• In Game Usability: Walls, floors and terrains have to be usable in the game. Try to make something that your sims will want to decorate their house with and that you would see in a real life house.

• Colors: Calling it sci-fi or psychedelic won't fly. If you insist on neon wall paper then decorate an entire house with it and play the house for two whole days. Then come back to us.

• Scaling:
  
  Terrain paint with a beautiful leaf texture is unusable if the leaves are the size of a pool table. Same goes for flowers on the wall that are bigger than a sims head. Go for scales that could realistically belong in a sim's house. Compare your texture to a sims hand or head. They should almost never be larger than a sim head.

Remember that if you're using a photo for your texture, you need to think about how zoomed-in the original photo is. If you take a photo of one square inch of a surface, and use it as a whole floor tile, it's going to look wrong, even if the photo is of a high enough resolution that the texture doesn't end up being blurry. This is particularly important for textures such as stone and concrete, where it's not always obvious by looking how big the area shown in a photo is.

• Paintings and Logos: Don't take a pretty picture or a photo of yourself and turn it into a wallpaper. The same goes for anime, comic book pics, random posters of celebrities, etc. Try to make something creative that could realistically go on a wall or floor. Look at home decorating sites for inspiration.

• Murals: If you want to upload a mural, it's usually better to do so as an object - a large, flat painting which can therefore match multiple wall styles.

• Seamless:
  
  Make your textures seamless. Do not make a pattern that abruptly cuts off on every tile; make sure that the colours match on the edges. If you are making tiles, use grout so that they look like tiles when laid on a floor.

• Distortion Unfortunately, walls are very prone to distortion. This is because the game squishes wall textures horizontally. You will need to look carefully at your wall texture, and may need to stretch it in your graphics editor, to get it looking right in-game.

• Wall/Floor Texture|
  

  

  From an upload by iCad
  Although the main focus of a wallpaper or a floor is the pattern, they do need shading and texture details as well as just a flat pattern. Wallpaper often has raised/embossed details, and the texture of the paper should be visible - whether that's a rough, grainy texture, or a subtle weave, or anything else. When making floors, think about what type of floor you want to create - is it carpet, lino, tiles, stone etc? - and work on the texture to make it look like real 3D flooring, not just a pattern or colour pasted onto the floor.

• Do not take screen shots from HomeCrafter. These give very little information to your downloaders and if the grid's still in place, it hides seams.

• Take game shots of your downloads spread across several tiles. People will want to see what the download looks like if they decorate a room with it and so that users can see how it looks when it's tiled. Add some furniture as well, so downloaders can see the scale.However, make sure that you don't use so much furniture/windows/shrubbery that your content is obscured.

• Terrain paint should be applied to several tiles, add some plants or garden furniture as well, so downloaders can see the scale. However, make sure that you don't use so much furniture/windows/shrubbery that your content is obscured.

• As a rule of thumb, your screenshots should include every wall spread over at least three continuous tiles, or 2x2 for floors, without any furniture obstructing that section of wall/floor. For terrain paints, the appropriate size of uninterrupted paint depends on the scale of your terrain paint.

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.

• Upload in Sets : If you have created several items in a set, or similar items in the same sort of theme at the same time, please upload these together in a single set, all on one thread (instead of all separately, one by one, on different threads). This is easier for everyone: on our upload moderators, as they only have one thread to review rather than several... on you, as submitting a single thread is much quicker and easier than several... and on downloaders, as they can get everything they want all in one place rather than having to hunt around.

• Label Pics/Files : If you are uploading a set of different colours or designs, please name the files, and add labels to the screenshots, or otherwise make it clear which file is which. This is especially important if your set is big or contains different designs, as downloaders may not want everything in the set.

• Catalog Location : Let your downloaders know where they can find your new walls and floors. Please give the location of your walls and floors, as well as the price.

• If your upload is rejected or marked as changes required and you're not sure why, ask in Creator Issues.

• If you're not sure whether your upload is ready for uploading, use the Creator Feedback Forum to get feedback on it.

• 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