So a long time ago I played Sims 3 nearly every day! Then, the Sims 4 came out, I tried it, hated it, and kept playing Sims 3 for several more years before finally dropping the series as a whole except for the occasional quick install of Sims 4 to build some cool houses and uninstall it again.

Well, 4 years ago, when I was still actively playing Sims 3, I posted a WCIF thread looking for doors and windows of a very specific, yet very generic style found in almost every house in the US built since World War 2. The search came up mostly empty in terms of filling these specific requirements, but did yield some interesting finds that I ended up using for a collection of houses. I miss these houses, and I miss this game!

Anyway, I posted looking for these windows because I had absolutely no idea how make them myself, or how to put them into the game, which ended up leading me to searching for guides on how to import models into The Sims 3 (though this time with a collection of signs I had made for a different game and wanted to use in my own Sims 3 world). It went utterly nowhere and those signs never seen the light of day in my world.

Now, fast-forward to just this last Wednesday (September 25th) and I began the search that started it all again, but now for Sims 4 (because a friend of mine got me into it to build houses, again), which also came up empty, literally. No one responded, though I didn't give them much time before I may have sort-of accidentally made my own mod to solve the lack of the proper doors and windows!


I don't know if it's the fact that a nice program called Sims4Studio exists, or that I've learned a LOT about Blender and UV mapping because of a really stupid project for Stormworks two years back, or both, but work on this little happy accident has been going smoothly. I have made a door, a window, and blinds for that window, and as soon as I get shading fixed, I will be able to make several sizes of this window in minutes!

Now, my question here is, how could I go about porting these to Sims 3? What programs will I need, what will I need to do with them, and what will need to change (and how do I change it) for these to work in Sims 3? If I can figure out how to get these in Sims 3, that will solve one of my two main problems that I even CAN solve: the lack of proper doors and windows for my build style. The other problem I can solve will likely be relatively easy this time around, which is those darn signs (speaking of, if I do make signs for Sims 3, I need to find a Simlish font to write my signs with, since the US just loves putting paragraphs of text onto road signs). The third problem I have (well first problem, and one I don't think I can solve) is performance. From what I recall, Sims 3 is a 32bit game and can only use up to 4 GB of RAM. Has anyone ever found a way around this and to allow the game to be more efficient with the now 32 GB I have in my current PC (the PC I had back then only had 8)?

If I can do this, I plan to finish my current mod on Sims 4 in about a week, get it uploaded for my friend to play with, then uninstall the game and reinstall Sims 3.

More or less, once you have exported the meshes from whatever you are converting from (be it TS4 or any other source) you can basically follow any regular tutorial on how to create the item from scratch.
Many are found here: https://modthesims.info/wiki.php?ti...Object_Creation
And here's a window specific one: https://sims3tutorialhub.tumblr.com...s-tutorial-time

The only conversion specific thing that is likely to come up involves making sure the textures are appropriate for what TS3 supports. That's usually one greyscale texture map for all parts, of square resolution (ie 512px, 1024px), in .dds format- which may require some manual rearranging of UV maps and/or the texture itself. When in doubt, mimic whatever format and resolution EA used on the object you plan to use as a base.
You can use the original TS4 colour textures as overlays or choose to make the object recolourable with Create a Style, it's up to you.

The general toolset would be:
S3PE
TSRW (most tutorials written around this, but its technically possible to make things without it)
Blender - sometimes multiple versions of it.
Milkshape 1.8.5 (Unfortunate requirement for most objects, as the object plugins for Blender are very old- but 99% of the time you only need it as a conversion tool between mesh formats, any tutorial steps actually related to meshing can and should be skipped in favour of Blender)
S3OC (optional cloning tool, often creates a cleaner clone than TSRW's inbuilt feature- the resulting package can still be used in TSRW afterwards)
Any image editor that supports .dds (GIMP or Photoshop)

But each tutorial should cover what they used specifically, anyway.
Worth knowing that a lot of the object creation documentation is quite old- still useful, still accurate, but there may simply be easier or more straightforward methods out there that just never got the tutorial treatment. Feel free to ask on the forums how to accomplish any steps you have trouble with, and you may find that some of us have alternatives.

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As for performance, the short answer is generally no.
TS3 actually doesn't release memory properly- causing it to have a real RAM limit of around 2.8GB, which is the point where it will either stop saving (Error 12) or crash when the limit is reached. This is more or less a flaw all frequent players of the game live with and manage with good save and modding practices. (See here.)

Longer answer, there are a few tricks and tools out there that involve tampering with ini files, plugins, external programs and the like with mixed success for giving the game a bit more to work with. To be taken with a grain of salt, as they're often voodoo / misinformation.
A popular new one is DXVK, which allows the game to use as much VRAM as you want to allocate. Has some good benefits, but players should always keep in mind that these things should be considered experimental and aren't perfectly documented what effects they're guaranteed to have (both good and bad) yet. Your mileage may vary, and graphical oddities / incompatibilities with mods can and do arise with these things.

With just a few precautions, the game fares pretty well despite that limitation.

@bobgrey1997 Just a note... Another person had mentioned a newer .wso plugin for Blender, that comes with new versions of TSRW. 2.8x and up. I got it, and tried it, but I cannot get it to work properly. I am not able to paint bones (joints), for direct export, then import to TSRW. I also get an error message when trying to import that .wso to Milkshape.

Point is, it might be me! Often is. You may have better success with using that plugin, if you want to try that. Otherwise, yup, Milkshape, and the rest of what @CardinalSims wrote.

If it is any consolation, I personally find Milkshape to be much easier to use than Blender. Works a lot better with the way my brain does - both initially look intimidating, but Milkshape feels much more calming to work with with it's very basic old-school interface versus Blender's insane amount of toggles, buttons, and options. Blender is much more powerful, but it stresses me out! Not to mention there are so many versions of it that I have found troubleshooting issues with it to be cumbersome as many different versions of Blender look entirely different. Milkshape stayed mostly the same until it was abandoned. I use it a lot for both deco and functional items - importing .wsos to examine and reverse engineer joint assignments like EA did it is one of the best ways to get bone assignments you need!

I used to be scared of Blender, and that was a big part of my failed modding in the past. However, a really stupid idea I had for a game called Stormworks had me learning quite advanced Blender tools. It also taught me scripting and programming. Now, I am quite comfortable with basic modeling in Blender. I've spent a total of maybe a couple hours modeling the both the main and LOD meshes of two sizes of windows with both shadow meshes for each the normal and LOD, and a main and shadow mesh for two sizes of blinds, and UV mapping and making all of the various textures. I then spend 3 days learning how Sims 4's shenanigans work to actually get them to render correctly.

This will be my main issue bringing these into Sims 3. Even if I have to build entirely new models because of how Sims 3 renders, I can do that quite easily in Blender. I just need to get them to actually work in the game.

I think my biggest concern, in terms of workflow, will be the textures. Sims 3 requires, if I understand correctly, BC3 DXT5 DDS textures. Now, I have zero clue what those designations mean, but I do have a plugin in Paint.Net (my preferred image editor) that can export in that format. It's the DDS export settings that always confuse the crap out of me.

As long as the textures are in .dds format, the game is generally happy with them- there are just some guidelines (rather than strict rules) many follow as to what compression to use in what context.

DXT5 is commonly used for the main diffuse texture. This format supports alpha transparency and is the highest quality*.
DXT1 is commonly used on the specular (shine) and mask (recolour channels) textures, which don't need to be transparent. But if you find detail is lost from the lowest quality compression, it's fine to use DXT3 or DXT5 to compromise on file size and quality.

When starting out, these two options will serve you well.
You'll need to tick 'Generate Mip Maps', as they're an important benefit of the .dds format, but the rest looks good to go on default.
GIMP is a free option that supports DDS out of the box, and Photoshop can support it with a plugin- just in case they don't look quite right with Paint net.

There are some advanced usage cases when you're more familiar with it.
*Like a note on quality, image editors export in inferior quality to converting with Nvidia's DDS Utilities. It's even possible to use uncompressed .dds for lossless quality.
But the difference is minimal depending on the texture itself, so the types of compression noted are fine to rely on in 99% of projects

Required is using standard sizes and .dds format. Most common size is 1024 x 1024, but that varies, especially with objects. Dxt5 is common for multipliers, overlays and stencils, and required for rgba masks. If a mask is rgb, and using squares with no real detail, I and some others will use dxt1. Dxt1 can be used for speculars. I have also used dxt1 for multipliers when the overlay is creating most of the detail. Because .dds will leave artifacts, or lose some finer details, on rare occassion, I will make overlays or multipliers uncompressed.

I use GIMP, so the inner workings of paint.net are foreign to me. That said, dxt compression for .dds is going to be the same. Also, check the box to generate mipmaps.