Hello. I was playing with Denton's VFX Tool and find some interesting things. I have created a tutorial of how you can create a custom VFX. Hope you will like. =)
Im going to attach the resources that we are going to use.

Hello. In this tutorial we will create our first VFX a simple image with movement. We will use Denton's TS4 VFX Tool. You can download this tool here:

TS4 VFX Tool Page

Now to the tutorial.

1. We start by opening TS4 VFX Tool and clicking on “Main” button to load the game VFX.



2. Now on “Visual Effect” write “ep03_spicy_breath” and

3. Click on “Edit” button to edit this effect (First we will do an override of this effect, later we will save a custom effect from this one.)



4. Now we go to the top first “Particle effect” and
5. We click on “Edit” button to edit this effect



6. On this new window we will go to flags and change 0000000000000800 (multiple particles at a time) to 0000000000000001 (one particle at a time)



7. Now we change the “Particle lifetime” to 2 on left and right (its in seconds, so this means that the particle has a duration of 2 seconds “alive”)



8. Now we go to the emit tab and will change the “Direction Min” to 0 0 1 and “Direction Max” to 0 0 1 too.
The coordinates are in (x,y,z) this mean that the particle will go to the Z direction “Up” by a minimun of 1 and a maximum of 1 unit.



9. Because the particle will be an image and dont be volume involved, we are going to put on volume min and max 0 0 0 on the same emit tab.



10. Because the particle (image) has his own colors we will put in in the Color Curve 1 1 1, that color is pure white but will preserve the original particle colors without mixing another color. Because we dont want a variation of this colors we leave the vary on 0 0 0



11. “AlphaCurve” means how visible on invisible the particle will be. 0 means invisible 1 means complete visible. “EmitRateCurve” means how glowy the particfle will be. 1 means low glow 50 means high glow.
In this case we will put 1 on each slot of the “AlphaCurve” and ”EmitRateCurve” If you put different values on the slots you can vary the visibility and the glow of the particle.



12. “Time” means how many seconds the Effect will last and “Cycles” means how many cycles the effect will have. We will use a duration of 2 seconds for the effect and we are going to loop it, so, we will put 2 on “Time” and 0 in “Cycles”



Now we are going to use our custom image for the particle. Please open the “necrodog-vfx-tutorial- textures” package with Sims4Studio and copy the instance key of the image of the four “necrodogs” (If you have S4S you can view easily the image) this image are the frames of the animation.

13. The key is AD1484B6AFE260E5 and

14. We are going to put in the IID slot on the effect



15. “DrawMode” means how the particle will appear. “DrawFlags” are the flags for the drawing of the particle. In “DrawMode”, 128 means that the particle will be opaque, and 132 that the particle will be luminous and semi-transparent.
In “DrawFlags” , 0 means that the particle will be affected by the room lighting, and 1 means that the particle will not be affected by the room lighting.
In this case our particle will be opaque and not affected by the room lighting so we will put 128 in “DrawMode” and 1 in “DrawFlags”



16. We are going to make a frame animated particle, so, as you can see, the image we are going to use has 4 frames in it and are ordered vertical .
You can notice that we can divide the image in 1 tile width (U) and 4 tiles weight (V) So we are going to put 1 in “TileCountU” and 4 in “TileCountV” and because we are going to use all the frames in the image to animate it, we are going to put 0 at “FrameStart”
The 0 in “AlignMode” will rotate the particle to our point of view, I find 8 align modes.

Note: I made the frames vertical, but also you can make them horizontal and you will have the same result, you just need to update the tiles count correctly in the inverse. TileCountU=4 TileCountV=1 But with this example we are going to leave as we said before the note TileCountU=1 TileCountV=4



16A. Now to make our image animated we need to edit the “FrameSpeed” We have four frames, so, if we put 4 on it, it means that it will be animated 4 frames per second so put 4 on the “FrameSpeeed” attribute.



17. The next attributes needs some Physics knowledge, but we are not going to use them in this case,so we are going to leave them 0 except drag that we will put -0.5



Some interesting to know
The “WindStrenght” is how much the particle is affected by the wind
The “GravityStrenght” is how much the particle is affected by the gravity

18. ”Unknown33” dont know much about it yet, but it afect the velocity of the particle so please put 0.3 to move the most correctly the particle if you put 0 it will be static even if you change the data from step 8.



The “SizeCurve” is how much the particle vary in size.
The”AspectRatio” is how much we can stretch the particle in weight.
The “RotationCurve” is how much we can rotate the particle
The “Vary” attributte below these attributes means how much we randomize these values.

19. For this example we are going to use “SizeCurve” 0.5
“AspectRatio” 1
“RotationCurve” 0
“Vary” 0



20. Now we are going to click on the return button to return to the particle effects.



21. Now before continue editing we are going to save. Click on the return button from the particle effects.



22. And click on Save button in the main menu.



23. Save with a descriptive name. I named it “ep03_spicy_breath-override-test-effect”
Note: Remember that at this moment is an override of an effect and changing the package name wont affect. It just to make a copy of the work if something fail.

24. Open VFX Tool again and click on “Open” button and open the file we saved on step 23.



25. Click on “Edit” button



If you want to edit more effects you can edit the next effects as your desire, but for this tutorial we only need one particle effect, so

26. Click on “ParticleEffect” BlockIndex 1

27. Click on “Delete” button

28. Click on “ParticleEffect” BlockIndex 2

29. Click on “Delete” button



30. Now on “ParticleEffect” BlockIndex 0 Clik on “More” button



31. Now on Local transform in “Flags” put 0200 this will allow to edit the local transform.

32. On position on the third value put 0.5 This will put the effect at 0.5 in Z

33. Click on the “Return” button.



34. We are going to save our work again. Do steps 21, 22, 23 and save.

Now we are going to reference a sound effect to the VFX. I have created one with Denton's Sound tool.

https://modthesims.info/d/639090/ts4-sound-tool.html

35. Please open “necrodog_chimes_3_tones” package with Studio and copy the instance key from the audio configuration. (in notepad or wherever you want, we are going to paste it later) in this case 6E9548DBBBA68B1E

Note: If you have made your custom sound effect, then you are going to copy the instance key from the audio configuration of your sound effect instead.



Now we are going to open VFX Tool again.

Do steps 24 25. You will get this screen if you make correctly the steps.



36. Now in the sound effect click on “Edit” button.



37. Now we are going to paste the instance key from step 35 in the IID attribute.

38. Click on “Return” button



Now make steps 21, 22, 23 and we finish to create the vfx.
Now we are going to copy our recently created vfx package, the “necrodog-vfx-tutorial-textures” package (or your textures package) and the “necrodog_chimes_3_tones” package (or your custom sound package) into your Mods folder and test it.

To test it. In game, put an effect player on the lot and play the effect, because its an override you need to put “ep03_spicy_breath” as the effect name.

If you did correctly the tutorial you will get an animated image going down to up with movement and the sound of three chimes when the effect start, just replay the effect again to hear the chimes again.

Congratulations! You have make your first VFX =)

Now we are going to convert this override to a new custom VFX.

39. Make step 24. After, click on “Rename” button.



40. A new window will pop.
Put the name of your new vfx. I suggest to put first your creator name in the effect and then a little descriptive name of your effect. In this case I have used : yourname_myfirst_vfx, then click “Ok” button



41. Click on the “Save” button and exit VFX Tool.




Now open Studio and open the renamed vfx.
Click on Tools, Hash generator and hash the name of the effect. They need to be the same name or the effect that you saved. In this case yourname_myfirst_vfx



And copy the FNV64 key into the instance key of the visual effects in this case FA22B5EC20061B05



Save the package and exit Studio.

41A) Great! You have created a custom VFX. Please save this effect in another part of your hard drive, not the Mos folder , we are going to test if works correctly first.

Now we have two options.

a) To merge the VFX with the game VFXs creating an override of the VFX instances and creating conflicts with other overrides of the same VFX instance.
Or
b) MizoreYukii has seen this problem, so she created a public common VFX override at curseforge so it will be only one resorce for all to use in common

https://www.curseforge.com/sims4/mo...om-vfx-resource

I suggest that you pull a request of your VFXs to be included in the common VFX instance override in her github so it will be only one resource to avoid conflicts.

https://github.com/MizoreYukii/TS4-Custom-VFX-Resource

Now we are going to test the custom VFX with the new name locally. Using option a)

And later if the VFX works with the new name, you can pull the request to MizoreYukii to include the VFX on the common VFX instances.

First we are going to merge the effect with the game effects to test if the new name works correctly.

42. Open VFX Tool and click on “Merge” button.

43. A new window will appear.

44. Select your renamed effect and save with a new name. I suggest something like yourname_myfirst_vfx_testing-locally

45. Put this package into your Mods folder and delete the VFXs that we have created in the Mods folder in these time, First check that the file from 41A) its not in the Mods folder. If it is, please put in a location you remember.

46. Load the game and put an effect player on the lot. Click on select effect and put the new name of the effect. If you did correctly the steps. You will see the same effect as before, but calling it with the new name.

Very good! You have created your first custom VFX.

Now to avoid conflicts delete the “yourname_myfirst_vfx_testing-locally” package from your mods folder and check that they are not more VFXs there.

Do you remember the file in 41A) ?? If the local package works correctly, that means that this file works correctly too. So I suggest to upload the saved file from 41A) pulling a request to MizoreYukii's github to include it in the common VFX for all to use.

https://github.com/MizoreYukii/TS4-Custom-VFX-Resource

Hope all you liked this tutorial and have fun creating your custom VFX. =)