These quality guidelines apply to the texture part of your creation.

• Texture Quality: Your textures should have some detail to them - not just a flat single-colour bucket fill, but with highlights and shadows in the right places. Even for flat, smooth items, you should have some detail.

• Crisp, unpixellated textures: Your textures should look as clear and crisp as textures from the game (or better!). There shouldn't be any blurriness or pixellation to your textures.

• UV Mapping: Ensure your texture is correctly scaled and not distorted. Avoid seams in your recolor texture.

• Materials: Most objects have more than one part to them. Make sure you take a good look at the object before you start texturing and use appropriate materials.

• Not Too Bright: Do not use over-bright colors. Even items meant to look neon in-game do not need to use full saturation on the texture.

• Black & White: For black you use dark grey, and for white you use light grey. That way you can still add lighter or darker for shadows and highlights, and your item will look right in the game - true black just looks like a dark hole, and true white is far too bright.

If you have made a new mesh to share, then these will also apply to your item, in addition to the textures requirements listed above.

• Color Enabled and Subsets: Very few objects should not be recolorable (foods, 'hood objects and fences), so please make sure that yours is. We have a great tutorial for how to make objects CEP ready. Also consider giving your object two subsets, especially if the object has different materials like a wood chair with a cloth cushion.

• Unique GUID and Script Numbers: New meshes need to have a unique GUID number. Some of the Build Mode items do not use GUIDs, instead they are installed with a unique script file. Modular stairs and Fireplaces with chimneys require a scriptfile. For more info, see: Modular Stair Number Repository and the Scriptorium

• Proper shadows: Objects should have the same number of shadows as the corresponding EA object. Particular attention should be paid to the shadow shape actually matching the object. For a tutorial, see: Creating an Accurate Shadow for your Object

• Duplication:Search MTS and see how many meshes have already been done for the particular type of item you're creating - do not duplicate items. We would, however, accept the same kind of thing if your version had significantly improved features (better textures, uv mapping, etc.) than an existing item.

• Polygon Counts: If you have created a new mesh it needs to have a polygon count (SimPE's 'facecount') which is reasonable for what it is. A curvy, complex item that would be used rarely can have a higher count than a blocky/boxy item that would be used frequently. Look at EA/Maxis items similar to the type you're making to get a good idea of what a reasonable poly count is for the game. Items with excessively high poly counts for no good reason will not be accepted at MTS. For tips on keeping poly counts low, see: Low Poly Modelling: How and Why

• In-game name
• Catalog location
• In-game price
• Polygon count, and the total count for each GMDC.

Tip: Try to keep object prices in line with prices for similar game objects, and categorize items so they show up in a logical place in the catalog.

Make sure you only mark the EPs/SPs required that your upload actually needs! Don't just mark them all! For specifics, please read: MTS2:Creator_Guidelines/Compatibility

• Show all objects: Show all objects in your upload. It is a good idea to put them in a room/lot setting with base game objects so that the size of your object is obvious.

• Show all recolor options: You will need pictures of each and every recolor, but you can use a swatch to show the colors. The picture to the right where the names of the colors and the texture effect in game using a portion of the object is a great way to do this.

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.

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.

Objects are some of the most popular items to make for the Sims game and can be defined as new objects or recolors.

• Mesh:You have created or edited the 3D shape in a 3D editor such as Milkshape or Blender.

• UV Mapping: The way the flat, 2D texture is applied to the 3D mesh is its "UV Mapping"