I've been noticing that an unfortunate number of things converted from TS4 to TS3 aren't converted properly, lacking the ability to recolour and pattern. There are often a bunch of styles of different colours to choose from in these conversions but they're all just different overlay textures. Often times there aren't even any multiplier or mask textures at all. Sometimes none of the patterns are even enabled. I've been having to go through and fix this myself: remove the overlay, create the multipliers and masks, create the clothing specular, enable patterns and match them to the colours on the overlay textures...
I just don't understand. Why aren't people doing this when they convert the items?

You really have the answer in your own post.
You had to put a lot of extra time and effort into making these changes, as TS4 objects do not natively come with these textures. The overlays are directly pulled from TS4's swatches, which is all they have to work with.
Not every person already going out of their way to convert items is familiar with making those additional changes, nor do they necessarily want them if the existing swatches work for their purposes. Nobody owes a single uniform level of conversion, the degree to which it looks and behaves like a TS3 object will vary from creator to creator.

The Create forum is typically for troubleshooting issues during modding / CC creation, not for questioning the modding practices of other creators

From what I understand, the Miscellaneous section is for mod related topics that don't fall into the other categories. Since this is mod-related and doesn't seem to fit in the other categories it felt like the right place for it, but if it should be in a different category then it could be moved there. I'm autistic and not the best at figuring out other people, my social skills are quite lacking, so since I genuinely don't understand the reasons I thought the sims modding community would have an answer.
I've converted items and made my own mods basically from scratch, for TS3 and many other games. I'm well aware of how much time and effort it takes. And how much more of a pain it is when things, like modeling and modding tools, aren't working the way they should. And now I'm having to do other people's work that I didn't sign up for on top of my own work and balance my rl. If the mod were just for personal use it not being the most complete would be whatever. Or if it's something for one person as a request or something and they're chill about it. But when you're making things for the public, or stars forbid, for money then it's only reasonable it should be a properly finished product. The latter especially. If you're a bakery making cakes you make completed cakes, you don't hand your customers a bowl of batter. And I honestly can't wrap my head around it. I can't understand why people are selling things that are only half done. I've been racking my mind trying to puzzle this out for days.

You know people create things they want in their game, and were kind enough to share it in public. However, they do not necessarily have to conform to someone's standards on how they create cc. If you made some changes to these cc according to your liking then good for you, and you can even make another version of the conversion just so it will be how you want it to be. Problem solved.

There's a CC patreon I unsubcribed from for this exact reason.

I have done several 4 to 3 conversions. There are several issues pop up, that can take uite a bit of time. 1st, TS4 is able to use meshes with a much higher poly count than TS3. Too high poly will cause distortions during morphing, usually in other categories than the actual piece being worked on. Tools such as Blender decimate and Balancer N Pro will reduce count, but can create odd faces and edges, which distort how the bones work. To overcome this, I will change tris to quads, and selectively remove rows of edges/ vertices. I have spent up to a week doing this on a mesh, and that is just step one.

As for making rgb/ rgba masks, as @CardinalSims said, you answered your question. It's a PITA. I have done as you said, and again as @aisquared says, people (me included) often make things we want for our own game, and then share. I recently converted Yennefer Black and White outfit. It is... black and white. Only part I separated a bit were the sleeves, but used the overlay for the black. It's what I wanted.

EDIT: Besides, it was probably free, not on a pay site. So, just continue as you have, and make whatever changes you want... Honestly, I also do that often. It is a gateway to YOU becoming a TS3 creator.

Me too! ... and I'm pretty sure the verbosity it affords me drives some people here mad. Maybe you will appreciate that I will overexplain. My interpretation is that every part of the Create forum is for discussing one's own creations, but of course maybe that is not everyone elses interpretation.

What you have is a pet peeve. People are allowed to do illogical things that annoy you and you are allowed to be annoyed by it- but it is rude to blame them for it. Puzzle unpuzzled.
Modding is built upon community and sharing and a fair amount of jankiness that comes with the territory of hacking a game open and rearranging what is inside. I mean, aside from CAW this isn't even a game that has official modding support. It is going to be a little homebrew by design, and the modifications that people share are going to vary wildly because of it. Regardless of the perceived quality or completion, all of it is incredibly generous to share.
It's also all entirely optional. You do not have to fix other creators work, because you don't have to use it. It is no creator's responsibility to cater to your standards, they're just another user just like you- not an employee.

Also, whole other can of worms but people generally have Patreon or something similar just to support them. They aren't charging for the work itself, it's an optional donation. Making CC takes up a lot of time and few people can pour that time into it every day without having an income to support it. Whether what they make is 'worth' the money is not something any of us should be arguing over.
If you're referring to things that are genuinely behind a paywall, then that is the issue long before the content itself comes into question. That's against EA's terms of use plain and simple.

As pointed out by @LadySmoks , what this content was lacking pushed you to learn how to solve it.
Doesn't that sound familiar? Are we not all leeches on the back of EAxis' creation, who found many things about it lacking and became modders to fix it ourselves?
You'll also find that most of us also have pet peeves too, it just isn't our business to try and hold anyone accountable for them. I get pretty frustrated with creators who are primarily Blender artists and only seem to turn their mesh into CC as a way to showcase it, because by Jove there is no hair that ever needs to be 36k polygons. It has a bit of a trickle down effect that less knowledgable users have games full of garbage that isn't actually game-ready, but the responsibility to know what you're modifying your game with is on them too. Those artists don't actually owe their work to be in a certain ideal format because it's hobby work, not DLC- we're just lucky they even shared it to begin with.

Anyway. Verbosity, case and point

Derailing a tiny bit, but I just have to throw in a recommendation for MeshLab. It's free and I barely know how to navigate its interface, but it has the most beautiful mesh simplification filter that I have been using to decimate recently. The option is called Simplification: Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation (with texture).
I just import .obj, apply from Filters > Remeshing, with these settings:

With the target faces changed to whatever you would prefer it gets down to. On certain shapes if the result is 'exploded' you can Alt+R to reload the file and try again with unchecked boxes. Then Export Mesh and leave all the defaults ticked so that the UV is preserved.
I hope that can be of some use to you!

Thank you, I will check it out. Worst to happen is that I cannot get it to do as I want... similar to Jmesh tool. ))) Selective reduction is horribly tedious, but gives great results... Definitely one of those, "Just how badly do I want this" kind of things!



"Leeches" is such a harsh way to put it. I prefer... "Creative expression based on crappy meshes by EA". Although, more than TS4 meshes, it's foreign game mesh conversions from Deviant Art, XPS and MMD that is the real fun! 10 mesh parts totalling 60,000 vertices, with 20 linked textures to fit on a single map... Good times, that!

Ditto to basically everything everyone else said.

Every creator has different tastes, standards, processes, skill sets, and so on when it comes to conversions. Some like including every TS4 swatch and some think it’s unnecessary. Some like matching the colors of TS4 textures to their recolorable versions while others find it tedious and don’t bother. It’s all a matter of personal preference since the vast majority of converters (including myself) create for ourselves first and then share with others in case they may like it too. Some converters do take requests, but again it’s a personal preference.

Additionally, every object is going to have different quirks that make consistency more of a challenge, even for the same creator. Personally, I’ve had several conversions that I’ve tried to make recolorable, but because of the base TS4 textures we have to work with it’s not always doable. For example, some TS4 textures have curves, blurred edges, or diagonal lines that are extremely hard to replicate in a UV mask. So in these cases I will cut my losses and use only the overlays.

Speaking of overlays, when converters only use overlays, there really isn’t much benefit to using a mask or multiplier since they’ll just be covered up anyway. I usually keep them very simple or reuse the overlay texture in the mask and multi tabs to keep the file sizes smaller. Disabling patterns goes along with this since there isn’t much of a point to leaving them enabled if the object itself isn’t recolorable.

And as you said, converting and making mods from scratch is hard and time consuming. A lot of creators are adults with limited time and real life obligations, just like you. If they want a particular object in their game, but they don’t care if it’s recolorable or not, then they’ll likely just use overlays to save time. You don’t have to fix other people’s work if you don’t want to or have time to. It’s not an obligation or something you sign up for when you download someone’s stuff.

Off the top of my head, I don’t know of any TS4 to TS3 converters that are selling their conversions. Some of us do have Patreons for general support or Ko-Fi for one time donations/tips, but those are optional. Most of us are completely free, though.

I 1000% agree with you CardinalSims, LadySmoks, and Twinsimming. In the last year or so, I have really discovered so many great items for other games that I'd love to use in builds I personally want to do and use in TS3. Unfortunately, while I do enjoy it to a degree (bringing something new to TS3 is exciting) converting does take up a lot of time and mental energy. I have many things I made in the last year I still haven't posted for various reasons - main reason being, I made them for myself and sharing is something I decide if I want to do later on. Also, time, or the lack thereof.

But lately...I've been feeling pretty discouraged with sharing things, again for various reasons, but a main one being that I personally choose to not make most of my conversions CASTable. I've grappled with this for a while now, but I have come to the conclusion that I am sharing things I converted in my own free-time for my personal use, completely for free. It does not interest me to fiddle with making a mask and multiplier for every little deco item, because for my use it works as-is. I'm happy to just have the item in TS3. I'm sharing what I made for myself, in case others want it too. So yeah, I guess I really don't want to spend my limited free-time away from work doing extra tedious work that has no use for me personally, for items I may or may not share, and if I do, I'm doing so for free.

This strikes home. It is disappointing to download something cool for the game and find out it is not castable. However, i have spent WAY too much time this weekend attempting to convert something I really wanted from Sims 4 to Sims 3 and it has given me an appreciation of those who make conversions and the complexity of the process.

Other than some fiddling around with some Hogwarts crests in Sims 2, I have done absolutely zero modding in 20+ years of Sims. The few tutorials I have found on line left me more confused than enlightened. Most of them are so old they are using obsolete versions of the software, which doesn’t help. Why should the people who profit by getting us to throw money at Sims 4 do anything to keep software support for Sims 3 and Sims 3 modding? It’s not making them a profit.

I definitely learned it’s not easy. I had my 69th birthday yesterday and my eyes are not what they used to be. I really can’t see the Blender menus, which is a bit ironic that graphics software is so darned hard to see. Why are the screen, the text, and the menus all the same color! In all fairness, I’d probably still be confused if I could read it. I definitely don’t see myself purchasing some of the programs required. Even if I wasn’t on a budget, I wouldn’t use them enough to justify the expense.

I’d love to have this item functional and castable, but at the moment it kind of works if I use MOO and OMSPs, and resign myself to the textures it came in. I have no intention of sharing this seriously flawed item, but I can not find it in me to judge someone who can get their files a whole lot closer to perfect, even if it's not 100%, and wants to share the results.

Do not give up so easily! Hmm... I am currently on Workshop 26, with several a's and b's thrown in, plus 7 or 8 specialty workshops. Each workshop contains 10 to 30 project folders. Workshop 26 has perhaps over 100 folders and sub-folders... and sub-sub-folders (because I'm too lazy to start a new workshop! I would say that 99% of those were abject FAILS, which will never see the light of day! Stuff often goes sideways!!! VERY often. But, you can learn something from almost every fail.

There are newer tutorials, though can be hard to find, since too many browsers are numerically challenged (do not know the difference between 2, 3 and 4 after typing in Sims). With Blender, try to match the version used in a tutorial to the one you use, or at least close. Set ups change.

Blender is free (I use). Milkshape costs, and although some still use it, along with some tools from 20 years ago, you can work around it with Blender and Meshing Tool Kit for 99%, and even that 1%, there are other ways to by-pass MS. @Thornowl did a tutorial on that. Some bake textures in Blender, but I use it more as a meshing tool.

GIMP is free (I use), vs Photoshop, and I think, Paint.net is also free, but have never used it. Many other tools like s3pe, s3oc, TSRW, Meshing Tool Kit, Delphy's geom tools, Smug Tomato's geom tools for Blender, S4 Studio, s4pe, S4CASTools, various plugins for both GIMP and Blender, are all free! I do not know much about TS2 and tools.

Keep trying! Truth is, I downloaded S4 Studio, because of that fireplace you showed, and want to see if I can actually do a 4 to 3 object conversion. )