After playing the University Life EP briefly, my rebel sim just had to flout convention more dramatically. Now he can paint street murals of nudes to shock the townsfolk. Or maybe just intrigue them.

Tasteful nudes, though. A sim rebel wouldn't want to push society's boundaries too far.

To add these to your game, download my mod below. Note that these replace the game's default mural images. If your sim has already painted murals around town, they will be changed to the new images.

As shown in the pictures above, graffiti is not affected, only murals.

This mod requires the University Life expansion pack for The Sims 3. It has been tested at patch level 1.50 and 1.55 but should work with any subsequent patches.

If you have never used mods for The Sim 3 before, go over to the Mod The Sims site and follow the steps in this guide or this more detailed guide to set up your game properly.

Click here to download my mod (19.7 MB) then unzip it and place the package in your game's Mods/Packages folder.

If you are leery of downloading random files from the internet, and I don't blame you at all for that, I may make my mod available at the Sexy Sims 2 site shortly.

Simply remove the GraphicalXTC-StreetArtFemaleNudes.package from your game's Mods/Packages folder. Any existing murals will revert to the game's standard images.

If your sim is just starting the Street Art skill, they will not be able to paint nudes right away. Once they can paint medium size murals, the nudes will start appearing. Don't fret, reaching that skill level happens pretty quickly.

As they gain skill and can paint larger and better quality murals, they have a chance of producing an even greater variety of nudes.

Yes, all the nudes are of females. Sorry, that's my bias showing through. If you want hot guys instead or a mixture of both, check out the Technical Tidbits section below for information that will help you create your own version of this mod.

 

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For those who are interested, here are some of things I learned about the murals while creating this mod. Hopefully this info may help you create your own mods.

All of the graffiti and mural _IMG resources are stored in the University Life package (FullBuild_p18.package). The resource names follow this format:

QualitySizeMuralVariation_Stage

For example, high2x2MuralA_1 is the image used for a high-quality, 2x2 square (medium size) mural, the first random variation, during stage one of the painting process.

The same mural images are used for both wall and ground murals, and variations are randomly selected by the game when a mural is begun.

The painting process goes through three stages. 1 = a basic roughed-in outline of the mural with the tape border, 2 = a more filled in image, still with tape border, and 3 = final image without tape border. The final image remains as the finished mural in your town. There is an additional image, identified as stage _4, which is a partially wiped-away image used when a sim carries out the 'Clean Up' interaction.

So each mural must have four image resources. They are all DDS format, with the final _3 stage image being twice the size of the others. For example, 1024 x 1024 instead of 512 x 512 for the large size mural.

The Quality level can be low, med, high, or master for masterpieces.

Size can be 1x1, 2x2, or 3x3 for small, medium, and large. Not all sizes are used everywhere. For example, low quality murals only come in small and medium sizes.

According to the game's code, it will use up to 10 variations labeled A through J although there are some tuning restrictions discussed below.

Browsing through FullBuild_p18 you'll find some more _IMG resources which follow a similar naming scheme but without Mural in the title. Those are the images for graffiti.

The _IMG resource's instance number is an FNV64 hash of it's name.

As mentioned previously, my mod simply replaces the default mural images. I would prefer to make additional murals and not overwrite the standard ones, but have not been successful so far.

The tuning file which tells the game what murals are available is the StreetArtVariants XML file found in the GameplayData.package. It contains a number of sections like this:

    <ArtPicker>
      <Name>Ground Mural - Med</Name>
      <Quality>Med</Quality>
      <MuralKey>GroundMural</MuralKey>
      <Level0>0</Level0>
      <Level1>0</Level1>
      <Level2>1000</Level2>
      <Level3>600</Level3>
      <Level4>600</Level4>
      <Level5>600</Level5>
      <Level6>50</Level6>
      <Level7>45</Level7>
      <Level8>40</Level8>
      <Level9>30</Level9>
      <Level10>33</Level10>
      <SmallVariations>0</SmallVariations>
      <MedVariations>8</MedVariations>
      <LargeVariations>6</LargeVariations>
      <SmallDuration>7500</SmallDuration>
      <MedDuration>1.75</MedDuration>
      <LargeDuration>2.25</LargeDuration>
    </ArtPicker>
      

I believe the Level0 through Level10 entries form a weighted scale indicating how likely a sim will paint a mural of the specified quality and size at a given Street Art skill level.

The SmallVariations, MedVariations, and LargeVariations entries would seem to indicate how many variations are available as _IMG resources for this specific mural quality and size. Note that even though the same images are used for both wall and ground murals, sometimes the number of variations indicated in this tuning file differs, presumably so that, for example, more variations can be painted as ground murals than as wall murals.

The game will select a variation randomly after determining what quality and size the sim will produce.

Given this information, it would seem possible to add non-default murals by increasing the number of variations specified in the XML tuning file and adding the corresponding _IMG resources following their standard naming scheme. For example, since the last medium-quality, large-size mural variation is 'F', we could add _IMG resources...

	  med3x3MuralG_1
	  med3x3MuralG_2
	  med3x3MuralG_3
	  med3x3MuralG_4
	  

...being careful to use the proper instance ID (FNV64 hash of resource name) and then change the tuning file's <LargeVariations> entry from 6 to 7.

Tried it, doesn't seem to work.

Great fun to test as well. Since mural variations are selected randomly, your sim may have to paint quite a few before one of your custom versions is used. When the game appeared to choose one of my additions, it either jumped out of the interaction entirely or seemed to generate a blank mural.

If you want to dig into it further, check out the Sims3.Gameplay.Skills.StreetArt and Sims3.Gameplay.Objects.HobbiesSkills.GraffitiSurface code.

If you figure out how to make non-default-replacement murals, please let me know.