1. Basic Window Cut Outs
2. The Multi-Tile Cut Out
3. Making Door Cut Outs
4. Making Shaded Cut Outs

1. Basic Window Cut Outs

I have written this tutorial at the request of the fantastic people over at The Banana Republic Revolution :)

First off, let me tell you how much I dislike the name "Cut Out".The term just seems so cheap to me, like an old sleazy motel. Anyway let me continue!

So what is a Cut Out? The name is an accurate description because it is the part of a window (or door) that does "Cut Out" walls. I will be describing all that I know about doors, windows and the sprites that create the Cut Out section of these objects! There are some sprites that get exported that I know nothing about. If someone does and would be kind enough to share that info we would all appreciate it!

So lets get on with it! Did you know you could make a Cut Out from a door as well?Yip! Excited yet? Good! I'll tell you as we go along! I have already explained most of this with the patches of the door Gap/Cut Out problem so I will only briefly explain it here for the sake of the tutorial. All windows AND DOORS have sprite sections that dictate the Cut Out style. When you export doors and windows you normally get a list of folders similar to, this.

These folders contain your Cut Out patterns! Usually the first three folders on the exported list contain the wall Cut Out and the next three contain the sprites, which you see when in build mode and you have the walls down. The first folder is for the smallest zoom (customwall0250), the second folder is the medium zoom (customwall0251) and lastly the third folder is your largest zoom (customwall0252).

It is really easy to work with these sprites and the only nuisance is that even if you choose one zoom all sprites in T-Mog you still have to manually do all the Cut Out sprites by hand!

The one annoying limitation of these Cut Outs is that it mirrors. You cannot actually have separate view Cut Outs!It only has two views. It makes life easier if you don't need four views though!

What these sprites do is tell the object how to chop through walls. Along comes an object in the game and reads its code and says, "Whoa, I'm a window! Now let me look at how I should cut through a wall". It then reads these sprites and cuts a corresponding hole the wall exactly as it instructed. So essentially these sprites are like stencils for the object to use.

Lets look at the largest zoom Cut Out sprite.

That is what the Cut Out of the federal window looks like. It is really simple not so?The white section of the bitmap is what is punched through the wall and the grey is what is left of the wall. By changing the shape of these sprites you can control shape of the Cut Out.

When people typically make Cut Outs, they go over to the sprites of the actual window and blank them out. What this does is display absolutely nothing when the object is placed but it still chops up your wall creating the infamous ... "Cut Out"!

You can literally make ANY shaped Cut Out! All you need is imagination and some patience. My suggestion is to work from any good quality image. Pssst ...Clip Art or something similar can be an excellent choice because you can get standard shapes and patterns and the edges are quite clear for you to work with. Let say we pick a diamond shape for purposes of explanation in this tutorial! My diamond shape!

Paste the image of your new shape into your window Cut Out and skew it to align at the same angle as the top part of the original sprite.

Now you will land up with a slightly fuzzy diamond shape but in the same angles as required by the game. All we are looking for is to get a selection from the white part of the diamond. Using your selection tool play with the tolerances and select the white part until you have it more or less all selected. Now we can actually just delete this layer because there is no further use for it!

With the selection still active make your background colour 100% white and press delete on your keyboard so that the actual selected area is completely white. Fill in the remainder of the white on the original Cut Out that you do not want to form part of the new Cut Out with the exact same grey as the original. Ooooh, the start of our Cut Out!!

What you need to do now is go clean up and straighten out the edges of the white so until you are happy with your Cut Out shape. Remember that you can place the Cut Out anywhere on the area that is grey! The grey area represents the segment of wall you will be placing the Cut Out on. So you can judge it logically and align it to your preference

Stay within the grey area and use pure white and the same shade of grey. This is not like the Alpha channels. The edges must be sharp and not blended. In my limited experimentation with the white areas at the top and bottom of the sprite, fiddling does nothing but wreak havoc! Perhaps someone knows more about manipulating these areas?

Once your first sprite is to your satisfaction you save it of course and then mirror it and save it over the corresponding other view. Your large zoom is now complete! You could repeat this whole exercise for all the other zooms but why bother when there is a shortcut?

Copy your large zoom Cut Out sprite and open up the same view medium zoom sprite. Create a new layer. If you are into keyboard shortcuts then press "Control" and the letter "A" to select the whole image. You could alternatively just do it via the file menu. Making sure that you have your new layer active past the large zoom you just copied into that selection. What it will do is squash the image down into the same size as the medium zoom. This creates a fuzzy edged replica, which you will need to fix up as you did with the larger zoom but it is much easier than doing it the long way. A hint is to trim the top and bottom of the new layer so that the edge of the old layer shows through. This way you only need to fix up the actual new Cut Out area.

Another reason to do it this way is that the Cut Out will be exactly at the same height and shape through out all the zooms! Mirror the sprite and save it over the other medium zoom. Go through the same procedure of copying the medium zoom and pasting it into the smallest zoom.

Phew!All you need to do now is import the window back into the object file with T-Mog!!!

You can now test it out in your game to see how it works. Remember to adjust the description and price as well as the depreciation levels with T-Mog. It is no fun trying to sort through hundreds of wall Cut Outs. Keep in mind the fact that because the object no longer has a graphic sprite, the game shows an empty icon in the windows menu. You WILL land up with lots of blank window icons in the game's windows menu.

You could always make special game icons for your widow Cut Out by reading the "Thumbnail Fix Tutorial" from C&C Enterprises. These guys are great! Go visit their web site if you haven't been there before.

If you have downloaded my love tubs then you will have seen the special game menu icon that has the word "Love" on it over the icon of the tub. To make it really easy to modify these icons you could either use a basic shape (Like a diamond shape I used for this tutorial) to show what the Cut Out is or take a screen shot in the game of it and then reduce it to fit in the icon. If you want to take a screen shot in the game then I suggest you make a one tile wall and use my 100% white floor to flood the whole area. Take a look at this screen shot to see what I mean.

This way it is easy to isolate the actual wall segment and then paste it into your icon. The object's icon could look something like this one if you take some time working on it.

If you have not put off by this tutorial so far, then let me continue onto some more fun stuff.

2. The Multi-Tile Cut Out

This is a short section because you will use most of what you have practised in the previous chapter. I find the easiest way to tackle this is to copy all the sprites into one image and align them so that the tops and bottoms form a straight line as if they were in the game. If your graphics program supports saving selections then after each tile you paste into your master image, save the selection. If it doesn't but supports layers then paste each one on a separate layer.

You need to use one of these techniques so that you can chop up the image back into the original tiles once you are finished making your new Cut Out shape.

Using the same methods described for the single tile object create your newly shaped Cut Out on a new layer. Once you are satisfied then chop them up back into their original tiles and paste them into the objects sprites. Mirror and save each tile, copy into smaller zooms for each tile and just repeat the whole exercise. A Lot of work but otherwise really simple!

3. Making Door Cut Outs

Oooh, everyone has been patiently reading in anticipation of this section hehe!This is tricky but also rather easier than people imagine!

I assume you know how to use Iff Pencil? I certainly hope so because I am not going to explain how the program works. Get Iff Pencil from SimPrograms

We all know what happens to the window style (Cut Out) section in doors when you import with T-Mog. What we are going to do is recreate the wall Cut Out and then import it back into the door object as with the patches I made for the door gap problem.

For simple Cut Outs use my door patches or utilise one of the doors from the Original Sims Game! All you need to do is blank out the actual object sprites, import the door back into the object and apply the right door patch for the door you cloned.Easy huh? That is all it takes.

If you want to make a custom shaped Door Cut Outs then it is a little more work.

I created a little template with two files. One is a window and the other, a radically modified door that will be the final Cut Out. This door has very few sprites and is therefore a lot smaller in file size. Before I go any further I must stress that these objects are templates and not to be used in your game as they are. You will probably run into ID clashes and other problems. I would suggest you keep the original zip file with the templates in case you want to use them again.

The window is simply a surrogate for our window style bitmaps so don't worry about cloning it. Clone my door template and make sure to give it a name you will recall. Export your newly cloned door object and blank out the sprites. Import it back into your object and now you have an invisible door!

Now export the window template object file and modify the window style to your hearts content. When it is complete, import it back into the template window object.

Now open up your modified window template object with Iff Pencil. The window style (Cut Outs) are stored under the "SPR#" section. This is the section that T-Mog ignores when you import doors back into the object. Highlight it so that you can see the contents of the "SPR#" in the right hand pane of the program. To select all the items (and you must do so) click on the top most item. Hold down the shift button and click on the last item at the bottom. Now once all the items are highlighted right click on them and select export.

The options you should tick are as follows ...

Press OK, type a name before the .iff part and press the OK button again. Now open up your newly cloned object from my door template with Iff Pencil. Click on the "Edit" Menu and select import. Use these options ...

There you go!Save your object and you have created your Cut Out! Remember to remove ALL the template objects from your game!!! Now how much easier could that be?I suggest starting out with a one-tile project such as the one I just described! Trust me on this. Once you get this right then move on to multi-tile door Cut Outs!

Some technical data on how this was done

What I did was change the window object file to use the same numbered window styles as the door. So when you export the data from the window into the door it is identical and the door knows no different!

To try this out for yourself you need to click on the OBJD section and change each tile of the object to reflect the new "Custom wall style ID #".

These are the numbers in the "SPR#" section.

This might appear confusing but it isn't that difficult. It is more difficult to try and explain that it is to figure out!

All of this work is really so we can edit the window style bitmaps and somehow get them back into the door object. While it is easy with windows, T-Mog strips this out of doors during cloning and the export/import process.

One can also use this system to create custom doors with odd shaped Cut Outs. My advice is to just experiment till it works. That is all I do hehe!

4. Making Shaded Cut Outs

Those of you that were regulars on Soul Bazaar and now The Banana Republic Revolution would have seen the windows I made for The Hassan II mosque. I personally don't really like the typical Cut Outs because of the fact that it makes the walls look paper thin.

What I did with the Hassan II windows was create an actual window to go over the Cut Out. Let me use a typical game window to illustrate how I did it. This is the window style for the plate glass window.

Now look at the original window sprite. What you need to do is create a pseudo depth.Like this!

If you make the new window shading a transparent object, it will blend up against your wallpaper and create the depth. This type of shading does not work well with patterned or striped wallpaper. You also need to adjust the Cut Out so that the section shaded is on the wall and not cut away.

Right that is all for now. Make me some new Cut Outs!