Default Replacement Skins

[Sleepycat]

no clue...maybe buildDXT is the difference or maybe simpe changed something. I only know that I was told they had to be pngs more then 6 months ago, when I first started making alien default replacments *was also being a good little soldier*  but if bmp/png really makes no difference then it makes it even easier  *laugh*

Lol, somehow I had a feeling that's what you would say.  Mayber at the time buildDXT didn't support anything else but pngs.  I'll find some skin to make default and will try it with bmps.  If it works, i'll modify the procedure.

I really should be more careful when I edit myself before posting, insert into my post that BuildDXT wasn't used back then, well I didn't even know about it until just before I quit making different alien defaults *laughs*

as for mts2, I certainly was reminded why I started following JM around when he started his shifts from place to place before settling here


I agree, her skintones are so beautiful that it's worth losing a few details to have them, specially when we can play with crammys cock *giggles*  I think she said something about doing more dark skintones soon but first she needs to do a "dark template" to work from. I know from my own experiences that making a dark skintone from a light one is difficult. The light difference between Bodyshop and cas and actual in-game - dosen't help either 

I may switch to using Deep Earth as S4 again, I think I liked it alittle better then LateFall. Thats the wonderful thing about being able to make defaults, I can have the ones I like best as my defaults and use her others as non-defaults *has her cake and gets to eat it too* *laughs*


I'm still thinking about restarting again, this time doing what I was going to do before and start with my sims as YAs in a fresh custom hood instead of a maxis premade, which also gives me a chance to use some of Enayla's non-default skintones without having to add more sims to my existing hood *laughs*

[LFox]

I'm only using the first 2 defaults she made, the later fall i changed to do the 3rd skin and i'm still using dusk as the 4th.  Not too sure why but i think it suits fine to have two light and two black skins as defaults.

The people over at MTS2 are pretty ignorant which is why i never bother posting there or visiting it much except for a few things.

[angelyne]

I don't have an ounce of loyalty in me!   Lol, I was just looking at Oepu's new skins and they are quite realistic, teeth, nails, bellybutton, and they include other "details" as well   I am gonna give them a spin.  And I can make them into defaults if I want.  Thanks Sleepycat  ! munch scrunch munch <mouth full of cake>

[Sleepycat]

I love "Dusk" I made it my alien default so I will be wanting my males to get abducted *laughs* (I use the better looking polli-tech from laverwinkle) I did come close to making it the 4th. Two light and two dark would suit me fine also...or even 1 light, 3 dark...hmmm maybe I'll do alittle shifting around...again...and just make the 5 I like best as defaults and screw the light to darker theme  *laughs* although the way custom is dominate I'd be better off making my least favorites defaults    unless I only pick 5 to use and don't use the others at all   


It would be really nice if Maxis would give us more default skintones (and eyes) so we could replace them too *giggles*


edit - hey you keep talking about Oepu's skintones but I don't recall seeing a link! *laughs*

[angelyne]

Ah I never mentioned her before. I checked out her skins some time back, but liked the ones by Helaena better.  But she's made new ones since then so, I'll see.  I have yet to see them in game http://www.modthesims2.com/member.php?u=43133

[Batelle]

I didn't like Oepu's skins as defaults, they were to grainy(I think that's the word I'm looking for) in my game.  Almost like fabric or cardboard rather than skin.  

If my computer could handle SimPE a little better or if my brain could handle the long way, I would make Rich Earth my darkest default, I really love how sims look with that skintone.  As it is, I'm happy with what I gots.  

[Sleepycat]

well doh! stupid me, I have actually looked at those and was just looking at her elf template a little while ago 

I still like Enayla's better 


Batelle, I have a copy of Deep Earth as a S4 default file, is Deep Earth the one you mean?

[Batelle]

Batelle, I have a copy of Deep Earth as a S4 default file, is Deep Earth the one you mean?

Errr, maybe.  It's not as rich as Dusk, but it's in the same pack.  She's put out so many in such a short amount of time that the names all sort of meld together.

[Sleepycat]

Batelle, I have a copy of Deep Earth as a S4 default file, is Deep Earth the one you mean?

Errr, maybe.  It's not as rich as Dusk, but it's in the same pack.  She's put out so many in such a short amount of time that the names all sort of meld together.

yes they do get confusing *laughs* well if you want to PM me with your email, I can send it to you and you can see if it's the one your thinking of 

[Renatus]

I broke down and installed Enayla's new defaults today. They were too shiny to resist. I also added her two other realistic skintones and the Rich Gold, Deep Earth, and Dusk skintones to my normal neighborhood. After some genetics switching I have a very nice variety on my sims. Rich Gold is a bit of a cool colour for a skintone but I'm partial to it (and it's close to the colour my skin is when I get a tan, when I can manage to hit that very narrow border between 'deathly pale' and 'burnt to a crisp' - right now I'm about the colour of her Opaline skintone) so one sim got that, and while Dusk is very dark I've seen a few people around Espoo (where I live) with skin that colour and I really like it. I've always been fascinated with that very dark, rich skin colour.

Currently I'm debating if I want Blue Midnight or Fae as my alien skintone. After the Laverwinkle alien tone I don't know if I can go back to green. 

[angelyne]

Oepu did mention taking some bits and pieces of other creators and using them on her own skins.  Wish I knew how to do that

[nectere]

You simply extract the png files either with Body shop or simpe, make folders and keep all the different skintones you want to work with in those folders. I have a folder name for instance Opal Skintone, and inside I have it broken up between male and female so I can quickly get to what I need. I do this for all the skintones I like, its in my Projects folder, so if I ever want to go borrow this or that, I can very quickly. I also have texture folders for other projects etc...

Then I have my separate current project folder, with the skintones that I am going to edit to make how I want them to be, of course these are just the png files that I extracted from the package I am working on to change. You open two corresponding skins in a graphics editing program, I have Photoshop CS, you use what you like. I take the host parts I want from one skin tone from my mulitpurpose project folder and copy them to the new skin tone, then blend them in to the new skintone so that they look like they belong. Merge the layers, save it and move on to the next one. You have to do this for each sex you are fixing. Children and younger dont have sex, so skip those. Thats about it really. Once you are done editing all the files you simply reimport them (build dxt) or you can do the bodyshop method. From there you can make defaults or whatever you like, or decide that your parts dont look right and go back and edit them some more.

Dont be afraid to try. I always empty out my downloads folder when working on these types of projects only leaving in what I am working on and testing. It saves a lot of load time since you may need to go back and forth between programs a few times to check your results...unless you of course are me, and can do it perfectly the first time.

[Sleepycat]

I keep thinking of making Dusk my S4 default and making Porcelain Doll into my alien default, it's creepy/goulish/different enough to be perfect for aliens *giggles* I've always hated the shade of green Maxis used, I could never go back to it.

totally un-natural colors like green and blue and purple for my sims, just don't interest me... Porcelain Doll is almost normal and it kind of reminds me of myself when I'm feeling like death warmed over 


angelyne, if you can edit pictures at all then you should be able to do it, once you select the "part" you want (thats the tricky part) then you can copy it and then paste it to another skin, it dosen't always look right but sometimes it's good enough *laughs*

[angelyne]

Well I can always experiement.  It won't hurt.  Although I am not an advanced user when it comes to photoshopping.  I just wonder how you would take let's say a bit from one skin and then past it on a different skin, how would the skin color match?

Anyway, it could be fun to try.  At least now I understand the whole concept of exporting/important texture.

BTW, nectere, do you know why we convert BMP files into PNG and work with those? We were wondering upthread about that, and the only thing we could come up with is "we were told to do it this way".

 

[nectere]

In photoshop there is an option to match color, you will pick your first layer (the base skin) to match the pasted part to, I use normalize as an added option. This will take the new part and recolor it closer to the underlying skintone. You may still have to fiddle with it using color adjustments, or curves or whatever method you want to try. Obviously you want to work with tones that are similar to each other, you wouldnt want to paste a dark tone on a pale tone and expect to get great results, its possible but it would take a whole lot of fiddling.

But the key here is to try. To try and try some more until you can do it yourself, then you will find that a whole new world opens up when you look at something, whether it is a skintone or an object.

Bmp files are too big, you wouldnt want to work with bmps, jpgs are too small and can become degraded quickly. I actually work with raw files a lot until I am ready to import then I save it as a png. The point is if you used bmp files instead of having a skintone that is say around 4 mb, it would be around 7 or so. At least that is my uderstanding. I rarely use bodyshop for anything so I dont see bmp files I guess. In fact the few times I used bodyshop I dont recall it dumping out bmp files, but rather png files. But its been a while since I have used body shop, since the lighting sucks and you really cant see what you are working when working with anatom skins. Plus it just takes too darn long to boot up.

**spelling issues...

[angelyne]

Well Jtmom, here is your answer.  A bit late but better late than never. I exported a skin and the size of all the files was 70 MB.  Converted to PNG.. 10 MB.  You can well imagine the size of your skin if you used BMP's.

Thanks for that information Nectere.  I am looking at a png now and trying to think how to approach the subject lol.  Amazing how much like a photograph it is up close.  I'll keep your instructions in mind

[Renatus]

Bodyshop exports bitmap files. The reason they are so large is because they do not compress information at all, so all of the detail is retained. PNG is a 'lossy' compression format but from what I understand it is a good one and loses less image data than JPG, which has some very obvious compression artifacts at medium quality.

[jmtmom]

OK, now I get it. That also explains why my files were so huge! Well, I'll do it "properly" from now on. 

[jrd]

I have turned skin set into a default overrides, and this works fine for new Sims. With /some/ standard Sims there's issues though:
-one Sim has an old S4 body, but a new S4 head (other S4 Sims display new/new)
-one Sim has *no* body (he is a floating head) in casual clothes, he has a body in all other clothes (and other S2s have no problems even with the same clothes).

Is this just a very risky treatment in general, or is the SimPE method bugged? (I have kept the original non-defaults in my game also, as TS2 crashes otherwise)

[nectere]

That happens to me with override skins too, I just use the mirror to update the appearance and that takes care of it, but its a pain to do it for all the townies etc. I dont seem to have a problem with true defaults though, just the ones made with the skin plugin where you need both the custom skin and the override file.

[Sleepycat]

I had the same problem after trying default skintones that were done the simpe "shortcut" way, my sims had 1 skintone for their heads and another for their bodys.


After I switched back to real default files - using the mirrors and then saving&exiting the Lots usually worked. Sometimes it took a couple trys but I was able to fix all my sims, I haven't seen any townies so I don't know if they are mixed up or not. The few sims I had fixed before switching back to real defaults had to be fixed again so I was glad I hadn't fixed very many.

I'm not sure what simpe does to make them the shortcut way, the files usually end up twice the size of the original and yet still require the original to be left in   

Thankfully doing real default replacements the longer way is easy enough, just takes alittle longer.

[jrd]

How do you make a real default file, ie not the shortcut way? Renaming all textures doesn't seem to stick unfortunately.

[nectere]

maybe its random, sounds like Sleepycat's sims still will have twotone skin even using the traditional defaults. So Jordi I dont know the answer to that question, because it sounds like you already know how to do long method on defaults rather than the shortcut or plugin method.

[Sleepycat]

How do you make a real default file, ie not the shortcut way? Renaming all textures doesn't seem to stick unfortunately.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2930.0   


I had the problem with the twotone skin I think because I was stupid and had entered and saved each of my Lots (with the mixed up skin) before switching back to real defaults. I was installing JMs Lot Sync Timer (I should have waited) and didn't realize at first that my sims were confused about their skintones. I think that if I hadn't saved all my sims with mixed up skins then I wouldn't have had to fix them 

edit - I've switched real default files before without any problems

[katemonster]

*frown*

I cant find a set of skins I like, default or not default. Maxis skins (and all the ones that basically take those and add pubes) are too flat and cartoony and uninteresting. Enayla's are WAY too shiny. Helaene's are gorgeous on adult women, but on men and children they are downright creepy as they look like they're wearing very heavy eyeliner and sometimes lipstick.

Any good places to look for skins besides those creators and besides MTS2, which has been "loading" my search for "default skins" for about the last five minutes?