• Clear: Textures should be crisp - not blurry or pixellated. See: Game Help: Blurry Body Shop projects, and make sure to turn up the Texture Detail setting on your in-game graphics options.
• Brightness: Neon or bright colours are fine, but don't go too bright - 80% saturation is usually plenty for even neon textures, but more just looks blinding!
• Black and white: Items meant to be black or white should use very light grey and very dark grey textures, not pure black and pure white. See: Tiptorial: Making black and white clothing the right way
• Highlights and shadows: Even skin-tight items should have some highlights on areas like breasts, tummy, butt, knees, and thighs, and should have shadows on areas like underarms, crotch, middle of the back, etc... See: How to add shadows and highlights
• Details: Details like buttons, seams, shadows, bellybuttons, etc., should be in the right place and look like they fit the shape they're texturing. If you use photos as your texture base, you may need to adjust these significantly, and choose your photos wisely.
• Seams: Seams on your textures should look fairly natural, and not out of place. Avoid using repeating patterns which have seams in them. See: Tutorials:Seamless Textures
• Bump maps: Bump maps should fit the item well, and not just be a desaturated version of the regular texture. If you can't view bump maps yourself, you should make a neutral bump map. See: Tiptorial: Bump Maps for more info.
• Adult skintones: Skintones uploaded to MTS must be "barbie" below the waist - that is, you may include nipple details but not genitals or pubic hair. Such items are welcome at our adult site, Sexy Sims.
• Choice of mesh: If you're retexturing a mesh, the style of textures should match the mesh shape (for example, a tuxedo on a skin-tight mesh doesn't make much sense), and the mesh should be one that's decently well-made.

If you have made or edited a 3D model (mesh) to make your Body Shop content then you also need to think about:

• Polygon count: Your poly count should be reasonable for the item, usually in line with the poly counts of a similar item from the game.
• Morphs: Fat and pregnant morphs should be made whenever possible, and should work properly. Unless there's a good reason not to for that particular creation, a fat morph is required.
• UV Map: The texture/UV map should not be seriously distorted.
• Mesh shape: The mesh shape should generally be fairly realistic - looking as if it's subject to gravity, with body parts done in a believable sort of way (for example, no boobs the size of minivans that levitate around the collarbones, please).

The correct files are in "My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/SavedSims" and will be called something like 83edf5a_YourProjectName.package, where the first part is a randomly generated string, and the "YourProjectName" part is what you called your project when you made it in Body Shop. You can rename your files to be something more descriptive (they'll still work renamed) but please do not delete the ".package" extension. This extension is required for the game to find your files.

Please do not put your creations on full sims and upload them as .sims2pack files. We just need the finished .package file from Projects, not a full sim. Please also do not include any .bak files (backups made when editing a file in SimPE), thumbs.db files (Windows thumbnail database files, which can cause folders to crash if they become corrupted) or DS_Store files (Mac system file, also not needed).

Please note that if you are uploading recolours of your own mesh, you need to upload the mesh to MTS as well. Please don't link elsewhere for people to get your mesh, unless it's already on MTS. You will need to provide additional pictures and information for a new mesh upload.

For instructions on compressing your files into an archive, please see: Creator Guidelines: Creating Archive Files.

• Do not include multiple archives with the same contents - that is, please don't put your files in both a .zip as well as a .rar because some people only want .zip files. Choose one format.

• Do not double-compress your files... a .rar file inside another .rar file (or any other archive inside another) doesn't compress it anymore, and it makes it so we can't see the contents without downloading, and also just makes an extra step for the people downloading.

• The file size limit on MTS is 50 mb. If you exceed this limit you will need to split your archives. This should probably never come up except for large worlds for The Sims 3, or huge sets of smaller items.

• The age(s) and gender(s) your creation(s) are for (example: "This works for young adult, adult, and elder females.")
• The category your creation appears in in CAS (example: "This outfit shows up in the everyday and formal categories.")
• If you have made a new mesh, you need to include polygon counts', which you can find by checking your GMDC in SimPE. You should also mention what morphs you have made - whenever possible, your mesh should have at least a fat morph.
• If a mesh is required then you must provide a credit to the original creator, mentioning them by name ("Mesh by Soandso") as well as providing a clickable link to where the mesh may be found. You should make it clear that the mesh is required but not included, if you have not included it with your files, so downloaders know they will need to get it separately.

• For recolours of the same texture, pick a colour and show at least one full size picture, and you can show swatches of the rest of the colours.
• For recolours of different textures you need full size pictures of everything.
• For new hair or clothing meshes, you should also show your creation from other angles - at least the back and sides. For body/clothing meshes, you should show how the fat morph looks, and the pregnant morph, too, if you've done a pregnant morph.
• For skintones: If you're uploading a skin, please blur or otherwise cover the butt crack and crotch of both genders, and the female nipples. Sims can wear extremely skimpy clothing, or you can blur or cover those areas in a photo editor. Take several pictures of the bodies and faces, showing the different colours (if you've made more than one), and the different ages and genders.

Keep the following in mind for your screenshots, especially the required ones:

• Size: 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall is a good size for the smallest pic you would want to upload. Your images can be up to 2560x1440 pixels, and 800 kb, so you have lots of space to work with!
• Lighting: For most things, it's best to take pictures in an interior room with good lighting. For lots, pictures should be taken during a nice sunny day, for floorplans, take the pictures with the lights ON.
• Clarity: Neither blurry, nor pixellated/crunchy. Do not size up small pictures to make a large one as this will blur them, and make sure not to use too much compression/too low quality when saving your images.
• Distance: Take your pictures so that your creation fills the screen without anything cut off at top or bottom - neither zoomed in too close, nor zoomed out too far.
• Distortion: If you resize your images, retain the aspect ratio so they don't get stretched or squashed. Take care when zooming in and out with the camera that you do not create a fisheye effect on your pictures.
• Photoshopping: Do not apply filters like sharpen, contrast, etc. to the required pictures, as downloaders want to see what your creation will look like in their game, not your skills at using Photoshop.
• Attached: All required images must be attached directly to the MTS upload, not just inserted using the img tag, so that even if the pics get deleted from your Photobucket (or other host), the upload on MTS is still complete.
• Show all items: For most areas, if you are uploading a set, you must take all the required pics for each item in the set. If there is an exception, it will be noted.
• Picture limit: You may upload up to 100 pictures for a single upload thread, so feel free to add some additional pictures just to show off your work to its best. Of course, keep it reasonable - nobody needs 50 pics to show off one sim or hair.
• Inline pictures: Inline pictures are those that use the [img] tag to show up in with the description text. So that it doesn't take too long to load, please keep this to no more than 4 pictures done inline, unless you put them inside an [infobutton] tag. To do this, see our guide on post formatting.

Please remember, for your required pictures:

• In-game: You must actually load the game to take your pictures - pics from Body Shop are not sufficient as the lighting is not very good. Create-a-Sim pictures are okay for TS2 content, but putting sims on a lot is usually better.
• Uncovered: You should take pictures of sims modelling your content in basic poses without arms or legs in the way, use short or pulled-back hair on a clothing model, no bangs/fringe obscuring makeup or eyes, nothing in the way of the view of your content (except for skintone censoring, if you've made a skin).

Tip: You may, of course, include additional other pictures presenting your creations however you like, and you can get as creative with them as you want.  :)