I was working on a set of gold stairs, and I went through the whole extracting process and converted the stairs into .obj files for maya through milkshape. In maya, I changed the material shading of the stairs to blinn, and I was sure this would give me the look I wanted for silver or gold stairs, but unfortunately, the blinn does not shows in game.

Is there a different file I should be editing. Right now I am stuck with a gradient for the gold look, and it's not what I wanted

Hopefully someone can decipher what I am saying and help out!

Changes you make to materials in Maya or MilkShape are not a part of the mesh export.

You mean to say that, the material properties I apply to the mesh in the program are basically lost through the exporting and re-importing process?

If that is the case, how would I go about applying a blinn or reflectivity to the mesh?

To change the materials, which is the color, shine and so on, from those used in the original game object requires that the MATD chunks be modified. This has only been possible since I release V0.15 of the ObjTool yesterday.

Documentation is sparse, tutorials non-existant at this time. I do have a demonstration of the power of this technique shown here.

<* Wes *>

I'm not sure what exports with stairs, so this may be unhelpful:

I've been spending time playing with walls, there are 4 .dds that come with a walls. One divides the channels, one is a specular, one's a diffuse map and the last a height map (I think) You may have better luck playing with the diffuse or specular maps, if it has them.

I'll admit to knowing nothing about actual meshing, I'm strictly textures at the moment... but if what you are doing in milkshape doesn't work, those textures might be a place to look.

I'm currently trying out wes's updated objtool, th egame is loading...we'll see if the edited MATD parameters show up

I had a "slight" problem when testing the object. I cloned the atomic age stairs, extracted the modl and mlod files via s3pe, used your updated tool to decompile the model files. Then I open the mtlsrc file for each file and changed only the shader name, I changed it to phong.

When I tested this package in game not only did the phong not show up on the stairs, but also the stairs were tilted and would not "loop" properly.

I noticed that if I didn't add a custom texture to the stairs and kept the default stone texture of the stairs, the phong shows up. If I add in custom textures that's when the stairs go bad.

I tried doing the reverse, uploading the textures, saving the package, s3oc'ing it, then opening the package with S3PE again and importing the edited model files but to no avail...it seems the two are not compatible.

Any ideas??

I don't know how soon I could look at this. I know from prior reports that the stairs are not recolorable, and have a shader named Stairs. If there is a shader specially designed for the stairs, then that is probably why they don't texture properly with teh Phong shader.

While I only posted the example of changing the Shader, all the used parameters of teh Material Definition are exposed, items like Shininess, Emission and Reflective. While parameters not designed into the shader will likely have no effect on rendering, modifying the values of some of the parameters that are used should make some changes. Material Definitions from other objects more like what you are designing to should provide some ideas on how the parameters affect display.

<* Wes *>

It is a strange problem. I have made a few stair recolors just fine without fiddling with the MATD'S. Also, the phong works on the cloned stairs package as long I keep the stairs default texture map. When I change both the MATD and the IMG files located in the package file, the stairs show the phong and the new texture in game, but the stairs are really warped and go sideways...I'll have to take a screenshot or two and send you the package sometime so you can see.

I would like to see the wonky one, to see if I can learn something from it. It may or may not be fixable, but it would be nice to learn not only what we can do, but what doesn't work.

<* Wes *>

Well, it seems the phong doesn't even work on a non re-textured stair clone anymore. Earlier I was able to see the phong on the stairs but now, not only are they screwy, but they also don't show the phong. I must have done something wrong, I am really tired at this point.

Anways, I have the package attached here, I deleted the last attempts where I changed the texture, so this one doesn't even have the texture changed, but if you try and work with it a bit, eventually if you even get the phong to work on the stairs, you might even be able to crack the case and get the texture AND the phong working together.

Thanks for posting it. I sometimes feel like a coroner, always dissecting dead stuff.

Truly, I cannot test every possible object in the game before releasing tools. If I did that, I would have all the mods done by myself... that wouldn't be fair, and by then everyone else would be playing Sims 4.

Obviously, if you ran into trouble, then there is something different about the way stairs work, as opposed to making ghost stereos. I won't promise I can fix your problem, but I will be looking at it.

<* Wes *>

Thank you very much for looking into this. I hope there is a way around because the game has some pretty bland (and limited) stair options.

I was so tired and frustrated yesterday after editing package, running game, testing stairs in game, failing, closing the sims. Repeating that same ordeal over and over for hours with 5 hours of sleep is torture. I feel for you programmers...lol