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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 25th Jun 2017 at 11:23 PM Last edited by Londondreary : 26th Jun 2017 at 2:04 AM.
Default Resizing textures from .package
One of the issues I've noticed with several clothing mods, is that their file size is huge. One offender is 17MB for a single corset, which is a bit...Whew. I'm not running a RX 580, so I plan on toning some of the textures down in size.

Following this tutorial, on replacing the texture of a painting with s3pe, it says that the dimensions are to stay the exact same. Is this due to some internal data in the .package file? What would I need to change once I've resized the .dds texture?

As for resizing textures 'n' all that, I've got that covered. Made a bunch of mods for Bethesda's games, so this isn't completely new territory.

Edit: After a bit of looking around, I found a .net API for Sims 3 packages; S3PI. The documentation is non-existant, sadly, but it seems to have the functionality I'm looking for: extracting and importing .dds files from/into a .package mod.

Is there some documentation kicking around, that wasn't shown on it's main site? I can handle some simple C#, and I actually made the same sort of program for Fallout 4 (a wrapper for Texconv.exe). But if the API has no docs...
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#2 Old 26th Jun 2017 at 12:21 PM
You might want to take a look at Texture Tweaker It is my understanding that with a painting the importance of keeping the texture the same size has more to do with making sure that the image portion of the painting stays completely on the front while the back stays on the back. And that tutorial was made before Peter and Inge made Texture Tweaker simplify things.

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Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 27th Jun 2017 at 11:36 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Ghost sdoj
You might want to take a look at Texture Tweaker It is my understanding that with a painting the importance of keeping the texture the same size has more to do with making sure that the image portion of the painting stays completely on the front while the back stays on the back. And that tutorial was made before Peter and Inge made Texture Tweaker simplify things.


Good find, I remember looking around for TT3 and not being able to find it. Wrote it off as some outdated predecessor to S3PE, but nope.

It's odd. There are some packages that are a couple hundred KB in size, with three 1024x1024 textures, and others that have three 1024x1024 textures but are several MB. Is there some sort of bug in TT3 that makes it think all textures are 1024x1024 in size?
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#4 Old 30th Jun 2017 at 7:41 PM
It's not a bug, it's actually a required thing they added to it, which I understand why they did. the reason why some textures could end up being a hundred KB is due to the fact that some people export the wrong files as a DXT5, while really, it shouldn't. DXT5 exporting is actually only required when a texture has this white and black blocky background(aka transparent) Then, you wanna use DXT5. So in tihs case that would be the overlay, stencil, bump map/normals and the multiplier. The DXT1 should be for the Specular map, mask (IF you used 3 channels, 4 should be a DXT5). So. Usually the textures should get to at least a hundred kbs or 1-2mb. Which is okay! At least, the way they're getting compressed is the reason why they're getting bigger. Kinda the same like the difference between JPEGs and PNG

Now let's get to the reason WHY keeping everything the same size is so important

So, say your multiplier is 1024x1024, and you make your specular map, let's say... 512x512, either your multiplier will be resized IN-game to 512x512 (Thus, being really blurry) OR which has happened to me before, a part of you sim's body will turn all shiny because there's no specular map applied to that area due to the size of it. Or that part would turn black. this is just not the specular map and the multiplier, but every texture you're using. Textures will get resized to a certain size by the game already if you didn't do them properly, so I guess that makes it 2 reasons why TT3 has this particular function

For the corset you took as example, it's not just the textures playing a role in there (IF the textures are all 1024x1024 of course, instead of higher. If they did... well it will seriously get the game to lag). it could also be the polycount on the mesh. When something's higher than 7k-10k, things will get quite huge in size, even for a OBJ file. I've had that with Zbrush before where I ended up with a 2 GB mesh due to polycounts. (Of course that was just for a personal project )

Do keep in mind that EA doesn't really use scripts for clothing, besides the blending GEOMs and layering the textures as you might have seen in the existing scripts . In fact it's an entirely separated thing from actually creating clothing. The process is basically: Create mesh>Make it sims compatible in Milkshape (Like removing seams, etc)> use meshtoolkit to add the bones and morphs>Create the textures needed>Turn it into a readable TS3 package, which CTU and TSRW will do themselves, aaand then just simply test it

But for someone who meshes things for Skyrim before, I understand why TS3 is a whole different area for you, and actually, it's a very easy but limited way of modding (Whenever we're speaking of CASparts of course )

By the way! Here's a link to the latest S3PE: https://sourceforge.net/projects/si...852.7z/download

Let me know if you've got some questions!
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 15th Jul 2017 at 2:35 AM
It seems I was wrong; the issue is not in the size of the textures. After poking around the .package files, and being informed by users on LoversLab, there are two main reasons for filesize bloat:

1. Duplicate textures
2. Uncompressed records

#1 Is the biggest culprit, typically a result of mods having separate .package files for Teen/Adult/Elder, despite using the exact same texture (and mesh?), with S3PE not detecting & deleting duplicate textures, & changing the GEOM objects to point to the "original" (i.e, last remaining) duplicate texture. I've another thread created that asks about resolving that, so I ought to ask on there instead.

Thanks for the help so far man.
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