Face Templates - 2008-05-08 - No Update - New Links

[J. M. Pescado]

Am I understanding right, that my sims I spend so much time creating will end up looking like a facetemplate once they are adults? And is there anyway around this? I don´t really want to turn faceblend off, because of all the ingame born sims.

I think this is a misunderstanding. Amber is, at best, talking about what happens over generations. Sim genetics should not be altered due to natural aging, only that sims allegedly have 3 "parents": Your two input sims, and a baseline face.

[Ambular]

Am I understanding right, that my sims I spend so much time creating will end up looking like a facetemplate once they are adults? And is there anyway around this? I don´t really want to turn faceblend off, because of all the ingame born sims.

I think this is a misunderstanding. Amber is, at best, talking about what happens over generations. Sim genetics should not be altered due to natural aging, only that sims allegedly have 3 "parents": Your two input sims, and a baseline face.

Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you, abelle!  O_o  I expressed myself very poorly there.  The genetics in a CAS Sim won't change, and if you design a Sim to look a certain way at a certain age, they should look that way as they grow up.

What I mean is...okay, have you ever noticed that when you make a Sim and age them up and down in CAS, the features that look really nice at one age can become weirdly distorted and more noticeably Maxian at others, requiring you to adjust them and make a lot of compromises to get a Sim that looks nice at all ages?

One example that particularly comes to mind is face thinness: make a kid in CAS without the overly plump Maxian cheeks, and then age her to Elder, and she'll wind up looking cadaverously thin.  Adjust them so the Elder looks normal and then regress her to a toddler, and she'll be bloated.  This is because the game is using the face templates to help it figure out how to change the features from one age to the next.  (Drives me up a bloody wall, incidentally.)

Create a CAS Sim without bothering to check how they look at other age stages and adjust to your tastes, and they and their children will be pretty much at the mercy of the templates--their genetics will still be there, but the game will interpret them without your input.  If you use replacements, those will become the guide for the game instead and you'll get different (and hopefully less annoying) distortions. 

However, in the context above, I was primarily talking about children born in game, not CAS Sims.  As Pes says, the genetics get diluted over the generations.  I'd say the best way to avoid it is to regularly introduce new CAS Sims to the hood so the Maxian component doesn't overtake everything else.

[Nailati]

Templates 08 ("Asian") and 18 ("Australian") are up.

Not sure if they eyes on #18 are too big.

I haven't tested these extensively for "breedability," so please let me know if you come across any awkward feature combinations. Thanks!

[Gwill]

You fixed the most hidious of all the maxis hidiouses!
I could actually risk creating a neigbourhood with just these replacements (but I won't; I'll be patient a while longer).

I love you so much for doing this; thank you.

[abelle]

Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you, abelle!  O_o  I expressed myself very poorly there.  The genetics in a CAS Sim won't change, and if you design a Sim to look a certain way at a certain age, they should look that way as they grow up.

What I mean is...okay, have you ever noticed that when you make a Sim and age them up and down in CAS, the features that look really nice at one age can become weirdly distorted and more noticeably Maxian at others, requiring you to adjust them and make a lot of compromises to get a Sim that looks nice at all ages?

One example that particularly comes to mind is face thinness: make a kid in CAS without the overly plump Maxian cheeks, and then age her to Elder, and she'll wind up looking cadaverously thin.  Adjust them so the Elder looks normal and then regress her to a toddler, and she'll be bloated.  This is because the game is using the face templates to help it figure out how to change the features from one age to the next.  (Drives me up a bloody wall, incidentally.)

That is good to know. I did notice, that the toddlers I created in bodyshop and CAS were looking strange, when I aged them up there. I didn´t know, that the facetemplates played such an important role for ingame born sims though. This is another reason to have good facetemplate replacements. I can´t wait for these to be finished. I feel like I have been following this thread for a year. The finished templates look amazing though. Well worth the wait.

[Aggie]

For faces 8 and 18, when I click on the FileHO links, I get this message:

      
   This File has been deleted because of abuse
If you think that this is an error, please contact us.

What the hey? I'm assuming that the links you provided to the other file sharing site will work once that site has finished it's maintenance.

[Nailati]

I love you so much for doing this; thank you.

Just for you, my fellow crazy cat lady.

For faces 8 and 18, when I click on the FileHO links, I get this message:

      
   This File has been deleted because of abuse
If you think that this is an error, please contact us.

What the hey? I'm assuming that the links you provided to the other file sharing site will work once that site has finished it's maintenance.

Huh. That's bizarre. What, they think it's some kind of pirated goodies?

Off to do link maintenance.

EDIT: Added some more mirrors, trashed the FileHO links.

[Aggie]

*click* Baaaaah!

Err, I mean...thanks, Nailati. I appreciate it.

[chintznibbles]

This may be a stupid question, but how many faces have you done altogether?  I mean, I see the seven in the links on the 1st post, but are there more? :p

I ask this because I seem to have downloaded a lot of them in the past and am interested in making sure I have the newest and theoretically most shiny versions (I'm ransacking my download folder in hopes of fixing some Seasons-based conflicts, so I figured I'd try to do some other mod housekeeping/updating at the same time).  Is there a way to, say, download them all at once?

[Gwill]

There are 7 complete sets, with all ages.
All other faces from the game has only been finished for adult, and as far as I understand, just beta versions.

[floopyboo]

Naitali, I would like to give you a bit of feedback, although I am sure you have heard what I'm about to say from many directions already. So far I am seeing a great range of diversity & interesting faces with your template betas installed. I am pleased to say that in a new hood I have already noticed considerable improvements to the pleasantview-default townies. The faces are interesting & diverse without being cariacatures of racial prototypes. I have to commend you for the quality of your defaults thus far.

[polonius]

These templates are fabulous.  I can't get over it - some of my townies turned out to be gorgeous!  There was a nasty surprise for me when one of my sims aged to elder, though - I had forgotten that most of the templates are still adult-only.  I'm pretending that he was involved in some sort of disfiguring accident lol.

I like the way you preserved the distinctive characteristics of each template, so the resulting faces look human instead of like porcelain dolls. 

I hope work is continuing on this wonderful set.  Thanks this is great!  

[Ambular]

Yes yes I know, scary undead red skull dude, but ummm...Naitali?  You still alive?  XD

[cheriem]

Thanks for the waking of the dead Amber as I was just wondering about this as well. 

[Nailati]

Hey, guys. I'm desperately searching for a job and have been without internet access for several months now (I'm writing this from the public library, elbow-to-elbow with the hobos). So I can't work on this project now and to be honest I don't know if it'll ever be finished. Of course you can always help things along by contributing to Nailati's Rent and Cat Litter Fund. 

Y'all are free to take the faces and do with them as you will. A while back I got a pm from someone who wanted to know if they could make some templates based on my #2, and I'll state here publicly what I told them: absolutely. If you use my faces as a starting point for your own, I would very much appreciate credit, but you do what you want.

Later!

Edited due to a momentary lapse of spelling

[ElfPuddle]

You're okay, and that's what matters.

Good luck with the search!

[cheriem]

Exactly!  Here's hoping that things will look up for you soon.  Best wishes.

[Invisigoth]

Here are all of the Nailati faces that I have. I hope that it is okay with her that I've uploaded them but they are so beautiful that it would be cruel to hoard them for myself.
There are several sets of replacement face templates that are meant to "fix" the EAxis faces. At the moment my two favorite sets are by Terrakosmos and
Selzi. Both of those posts have links to tons of other face replacement sets so you shouldn't have trouble finding one that you like.

[Ambular]

Also, if anyone has links to similar but more complete face replacement sets, in the same vein of subtle tweaks to the original faces, I would be very appreciative (though perhaps that's better done as a PM or a new thread). The existing face replacement sets I've come across have been more dramatic changes, often eliminating the variety (for better or for worse) in the original EA/Maxis set, or just plain ugly.

Heh, well, the EAxis originals were kinda ugly to start with, which is the whole point of replacements, so if you go too subtle that's what you're going to get.  XD

Having said that, AllenABQ's set, which was the first to be made, is basically a mild defiglification of the originals:

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=106077&c=1&page=1&pp=50

And I tried to keep some of the character of the originals in mine:

http://www.modthesims2.com/member/showthread.php?t=194488

[Emma]

I use Amber's face replacements and they are great looking without being too pretty-pretty. I like my sims to have some facial character rather than constant good looks.

[jsalemi]

Ditto -- I tried a bunch over the years, but settled on Amber's.

[jolrei]

I haven't used face templates until recently.  Currently I'm using Zazazu's, which have a nice variation in face sizes (or so it seems to me) - not constant large foreheads, small mouths, etc.  Her set also has slightly larger eyes (I think), which I know some folks think is a bit cartoony, but I like it.

[veilchen]

What I like is the mix and match. I think I used faces from just about every talented creator: Selzi, Amber, Nailati, etc. I had the perfect set going in my game. Of course all of that, including all the downloads of the full templates, have gone down with my computer. Stupid computer.

Meh. I will have to do it all over again, but because I know where I got the most templates from, it'll not be that hard. The hardest part was/will be finding the odd little here's and there's. Thanks to Amber and the 'abandoned mods' thread I was able to find quite a few of those back.

[seelindarun]

This is what I do too.  There are some Maxis faces I don't mind, so I don't replace those.  Then, I put in some replacements for those which I only want modified slightly.  Finally there are some I never want to appear, and I choose the prettiest or most interesting version from one of several creators.  I think in total, I have borrowed from around 6 different sets.

Doing it this way does expose my game to some ugly babies from face size mismatches, but it avoids the problem of homogeneity.  I don't fault any of the creators; it's only natural that we each have an individual sense of what we find pleasing and that's bound to be an overriding influence when you try to make up 20+ faces.

I try to resist the urge to give plastic surgery to any of my sims.  I've found that by playing even the ugly ones, I can eventually find something attractive or interesting about them.  What I hate about the maxis uglies is that they're all unbearable in exactly the same way.

[Nailati]

#17 is complete. Thanks to Gwill for doing the SimPE legwork!

(All ages are included.)


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