• Clear Textures: Textures should be crisp - not blurry or pixelated.

• Texture Details: Use shading and highlighting where appropriate to give a 3D effect.

• 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 (which applies to all items, not just clothing).

• Usefulness: Walls, floors, and terrains should be something useable in-game, and something that your sims will want to decorate their house with. Random patterns and pictures are generally not suitable for walls, floors, and terrain.

• Scale: The texture scale should make sense for the game. A terrain paint shouldn't have leaves the size of pool tables, or flowers the size of a sim's head. Compare the texture to a sim's head or hand, and make sure the scale is correct.

• Seamless: Textures must be seamless, so that the edges of each tile are not obvious.

• Paintings and Logos: Most of the time, it's best to do these as recolours of objects (i.e. make them a picture your sims can hang on the wall, not the wall itself). For murals or full-wall-designs, consider recolouring the FullPoster Wall Overlays instead.

• Undistorted: Make sure the textures are not stretched or squashed. Use the correct aspect ratio. Please note that if wall textures are made at the template size of 256x512, they will be distorted in-game (if you make a circle, it'll turn into an oval). You must make your textures at 256x768 and then resize them to 256x512 before importing into Homecrafter for them to look correct in-game.

If you are doing a huge set, you can always break the set up into pieces, posting more screenshots along with the downloads as comments in the thread, as is done here and here. To do that, create a new thread in the Creator Issues Forum and arrange your thread there, using the first post as an introduction, and attach your uploads and images to subsequent posts in the thread. When you're done, PM a moderator to have it moved to the upload queue. For more information, read the message that displays when you go to post in Creator Issues.

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.

• A picture of each texture, shown over several tiles. This means showing at least 3 tiles of wall, or 2x2 tiles of floor.

• Show all items: If you use the same textures for everything, just in different colours, it's okay to show one or two good full-size pics and then texture swatches for the rest. If you use different textures for everything, you need to show everything full-size.

• Unobstructed: You can put things like a couch, a window, or a plant, but make sure they're not in the way of your wall, floor, or terrain paint.

• Angle: Please take pictures at an angle that show your creation clearly. As far as possible, screenshots should be taken face-on - from directly in front of the wall, or top-down for floors and ground cover.

• In-game: Pictures must be taken actually in-game, on a lot. It is not enough to just show pictures taken in Homecrafter, or to just show the textures without also showing in-game pics.

• TIP: Make sure you have square pixels set to on so your images don't appear distorted.

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.

• Homecrafter Program : Official Sims2 Site Archive Tools

• Walls and floors not tiling correctly? See: Tutorial - How to make Wallpapers Tile Properly with Photoshop

• How to make Seamless Textures