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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 26th Jul 2017 at 6:23 PM
Default My custom terrain paint texture keeps disappearing.
I am working on my second world and I am having a problem. Most of the textures being used for it are custom textures, well one of the most critical textures for this world won't stay put when I place it. It will look fine until I start working on something else or leave the terrain paint.
If I start painting again it will show up, but once I stop it has about a 7/10 chance of disappearing again. The same thing happens if I edit the surrounding terrain, it appears briefly and then disappears again.

How the terrain looks when the textures are correct:

After switching to the sculpt tab:

The texture is a dds saved with a DXT5 compression.

I am using the 1.67 version of Sims 3 and CAW and I am using the steam version on Windows 7.
The world I'm working in is a large world using 33 textures, 31 of which are custom, with some of the customs being recolors of base CAW textures.

I have tried the following:
Restarted world with half the custom textures I had before
Re-sizing large HD textures to easy strain on CAW
Saving the texture with a different compression
Saving while the texture was visible (unsuccessful, texture was gone when re-loading)
Re-sizing the texture to make it smaller
Re-saving the texture to make sure I had used the write format
Adding a new layer with the same texture to see if maybe it was just a bad layer
clearing caches and featured items folder from the CAW folder
Re-naming the mods folder to keep CAW from reading it
Clearing caches after re-naming mods folder
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retired moderator
#2 Old 26th Jul 2017 at 7:05 PM
The only thing I can think of that you haven't tried, is to delete the _KEY resource from the world file.

Be sure to backup first!

http://www.modthesims.info/showpost...8&postcount=138
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#3 Old 26th Jul 2017 at 8:13 PM
Thank you for the response, unforunatley it didn't seem to help. The only solution I have found that kind of works is to replace a texture i don't care about as strongly that is higher up in the list.

Is it possible that the quantity of the textures is the problem?
e3 d3 Ne2 Nd2 Nb3 Ng3
retired moderator
#4 Old 27th Jul 2017 at 6:32 PM
How many textures do you have per chunk? The chunk boundaries turn red if you have more than the recommended amount (8).
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#5 Old 28th Jul 2017 at 9:17 PM
Well, all the edges turned red so I'm assuming that's part of the problem ^^".
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retired moderator
#6 Old 29th Jul 2017 at 10:39 AM
I'm unaware of an upper limit for the total number of terrrain paints used in a world, but the game might have a problem rendering too many in a chunk, especially if you are layering them.
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#7 Old 31st Jul 2017 at 6:33 AM
I wonder if that is it. I did eventually pull the terrain painting together by removing the paints so I had only 32, I'm not sure if it's the amount, or just that I have too many paints + chunk but it seems to be good now and I'm very happy with it. Thank you for the tip on chunks, I'll keep that in mind for future projects.
dodgy builder
#8 Old 31st Jul 2017 at 8:43 AM
You have 32 textures? I thought I used many on Stranda, but I probably had like 16 or something.
Test Subject
#9 Old 31st Jul 2017 at 12:38 PM
I use 39 textures for my world but only max 8 per chunk. Works just fine.
When I used more than 8, there been problems of varying kinds ...
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#10 Old 2nd Aug 2017 at 10:58 AM
@Eva-Lulu Just out of curiosity, what issues have you had by going over 8 per chunk?
Test Subject
#11 Old 2nd Aug 2017 at 11:08 PM
Quote: Originally posted by LemonyLin
@Eva-Lulu Just out of curiosity, what issues have you had by going over 8 per chunk?


What happen when I used more than 8 textures per chunk has been that a texture layer has disappeared and sometimes it been replaced by another of the texture layers in the Caw list. And when i erase layers over 8 in a chunk caw often crash. (The only time it crashes for me) There have probably been other problems, too, which I have happily forgotten.

I'm sure you can have more than 8 textures per chunk without a problem (many cc worlds have it) but if you have as many as 39 ... or 33 ... it's asking for trouble.
Nowadays I am extremely careful with my texture. I only have the ones I use in the SourcsTexture folder. The rest in another folder somewhere. I name the folder textures in the order they appear in the list in caw with numbers ( 01_el, 02_el, 02_eI, etc.) so it's easy to keep order. I sometimes empty the folder LocalWork so no unnecessary textures lie there. Have you emptied the LocalWork folder? Did not see that you mentioned it.
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#12 Old 6th Aug 2017 at 8:44 PM
@Eva-Lulu Thanks so much for the reply. I'm pretty sure that was my problem then. The map size was teeny tiny so have so many textures in such a small space was probably exactly what did it.

Also, no. I didn't empty the Localwork folder. What does it do?
Test Subject
#13 Old 6th Aug 2017 at 11:31 PM
The LocalWork folder is a catch for your textures, it fills up with all textures you have tried.
Could be a god ide to clear it. It vill regenerate when you start CAW next time.
Documents\ Electronic Arts\ The Sims 3 Create A World Tool\ UserToolData\ LocalWork.

Have your textures stopped disappearing ?
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#14 Old 10th Aug 2017 at 4:45 PM
@Eva-Lulu Yes, I started being more careful with texture placement and things seem to be humming along fine now.
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