. Save your blend file in the folder with the exported xml and name it the same as the xml file. Press compile to make sure the compiler can find all your files, so that we are ready to replace the sprites.
Since we're making a 2x1 table, set the x dimension to 2. This object uses flipped sprites, which means only 2 angles are rendered, and the other 2 are flipped. Turn off Render NW and Render SW so we can do the same. Alternatively you can add all 4 rotations to the object's draw groups by pressing the Add Rotations button. This lets you render all 4 rotations and the object will use them. You can find out more on the Adding all 4 rotations to an object page.
In the xml file we can see that this object is using sprite ids 100 and 101. Set the base sprite id to 100 so that we will replace these sprites in the object. Multi tile objects will have consecutive sprite IDs per tile, starting from the base.
Now we can make the model. For this tutorial I will just be using a few cubes. If you need help with the size and position, you can turn on visibilty of the "The Sims Object Bounds" in the object list. This shows the total size of the tiles that your object is taking up. A table in The Sims needs to be about 0.84 units tall.
You can press the "Set resolution and camera" button to set the active camera and image size to The Sims 1 dimensions. Activate the camera and zoom 1:1 to see how your object will look in-game. Press the compass buttons to rotate the camera to that direction. If you want you can parent lights to "The Sims Rotation Origin" object so that they will follow the camera.
TS1 Renderer currently only supports rendering with Cycles. Set the rendering settings how you would like. Turn off the noise threshold and denoising for best results. The sample count does not need to be huge. Use GPU acceleration if you can otherwise rendering will take a long time.
Now press render, split, update xml and compile. Once you know everything is working you can turn on the auto options to do these in sequence automatically. If we set everything up right our object should be done. It will now be available in-game to use. Do not use The Transmogrifiers import function; the compiler produces the updated iff file. If the game or The Transmogrifier can't find your file and isn't showing any changes, check here.
