Using MS-paint to make Sims 2 clothing
(but not why you would want to... that's up to your insanity)
That MS-paint is NOT a fully featured paint program. At best it can be used to edit icons and low color images. It's true usefulness comes from being able to paste images that can have many colors.
MS-Paint comes with all versions of Windows and it's located in Start > Programs > Acessories > Paint
The basics of Making a Project in Body Shop.
Time to go insane...
I apologize... people really can do good things with ms-paint. But once you use Paintshop Pro, Photoshop or even Gimp you'll understand why I call MS paint a fully UN-Featured paint program. This is a very simple tutorial...
First open up paint. It's Under the start menu in Start > Programs > Acessories > Paint. Now open up your project in paint by selecting File > Open and browsing to your project folder then opening the clothing bitmap file. (You should know how to make a project. If not refer to Body Shops manual. It's on the same download page as Body Shop. The link is on my front page.)
I've selected this clothing for the tutorial:
You can just start drawing on this... but your brushes are very hard edged and won't give you the smoothness you want. They only draw one color and don't soften the edges like the better paint programs do. The alternative is to hunt down a .bmp pattern that you like and just paste it in there over all the clothing colors. The alpha channel of the picture and the Normal map will help correct bleeding. I found an old gif that was generated from a map making program. You can use anything. Search google images. Find windows backgrounds. In any case you'll use Edit > Paste from from the menu. Select any BMP, JPEG, GIF you may find interesting.
Here's what my clothing BMP looks like in MS Paint:
It doesn't look right... right? That's fine. The alpha channel will cut out the pattern we need around the map and the normal channel will add depth by sort of faking the appearance of more poly surfaces by casting shadows based on a bitmap instead of more polygons. I just save this over the original project BMP and boom...
This is what the bmp looks like without any further tweaking in Body Shop:
You could tweak the normal bmp, but that's next to impossible in Paint. Please get one of my top 3 picks for paint programs. HTH as they say.