Walls....everybody loves walls. Which is probably why we hang stuph all over them...trying to protect them, yeah. Anyway, a good lookin' wall is, well, a good lookin' wall. Even though most of us keep out walls down in the sims except when installing a new window or as background when snapping a nudie photo of our sims, its always nice to know they're there. For the most part, walls are pretty easy, in some ways easier than floors, some ways tougher....(*shurg*). Anyway, as they said in the "Cask of Amontiado"...let's get wallin'.

Step 1: Open up the trusty paint program and create a new image. The specs for walls are 128 pixel width by 240 pixel height. You can make it any size, but note that HomeCrafter will CROP the image, not resize it, so if its bigger you'll be losing wall space. As with floors, best I can tell is that HC uses 72 ppi, though it doesn't seem to make much difference. Again, I usually work in 75ppi out of habit....HomeCrafter will take care of the details for ya.

Step 2: Decide what kind of wall you're going for....exterior? interior? painted? varnished? plaster? or that cheap wood stuph your dad redid the basement in back in the 70s? Whatever....totally up to you. Keep in mind the advice about tiling in the floors tutorial, except, remember that you only need to match the right and left sides in this case....the tops and bottoms of the images can pretty much do whatever they want. For the sake of this example, I'm gonna do a sort of wood base with half of it painted in a cream paint (or oatmeal...eggshell...sandy beach, whatever the fuck you wanna call it). First thing that I usually do is to block out the basic colors....like.....so....

Done?? Ummm....no. Ok since I said I wanted wood, I'm gonna add some "grain" effects to the wood and stuph...

Ok....not perfect but good enough for government wood. Wood can actually be fairly difficult to simulate...my usual method is to speckle the "wood" with the lighten and darken tools, and the smudge it in til it looks good. Then I just added a light ripple effect to give it a bit of pattern. Fool around with the effects on your draw program, and you should be able to come up with some interesting effects. Ok, the final thing I'm going to do is add some "depth" to the image....define the upper cornice, a baseboard, and a middle panel.

Again, the lighten and darken tools are my best friends in the whole wide world. Try to think generally about how light's going to effect the object...simple stuph like there should be a bit of shadow towards the floor and ceiling, other than that, just sort of wing it, keep what looks good, undo what doesn't. (*shurg*) simple no? Anyway, to finish my walls off, I generally do a very light blur over the entire image to make all of the colors blend a touch more effectively. Pretty much a matter of personal taste. Since my sims just painted the house, I'm going to leave the painted part pretty clean. If you want to create "aging" add some stains, smudge it around, whatever you want. Basically it all comes down to how comfortable you are with the effects on your paint program. Keep playing with it 'til you like what you see.

Step 3: Ok, save your image. Just like with floors, you may run into some crankiness from HomeCrafter about 256 colors, but maybe not. (*shurg*) just do whatever HomeCrafter tells ya to do and it should go ok. The general name convention for walls is xyz_Wall.bmp, but like with floors, call it whatever you want.

Step 4: Heat up ol' HomeCrafter and get to converting. First things first....make sure the "wall" button is selected so that HomeCrafter knows what to expect.

Next import your wall image.....hit the import image button and your wall should show up in the preview window.

Got it? Good good. Now go nuts and cover up the sample house with your new walls. Zoom in and out and see if its what you were looking for. Make sure you're not getting any icky tiling effects if you didn't want them (conversely, make sure you're getting way cool tiling effects if that's what you were going for).

Truly walls to TV to!! Ok, next to last step is to add your wall details, price, name, and description (see my rant on the floors tutorial if you're considering skipping this step).

As with floors, any price from 1-99 simoleans is allowed, and like floors, $5-$15 is the general range. Got it? Good.

Final step is to hit the "export" button.

HomeCrafter should default to saving the wall to your "the sims/game data/walls" directory. You can save it anywhere you want, but its got to be in this directory for it to work in your game. Heat up your game, go nuts with your new walls, and watch as all the little sim brats cover your walls with their smudgy sim fingerprints.

Enjoy!!







Any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me here.