Tutorial: How to make recolors of customized wedding cakes

[danicast]

First, some important notes:

- This process can produce game crashers if you do something wrong, so my suggestion is to add your new object to test in a specific separated folder at your Downloads folder so you can easily find and remove in case something goes wrong.
- This is NOT a recolor process,  it's a cloning process. This process produces a clone/duplicate of the cake that you are using for basis which includes the mesh (the clone works without the original object)
- ALL these steps are required. If you skipped a step the cake is not going to work as suppose to (trust me on that, I made several cakes with funny problems)
- Unfortunately I didn't discovered yet how to make a clone from Santo Antonio's Cake (the game default wedding cake) simply because I can't find it in the resource tree. As soon as I find, I'll try that because I really like that mesh but I'm guessing that the process is very similar, you make a clone from the cake and a clone from the slice and put them to work together.
- I want to thanks starr, who pointed me in the right direction, Numenor for several posts that he made at MTS2 with important information about clones and food, Eris3000 for the awesome cakes, and fireflies, for the very useful and well made Cereal Food Tutorial.

What you are going to need:
- SIMPE latest edition
- a graphic program like Photoshop or Photopaint.

1. Choose your base object

In my case, I'm using Eris3000 wedding cakes that can be found at MTS2 and TSR. I really love her meshes and I wanted to have more cakes in my game with those meshes. If you use Erin3000's cakes as basis you will see that each cake have 2 separated parts: one file that is the cake and one file that is the cake slice. We need both to make our clone properly works.
This method that I'm going to show you envolve 2 objects working together. I don't know if this procedure is valid for food that doesn't have 2 parts. Probably not.

2. Cloning the cake and the cake slice

We are going to do this process twice: one with the cake mesh and one with the cake slice mesh.

- Start SIMPE
- Click on the tab called Object Workshop
- Click in "open"
- Select the object that you are going to clone and open
- Now usually what you see is a drop down menu where the option selected is "recolor". Change that to "clone".
- We are going to use SIMPE default options so we don't need to change anything. According to Numenor, is the best way to work and to be sure that you are not making a game crasher.
- Click the button marked as "start"
- Now you are going to see some fields that are showing the original object description and title. In the title you need to type something useful to describe the cake that you are doing. I adopted a method where I put the original object name followed by my new cake name like "Eris-3000-LWC- DaniCast-Classic-Wedding-Cake-001". This helps me to make sure that I'll have an unique name to each cake.
- Click "Finish"
- SIMPE will take a minute loading some necessary things and will open a window called "Scenegraph Rename Wizard". You will see that the original object name is listed in all lines. Type your new object name in the only field available (like "Eris3000-LWC-DaniCast-Classic-Wedding-Cake-001" without quotes) and click "Update". I didn't used blank spaces but "-" between the words because I was unsure if that could cause problems.
- Click "OK" to conclude the process.
- Save your new file with the proper name in a place where you can find later. I usually have a separated folder outside the game to my projects.

Repeat exactly the same process with the cake slice. I named the cake slice "Eris3000-LWC-DaniCast-Classic-Wedding-Cake-001-Slice" to make more easy to find the pair of objects that work together.

3. Recoloring

Due a game limitation, wedding cakes only have 2 parts recolorable, usually the cake texture and the cake plate.
The process of recoloring is exactly the same as any other customized object:

- Open your new cake clone in SIMPE
- Go to the tab "Plugin View"
- Select in the resource tree the item called "Texture Image". If  you did everything right, you will see that your new object name is in that tree in all textures available.
- Export the image that corresponds to the cake textures. The cake mesh have 6 images but only one is the right one to recolor and is easy to find due the mapping, is the only image that have frosting, decorations and flowers. The cake slice have 2 recolorable images, one exactly like the cake mapping and one for the plate. Is more easy to understand when you open the file.
- Change the image as pleases you.
- Reimport the image using the DDS "Build  DXT" feature. If you are not sure about what is this, check some tutorials about recolors, basically is a very useful free plugin that we use with SIMPE to produce better graphic results.
- Commit and save.
- Repeat the process with the cake slice.

4. Atributing a new GUID to not overwrite the original object

Now here comes the tricky part where I made a lot of mess to discover where exactly I had to edit.
Your clones already have the correct images inside, is time to get a new GUID and edit one single BHAV inside the cake to make the main cake "calls" the correct cake slice.
- If you don't atribute a new GUID your cake will overwrite the original model that you used as basis because still have that original GUID. The game doesn't really care how do we call the files, the GUIDs are what the game uses to identify all files. They must be unique.
- If you don't edit the BHAV line, your cake will call the original slice plate when the sim cut the cake. If you edit the wrong line, unexpected surprising things can happen. Been there, done that.
- You need to be online to get a new GUID from SIMPE site

Now to the process:

- Open your new cake in SIMPE
- Go to the line "Object Data" in the resource tree
- There is a field there called "GUID" and right next to that field a clickable text called "get GUID". If you never did that in your life you are not registered in SIMPE site. Click on "get GUID" a new tab will open with the fields Username, Password and Email. If you are not registered at SIMPE site, add these informations and click on "set". SIMPE will call SIMPE site and register you in the database.
- After that click on "register object".  SIMPE will work by itself and get you a new GUID for your object.
- I updated all MMATS (the field is right above the GUID field). Numenor says is not really necessary for cakes but I did, just in case.
- Commit and save

Repeat the process with the cake slice, just, if you already registered at SIMPE site, use the same data to get the second GUID.

Now we are going to edit the BHAV to make the main cake call the cake slice

- Open your cake in SIMPE (the cake, not the cake slice)
- Go to the line called "Behaviour Function (BHAV)" in the resource tree.
- You will see a tree with several options in the right tab
- Select the line called "CT - Create Cake Slice in Temp 0" clicking on it
- You will see a table with several fields and numbers
- In the field called "Instructions Setting" there is a pair of lines called "Operands". It's a serie of numbers in pairs like 00 09 08 07 etc. The GUID number are the first 4 pairs of numbers. You are going to replace these 8 first numbers with your cake slice GUID numbers, backwards.
Like this:
My cake traditional slice have this GUID number: 0x 00 71 F5 01
So I wrote in those fields like this: 01 F5 71 00
- When you're done, click "commit file" and save.

That's it, your cake is ready to test.
I hope this tutorial is useful to someone and feel free to ask questions.