A friend asked me for the dimensions required for making custom art work using aminovas’ tutorial, and the answer is kind of long so I thought I’d post it here.
For photos I’m going to give you two sets of dimensions. The first I’ll refer to as Unstretched and are the dimensions at which your image should look in proportion, in order for it appear as you intended in game. The second I’ll refer to as DSS and are the dimensions you need for the final DSS file you swap in using S3PE. The image will look stretched out in the DSS file but should appear correctly in game.
Paintings are a bit more complicated because part of the image gets cut off in game (on top of the stretching issue shared with photos), so you have to create margins . For paintings I’ll provide a third and fourth set of dimensions, which I’ll refer to as Margins and Unstretched Plus Margins.
For all the dimenions I’ll put width first and height second. Some of them might surprise you – for example the DSS file for the large portrait photo needs to be wider than it is high!
Small Portrait Photo
Unstretched: 256×316
DSS: 256×256
Medium Landscape Photo
Unstretched: 512×412
DSS: 512×256
Large Portrait Photo
Unstretched: 512×638
DSS: 512×256
Small Landscape Painting
Unstretched: 396×256
Margins: 55, left and right
Unstretched Plus Margins: 506×256
DSS: 256×256
Medium Portrait Painting
Unstretched: 172×277
Margins: 42, left and right
Unstretched Plus Margins: 256×277
DSS: 256×256
Large Landscape Painting
Unstretched: 343×216
Margins: 20, top and bottom
Unstretched Plus Margins: 343×256
DSS: 256×256
You can double these dimensions to make the images appear better quality in game, but it will cause problems with custard, so I wouldn’t do that if you’re making something you want to share.
Another thing that will make custard go crazy is if any of the photos are registered by the game as being of anything other than ‘nothing’, so make sure you’re just taking a photo of the grass or sky or something like that, and check the photos themselves before you start messing around with replacing the images.
I usually make my photos and paintings of coloured floor tiles, and I colour code the different sizes so that when I get into S3PE I know which is which.
Good luck!