• Clear: Textures should be clear, crisp, and not pixellated.
• 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: For your main texture and for stencils/logos, most of the time for black or white, you should use very light grey and very dark grey, not pure black and pure white.
• 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.
• 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.
• Additional texture types: Additional texture types should be done well also, with bump maps fitting the item and looking correct, and speculars not set too shiny, etc.
• 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.
• Logos and Stencils: Simple designs in one colour should always be done with channels. Stencils (i.e. non-recolourable/non-CASTable designs) should generally only be used for more complex logos, patterns, etc. that cannot be split easily into recolourable channels.
• 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.
• Channels/recolourability: Whenever possible, an item should be made versatile to recolour with the Create-a-Style tool, with multiple channels for customization.

Tip: You can find great info on making quality textures in the TS3 CAS Tutorials.

• 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: Morphs should work properly, generally resemble the EA morph size/shape (unless you have a good reason otherwise, like specifically creating a new body type) and look nice.
• 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).

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 item(s) are for (example: "This works for teen and young adult females.")
• The category your upload appears in in CAS (example: "This outfit shows up in the everyday and formal categories.")
• The number and description of the recolourable channels of your creation (example: "This has 3 channels: shirt, belt, and trim")
• If you have made a new mesh, you need to include polygon counts (for LOD1, or LOD0 if you're uploading a hair). If you don't know how to check your mesh's poly count, see Tiptorial:Poly Counts for Creators.

• Have at least one picture of each item you are sharing, showing the whole thing from the front, and focusing on the item you're sharing (example: for shoes, you need to zoom in on the feet, not a take a full-body pic).
• For new hair or clothing meshes, you should also show your creation from other angles - at least the back and sides.
• For creations with recolouable channels, show how they work taking at least one picture using different colours on the parts in Create-a-Style. For items like hair, eyes, makeup, etc., it's best to show a few pics of how your creation can look with different CAST styles (dark and light hair, dark and light eyes, etc). These pics can be collaged together if you like.
• For CAST presets where all the items are variations on the same textures (like hair or eye colours), it's okay to show decent-sized swatches of each preset, rather than full-size pics of everything.
• 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. You should show your skin's colour range, and pics of each age and gender it's for.

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:

• No 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 to edit your pics.
• In-game: You must put a sim on a lot and take pictures of them there, not in Create-a-Sim, as the way it renders textures is different and doesn't show what you really get in-game.
• 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.  :)