I'd like to ask these questions at Sims4Studio, but the registration process there has not worked for me and I see no way to contact the mods for help in registration. So anyway, I'm asking the questions here.

I understand that the normals and speculars can be imported either as .dds or as .png: I have only paint.net, which doesn't do .dds, so I'm saving in .png.

1. Most people when they talk about normals are talking about CAS parts, and they go through a rigamarole of exporting their diffuse texture to a program that renders it in a bunch of odd colors which they then convert back to black and white. But the image that produces is very different from the kind of image I'm seeing for the walls (very dark for one, and opaque for another). I can produce a wall normal that looks like the ones from the game by adjusting for black and white, brightness/contrast, & a little blur to reduce the effect of wood graining on the normal (I don't want the wood to look like it's all dried out and falling apart). Is this okay? It looks okay.

2. Transparency! The normals I'm looking at from the game are transparent. I looked at layer properties, though, and paint.net thinks they are at maximum opacity. Of course I want to save the wall normals in the correct transparency, so do I just eyeball it and set the transparency so it looks the same? I tried changing the blend mode but that does nothing. I thought I used to have in the old Paintshop before it was nerfed a way to save an image as a transparent something,. What should I be doing here?

3. As to the specular: this governs shine, correct? I see that some maxis walls have a completely black specular, which I guess would make them a completely matte wall. Since part of the walls I'm working on now is polished wood, wood that mean I should have those areas of the specular image be lighter in color--say a charcoal grey rather than an utter black?

Thank you for reading my anxious questions.

Hi,

You can download GIMP for free.  Gimp has DDS. 

https://www.gimp.org/

Sorry.  I can't help you with paint.net.  I don't use that software.  Most transparencies are set at varying percentages of gray on the alpha channel.

I don't think the questions I'm asking are about the image editing program.

I don't think transparency makes any sense in a normal map. Normal maps are used to create the appearance of bumpiness without having to actually use polygon count on the effect. If it appears "transparent", it's probably just an artifact of an unused alpha channel.


Yes. Some people are still using "painted shine" baked directly into the texture. This tends to look good in static images, but appears absolutely awful in motion. A dead giveaway of a painted shine offender is if they depict multiple swatches of the item or clothing in use, and despite the sim being posed differently or the camera is at a different angle, the painted shine appears in exactly the same place.

TS4 and TS3 use two-channel tangent space normals.

In short, the blue-purple gradient type maps are using the three RGB channels to represent 3D coordinates. To save texture space, computers can actually use just two channels and interpret the third.
Maxis put the same data in the RGB channels, which creates a greyscale image. They put the second set of data in the alpha channel.
What's then happening is that .png interprets alpha channels as transparency, which is what the alpha is used for on other types of textures.

It's quite fiddly to work with it that way, but not of much concern if you're making small edits to a reused map and especially if you're already content with how it looks. You're just losing access to previewing that channel properly.
That said, Paint NET should actually have dds support built-in in the latest version. There are definitely plugins, if not.
GIMP wasn't a bad suggestion, it's free and also has dds support out-of-the-box. If you're going to be working with textures a lot, it's worth considering.

As for speculars, if the specular is plain black then lightening it will effectively be like raising a 'glossiness' slider for the texture with black being no gloss and white being as glossy as possible.
For more depth of detail, you can use the diffuse texture instead- by desaturating it, then adjusting the shadows and highlights (not sure if Paint NET has an equivalent, but in Photoshop and GIMP something called a Levels adjustment is used for this). That creates a very dark version of the diffuse, where the amount of shine varies to match the original image.
You can always experiment- make many versions of a texture, and check how they look ingame

(Though I'm seeing now that this thread is from 2020... I sure hope you figured out your wall queries by now )