Illuminating Sprites with Iffpencil2
A BIT OF BACKGROUND:
In the sims the lighting is a bit strange. It does not actually shine on objects but will on floors (flooring, not terrain) and walls. Anyone who's ever made a courtyard and painstakingly added lights around for a wonderful nighttime effect knows exactly what I mean. Objects have two states ... they are in the dark (and become dark to reflect that) or in the light (and become highlighted to reflect that). Light can be the "sun" in the daytime or a well-lit room at any time.
It's all very logical for the most part but some things in the game are meant to seem like a light source (without actually behaving like one) and it's always a bit odd to see those things go dark. This tutorial fixes that problem.
TOOLS WE'LL BE USING
Instructions for achieving the same effect with IffSnooper can be found in the ***Mac Hacking Tutorial***
- An object to work on ;)
- Transmogrifier
- IffPencil2
- A paint/graphics program for editing sprites (bmps)
CHOOSING OUR OBJECT:
We are going to use everyone's favorite, the "rave" table that came with The Sims' House Party expansion. It's perfect for our purposes:
- It has fairly obvious bits that are meant to be lights.
- Those bits are nice straight lines and easy to work with.
- The table is a single tiled object with a single rotation-view so has a single sprite per zoom. This is perfect for tutorial purposes, as even with this bare bones minimum number of sprites you'll be making adjustments to 9 sprites. Thanks to point 2 up there they are easy adjustments but we still don't want you getting too distracted from the tutorial, do we? You can bury yourself under sprites on another project J
You can, obviously, choose to work on an object other than our rave table but don't say I don't warn you!
As this technique is not expansion-pack dependant I'm going to supply a "no-ep" version of the table so anyone without expansion packs would like to have a go at this: Download TS-TABLERAVE.IFF
Continue to next page: Start with IffPencil2