Darq, HP has a bedding graphics file somewhere on MTS2 - its in layers so you can fiddle with it. And might actually be more adaptable than Lucas', though I've not played with it as much myself.
Hm... I'll have to try to hunt that down, thanks for the suggestion!
Darqstar -
I definitely wouldn't consider walls and floors amateur. MTS2's tutorials say you should start with that for CC making as a beginner, but I think adding logos to t-shirts or making painting recolors is the easiest stuff to start with.
Recolors can be scary because you have to open SimPE.
The thing with walls and floors is that they can be a simple or hard as anyone wants them. Thus, they can talk a lot of time and talent or very little time and talent. Walls especially. You can throw a flood fill color on a wall and it really doesn't look bad in the game. Some of my favorite walls are simple colored walls. Floors, it's a little harder to just throw a color down, but I've seen people just add a little "noise" and call it "Carpet." But, on the other hand, if you draw out your texture, or work in layers, or hand draw your trim, then the wall is going to be more complicated. Some people don't realize this, they think that if you can make one wall easily, you can make any wall easily.
Like this wall:
This wall took me about four hours to make, because I started with just a picture of a slab of wood and did the rest by shading. The trim on the bottom part was a pain in the ass, and involved a lot of breaking down into one pixel at a time and doing formulas and math. Most people probably can't tell how much time it took me, or even care. But I'm still proud of that wall and
I know that it shows the best I can do. And if one person is using it and loves it and thinks it added something nice to their game, then I'm happy.
The floor I made to match it I like even better:
Yes, I know, I'm showing off, I admit it. But that was the first time I ever "carved" up different pieces of wood and then put them together so they would make that floor. Ironically, I also made a simple "straight floorboard" version too, that took me all of about five minutes to make. Guess which one got more downloads?
Anyway, I did a Secret Santa thing on LJ and one of the parts of my present was wallpaper. My first attempt took two hours and I ended up trashing it. (I had a high-res, tileable texture. I just could not get it to be perfectly seamless!) I was laughing a bit to myself that I can paint a decent texture from scratch, but I couldn't crop and warp one image properly. XD I eventually figured out, but I did a LOT of copy pasting and clone tool work in the end on those things, so I was probably still doing something the hard way.
Hm... I'm curious now, was size the issue of it tiling correctly? Or just aligning it to come out right? I'm always interested in other people's wall/floor making experiences, because very few people seem to actually care about how easy or difficult it is to make walls. Or else they lie, like certain people at TSR who claim to hand paint all her walls/floors yet uses patterns I've seen elsewhere.
I admire that you can work with the cloning tool. I still don't know how that one works!
I love wood and tile floors. Make as much as you want, I will probably use it all!
*laughs* I've been thinking about it. I still think I want to do some recolors on some Maxis stuff and make a bathroom that goes with the peach walls and floor. That's usually how I end up making room sets, I make a wall or a floor and start designing the room around it.