WIP Log - Sims 3 Shaders

Hi there patrons! This is going to be a bit of a lengthy technical post on some developments I did with figuring out and working with TS3 shaders.

I've been experimenting again with the Shader Framework, there is A LOT of potential for great things to be made with it, but creating shaders can be daunting and due to the way it's programmed, it doesn't work all that great on some machines. This post is all about the work I've been doing with it, and addressing these problems.

First off, as you can see in the image above, I've been attempting to fix the infamous "ShaderSkinCompositing" Graphics Rules setting.

This is vanilla TS3 with ShaderSkinCompositing set to true. As you can see, it makes body hair and other details look "blobby", and it's a bit of an eye sore, so most guides tell you to turn this off.

This is vanilla TS3 with ShaderSkinCompositing disabled. This fixes body hair and other overlays but makes the skin look splotchy and compressed, so while it's better if you use body hair, it's still not perfect.

This is TS3 with ShaderSkinCompositing enabled and with my improvements. As you can see, body hair and overlays no longer look blobby, and the skin looks clean! Essentially the best of both worlds.

This was made possible thanks to a little tool I made that converts shaders extracted with the framework into HLSL "source" code:

You can see this way variables can be given names, conditionals/for loops can be used, functions can be made, syntax is highlighted, etc. It's generally a lot easier to work with, and a lot more maintainable. This fix would have been a massive headache to implement otherwise, and the resulting code would be basically unmaintainable.

Before, shader code would look like this:

Not very maintainable and hard to read.

I'm very happy with how it all is coming together, and hopefully this will get people to be more interested in creating their own shader mods, and will also make my life WAY easier when it comes to creating and maintaining shaders.

Maybe I will eventually revisit the skin shader I was working on a while ago: