I hope it is okay to ask this here. I would love to get my hands on the image files for the default paintings sims make. Can anyone help me locate them in the game files? Thanks

You can't read them right now, they are certainly _IMG but s4pe refuses to read these at the moment. They are anyway in the ClientFullbuild6, 7, or 8 or spread throughout these three files; whenever s4pe feels like reading them at some time in the future.

Okay - thank you for the information

Hopefully they will become readable at some point in the future.

TSR have also announced they will have a tool for object creation available -- maybe that will also work for paintings. I don't know any details about their plans but I guess they will post in the Tools forum when it goes live, so I'd suggest you check that for updates.

Thank you! Will do.

Also, moving to Object Creation.

Hi, sorry to reply to an old thread... but has there been any update on this? I would love to retexture the paintings sims make, and I saw that Shimrod101 had done so for Angry and Playful emotions, so I wondered if there was a way to get the names of the IMG files?

You can find the Instance ID# on the easel paintings if you download the velocitygrass XML Extractor and extract the combined tuning file. It's found in the Modding Tools forum.

When you extract the file make sure you do not select the EA Naming convention or the s4pe Naming convention which are to the right. You want it as the default way it should give you, namely it should have {name} in front, then those numbers.
If you use the checkmark thingy at the bottom is irrelevant for you here, you don't need the comments or Strings, and you don't want to remove the "white space".

After it is extracted, find the folder with Windows Explorer (or equivalent) and you will find a subfolder called "recipe" which has 1762 individual files or thereabouts, hooray!

The easel files are called PaintingTexture_Animal (this is the first one) and are there alphabetically; each one needs to be read individually which can be done with Notepad or whatever you want to use.

At the very bottom of each file is something similar to this:
<T n="texture" p="InGame\Objects\Buy\PaintCanvas\paintCanvasLrg\paintCanvasLrgABSMedSun_01.tga" >2f7d0006:00000000:7efb4a64a0ec02c6</T>

The number at the bottom is the Instance #, so on this file here it is 7efb4a64a0ec02c6. Open the ClientFullbuild6 or 7 or 8 and click on the word Instance up at the top of that column to sort from top to bottom on these numbers, and scroll down to find it. These XML files don't say if it is in the 6,7,or 8; you simply need to check all three to find each image.

Thanks for the great instructions! It was intimidating look at all those lists of numbers and letters, but I figured things out.

Now I just have to get enough sims to have enough different emotions and skill levels so I can test them all.....

Edit: I had a sim with level 7 skill do a painting, but it came out as one of the textures labelled "low", do those labels not mean anything, or has something gone wrong?

That is normal IIRC -- sims with high skill are still “allowed” to paint lesser paintings (so the more skill they have, the more variety you get).

Impressionism and Surrealism do not have the lock-out on those low paintings, in case it was one of these two types you saw. Every one of the painting XML files has this skill range written in.

That makes sense guys, thanks! I will keep testing and hopefully will see a good variety of painting textures. I'm excited to upload!