More Awesome Than You!

I'm working on a set of replacement face templates for my game, which... well, I have high hopes, which pretty much guarantees the inevitable and fiery dashing of said hopes into a jillion pieces. But until then... I'm still working on the first batch of (adult female) faces before importing to CAS to do the whole gender/age cloning process and thought it mightn't be a bad idea to ask - if anyone here has experience with this sort of project - if there are any suggestions you guys think will help me along the way.

I've read the tutorial posts both here and at MtS2 on the physical process of renaming the files and so forth, but does anyone have any "nitty-gritty" suggestions on details like cloning in BS vs. CAS, which age/gender might be better for creating which clone, inevitable pitfalls I should beware, etc.? If I manage to complete this project (and the results don't ubersuck), I'll be more than happy to share the finished templates, but it remains to be seen whether I can slog through it all without my head and/or computer asploding in the process (^_-)

Cheers!
Liz

Well - I'm not sure if this is a tip per se since it's kind of friggin obvious, but make sure the face proportions for both genders are similar. I once came across a problem where the female cheeks were too chubby and the males' were too hollow, and whenever I tried to slim down the female in CAS, her male children would always come out looking like they were sucking in their face or something.

When you get to making sims from which to pull the Geometric Data information, all you need is a toddler of one sex and a child of the other. I did/do a toddler female and a child male. I'd do a household full... six kids to pull the data from and an adult so that the game would allow family creation. That's 3 faces in one family. Name them after their template number. Then go into SimPE and work the extract/replace magic. After those three are done, add the files into your downloads folder and check them in Bodyshop to make sure you didn't goof. It's ridiculously easy to goof them up. The first time through, I replaced the LOD files with the vanilla. The second time, there were a couple that I put the child template on the adult face. It's funny to look at, but not really something you want in your game.

Oh, and make sure that you are making these template families in a junk 'hood used just for that purpose. You'll be deleting a lot of sims from the bin.

As a face template user (I switch out sets when I get bored), I'd just warn in general against making all your faces look too similar.  I don't know if you're doing a theme to it at all (I've seen people go for different ethnicities, or simply "softening" the originals for various sets), but don't be afraid to have some distinctive features.  There is a happy medium between face template one and Carmen Patch, after all.

There've been a few sets I had no interest in whatsoever, because they were basically all the same, and all "pretty."  Bleh.

Hmm.  I'm not entirely sure I follow your procedure there...probably because it's entirely different from how I do it myself.  XD

I usually start in Bodyshop with the original Maxis template for the adult female of whichever template I'm working on.  When she looks the way I want her, I save the Sim, clone her and switch to teen female, make any necessary adjusments, save her, then continue that process down to toddler.  (And then do the same with the males, excluding toddler and child.  I check after each 'family' is complete to make sure all eight Sims bear one another a good resemblance, but I don't get too hung up on matching them exactly.)

Elders I do a bit differently because I can't stand the Maxis elder templates.  I take my finished adult and clone it, then make some minor adjustments: deepen the eyes and the lines around the mouth, pull back the chin, thin the cheeks or the whole face and the lips, add some sag under the jaw, and save the Sim as an adult again.  Then I use the GMDC from that adult to make the Elder template (AFAIK, adults and elders are the only types that have interchangeable face proportions.)  So my elders wind up looking like older but recognizable versions of the adults.

Liz, as far as procedural tips, it's not actually necessary to use CAS at all (unless you want to check out how your faces look in-game before you go to the bother of making them into templates.)  You can use saved Bodyshop Sims just fine--all you have to do is make a note of what age and gender order you saved them in (AF, TF, C, etc.) and then sort your SavedSims folder by date and time of creation.  I find this a lot easier, but YMMV.

I recommend that when you go to import the GMDC for your first template of a particular age and gender, you take note of the filename for the LOD and regular versions of the GMDC and jot it down.  The first part of the filename will be the same for each template of that age and gender, so you won't have to try to guess which one is the regular and which is the LOD with each template you make, which becomes tiresome very quickly.

If you haven't already, you'll probably want to grab Argon's fix (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9028.0.html) fix for archetypes 21 & 25 that allows you to make the full families for those two faces instead of Maxis's crippled adults-only versions, along with terraksomos's replacement template packages for the missing faces a few posts down that thread.

Probably. I have a general aversion to BodyShop. I use it for template making because for some reason they chose not to give us the full range of tools in CAS, but then go into the game to make the family. Then I can name the characters, too, so less notes. That way, also, if I completely bork something somewhere I have two copies of that face floating around.

Pyromaniac - it may be a "friggin obvious" tip, but it's a good one. And a real stumbling block, too! I do *not* love the game's automatic "trans-gender" refitting scheme. Females with a nicely proportioned lower face yield males with sunken cheeks and massive jaws, and males whose proportions I like seem to give rise to puffy-cheeked women whose faces end at the mouth. So frustrating!

Quinctia - I know what you mean about too much similarity, and I'm trying to keep that in mind. Some slots, I'm just trying to soften the original, some I'm just trying to "pretty up", according to my own taste, so that I'll have a few more faces that I personally like in my game. A couple are a bit more "stylized" than the originals, and then there are some where I look at the original, say "Eep, that'll never blend!" and do something completely unrelated in its place. I'm about 1/3 through the adult females and have tried to keep some different ethnicities in the group, as well as making sure there's some variation among the individual features. When I click through the saved sims in Bodyshop, the faces do seem distinct from each other, but I'm trying to at least keep the proportions close enough that their offspring won't be total franken-babies. It's a lot to keep in mind!

Zazazu - thanks so much for the technical advice! *takes copious notes* And using a trashable 'hood is a really good idea. I'm sure I'll goof a translation or two, too - the results should be amusing! And I think I share your general Bodyshop aversion. Naturally, I can't stand the lighting, among other things. But at least it doesn't have my sims making stupid faces at me while I'm trying to tweak their look. It's like, how am I supposed to get that brow the way I want it when every time I move it, the sim goes and raises their eyebrows up into the middle of their forehead? Stand still, you dipweed!

Amber - thanks for the extra details on your procedure. I think I'm working along those lines myself, but your elders method sounds brilliant. I hate what the game does to the elders! I'll have a perfectly lovely adult female going, hit the Elder button, and BAM, she turns into some horribly mutated love child of Skeletor and a chicken. The hell?! So I'll definitely be giving the "tweaked adult" method of elder-template-ing a try.

I'd grabbed Argon's fix for 21/25 but had somehow missed terrakosmos' template files - thanks for the reminder! I also have Argon's fix to allow the "elf" template among the townie population but opted not to have the "alien" face breeding among the general populace without abductions. ;o)


Speaking of which... are you guys familiar with the procedure for making replacement archetypes (if that's the right terminology) for PolTech and PapaPlantsim?

I find this helps immensely with the Bodyshop lighting problem:  http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=220884 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=220884)

Oh, cheers, Amber! Now I get to install and cross my fingers that the template AFs I've made so far don't suffer from "the bar at closing time" syndrome when the lights come on  ;D

This is the only thing I've found: http://www.insimenator.net/showpost.php?p=305669&postcount=14
GroupID for IdealPlantSim is 0x7F56568B

I made a replacement Pollination Tech, some time ago though. I followed a tutorial like the one Gwill linked to. I've had several aliens born since with my new replacement, and it's awesome. One toddler shows promise towards becoming a future pollination technician. I've been thinking about having several Pollination replacements that I switch every generation or so, just to keep things from getting too 'inbred', though making pollination technicians from alien spawn seems more likely to have the opposite effect.

My current pollination tech's facial structure was taken from Starr Goth, offspring of Cassandra Goth and my previous pollination tech. When I lost that PT's replacement file, I made a new one from Starr.
(http://i131.photobucket.com/albums/p282/Lady_Faizah/PollTech-StarrGoth.jpg)

What I'd love is a way to change the PT's hair colour to blond. The majority of my sims have black hair, brown and red competing equally for second - though most of the redheads are townies - but very few are blond. :P (Plus, I like the green/yellow combination.) Although, last I checked, the pollination technician didn't exactly have easily editable DNA like regular sims.

Have you checked out the Multiple Poly Tech mod from MTS2 (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=71852)? Theoretically, you could use the same methods you've alread employed to replace the four with those of your choosing. I used to like it because in an alien-heavy hood they could still breed. In Queen's Cove, the probe only seems to want Edmund Young.

One of the default Multiple Poly Techs has red hair, and she "fathered" the first alien overlord in Queen's Cove. Given that Edmund is black/red for hair, Tre has red hair, big blue eyes, and green skin.

If my memory doesn't fail me, the Pollination Technitian doesn't actually have a DNA file until he has spawned his first face hugger.
I know I edited my PT to have blond genes.  Black is way too dominant.

This is great info on the PolTech, guys - thanks so much!!

Gwill, I took a look at the link you gave, and it looks like a fairly straightforward process. Which probably means it'll whup my ass, lol, but I think I'll be able to give it a shot. Thanks! By the way, your avatar? Too damned cute  :D

I'm still inching my way through the process, but it looks like it's gonna work. Whoot and celebration! Just transposed the info on 01heart's adult female, and she loaded like a charm. Whee! Now I just have to do that a couple hundred more times... (^_-)

Keeping my fingers crossed!

You can find my own CAS face-replacement set here:

http://www.modthesims2.com/member/showthread.php?t=130190

The criticism above about replacement sets that are "too similar" might well apply to my set.  I tried pretty hard to pretty things up and sacrificed some uniqueness for the sake of beauty in the adult females.  Still, I haven't found any sets I prefer to my own.

One piece of advice: Try not to use a default SKIN replacement during the CAS creation face.  For my game, I use either my own (for personal use) modified versions of either Louis or Stefan skins, but either of them are so good that they can overpower the effect of facial structure mods and thus not allow you to see how well or poorly you are doing.  Use the EA default skins during the creation phase.

One more: Don't bother making low-density meshes.  There are still some people using low-def settings, but there are so few, and it is such a HUGE HUGE pain in the ass to do it, and the results still look crappy in low-def, I would just skip it.  It's kind of fun, once in a while, to switch to low-def and see what kind of low-def monkey monstrosities your breeding projects have created some generations later.

Also, one thing I should have done but didn't...  If, after you modify the females to your liking, you find their male counterpart is really goofy looking, don't transfer to the male GMDC.  You don't HAVE to.  You can, in fact, if you want to make the effort (I think it's worth it), fix the males' faces to your heart's content before you transfer the GMDC.  Many of my males turned out looking a little goofy after beautifying their female half.  I could have avoided that.

Another tip -- there is nothing to prevent you from using Milkshape for real special effects.  I've done that in my game.  If you go too far changing a face using Milkshape, you can get some strange side effects, but it seems to work just fine on ears and chins and brows.  The edited effects were fully inheritable.  Try to keep things symmetrical, if you do this.  Some of my Milkshape edited Sims had trouble with their eye animations, so be careful around eyes.

Try to keep your proportions ROUGHLY similar if you can.  This is where the tradeoff between too-similar, too-ugly has to be judged.  If you make the features too different, particularly in the size of head and placement of facial features, you will get really ugly kids. 

Instead of that, to add variety, what I suggest (and this is what I have since done for my own game, although it's not in my download) is try to give some of the faces one particular face feature that is different.  For instance, one with a remarkably narrow nose, or pointy nose, or pointy chin, or rounder face, or slanted brow, or narrower eyes.  It improves the gene pool potential without risking ghastly deformities.

Slightly OT: I mentioned this in another thread here, but if EA wants to improve their inheritance modeling in Sims 3, they would be well advised to fix the "dominant feature" part of the Sims DNA so that even when a feature is dominant (like a nose), it doesn't get misplaced vertically in a "dominant way," i.e., right on top of the nose or between the eyes.  That's the biggest single problem I have encountered with long-term inheritance issues after playing many generations.  One good-looking Sim can be faded into another good-looking Sim using Bodyshop very easily, and the results look great, but breeding them will produce monstrosities if one of them has a dominant facial feature that doesn't line up correctly.

Agreed. I kept the process almost entirely separate for males and females, in fact.  You can always go back and tweak one or the other to preserve their resemblance before transferring the GMDC's if you need to.

On the ones I'm doing right now (I'm working on a super-set of approximately 40 faces for optimal variety) I have 10 base sims that I'm using as my prototypes. Four are totally created in Bodyshop, six are just sims I like that happened over three or four generations of breeding using my old template sims, Bruna's template sims, and I think ...uh... Starlit's? I think those are the last three sets I was spawning off of. Then I'm taking each of those 10 and doing several small variations...messing with just one feature.

I've got a lot of variety in my current 'hood, but switching templates in and out gets old after awhile.  ;)

How are you going to get forty templates into the game?  I found myself limited to the replacing the existing ones in the game because I couldn't see how to mark a template as a new useable default.

Argon has posted instructions and a proof-of-concept 28th template set in the Bowels of Trogdor.  I tried to make a set but alas, it's a bit too awesome a project for me.  :( )

Ah... that truly IS awesome.  I will definitely give that a try if/when the new Simpe comes out. 

That's the kind of thing it would be perfectly safe to do with an old outdated SimPE.

I actually managed to back myself into this whole project by stressing over the not-BV-yet SimPE. Wasn't working for something I wanted to do, decided, feh, I'll just uninstall BV until it's slightly more awesome and start myself a new cleaned-out custom 'hood... then I forgot to remove my DLs folder before the uninstall (D'OH!!). So I looked at it as a chance to improve/embellish/weed out the whole collection and started my DLs from scratch... Finally, days later, with everything shiny and new and about to generate my own townies for a change, some fool part of my brain thought it'd be nifty to have a set of my own face templates to generate 'em from... and now I've finished the first 1/3 of them and I. just. want. to. PLAY the damn game already  :P

Still, it's been a great learning exercise (^_-)

Doc - thanks for the great suggestions. I actually jotted this down before I started: "NOTE TO SELF: Do this without replacement defaults to avoid 'cosmetic' prettification not attributable to the physical process." Heh. Oh, and as you said, I'm so not bothering with low-def versions of these. As far as the "too similar" question goes, personally, I think I have some nice variety, but like you, I've sacrificed some variety in order to keep the proportions relatively, um, proportionate. I kept thinking, while whomping together my adult females, that it might be more varied/realistic to have more of this or that, but when it comes down to it, I'm making this set for myself. I'll of course be more than happy to share if anyone wants, but in the end I had to go with what *I* want. I like sims with eyes that open nice and wide. I like shorter faces and noses that can't be used to open tin cans. The eyes tilt up and down, and brows are arched and straight, noses slope in different directions, and I did make an effort to include some various ethnicities in the mix. But whether it's superficial of me or whatever, I likes my sims the way I likes 'em  ;)

Fortunately, the males I'm coming up with aren't so spazfaced that they can't be "saved" with a little tweaking, and when it comes to elders, if they start to go all sunken/droopy crazy on me, I've been taking Amber's advice and using a less withered adult model instead.


Guys, I can't thank you enough for all the helpful suggestions and advice. I'm going to keep plowing through this tonight (it's 11.35pm now where I live) - with a little luck and a *lot* of caffeine, I may even have this set test-ready by morning. Wish me luck!

(PS: extra/added templates?! yikes! *is cowed by the awesomeness*)

Has anyone found out yet how to reduce the exaggeration of their expressions?  So the eyebrows don't raise too high and the mouth corners don't simper as much?

I assume that'd be more of an animation issue?  Although possibly if you exported the face mesh to Milkshape and tweaked the bone assignments a bit, it might be possible?

/me is totally just guessing based on what she's heard other people say who actually know how to mesh  :p

I would pay big, smacking whomploads of cash (if I, you know, had such a thing ;p) for them to quit with the Stan Laurel routine. Both in CAS and out of it. Especially in CAS, though, it's really hard to tweak a sim's eyebrows when said brows keep making a break for the sim's hairline. And the slackjawed teenager bit is currently tap dancing all over my very last nerve. Yes, I get it. Teenagers have attitudes. Very cute. But it's kind of hard to see what a face is going to look like in-game if, every time you leave it alone for 2 seconds, it starts drooping off the kid's skull  >:(

As far as the project goes, I didn't get as much done yesterday as I'd hoped - man, it takes a long time to make with the copy/paste. On the hugely plus side, I finished building and transposing *all* my template faces! On the not quite so plus, it means I'm in the middle of the part where I decide I don't like about a dozen of the faces as much as I thought I did and decide to do all 12 of them over again. Rassafrassaslowtweakingsoimpatientwannaplay...

But hey, at least when I finally finish my set, I get to start re-binning hair - that'll be superfun!!   ::)

Actually that one was by terrakosmos. As far as tweaking between ages is concerned, wouldn't that only be useful for Sims made in CAS/townies? As far as I know, the children inherit the facial data of the parents, if you have the archetype different between ages it won't make any difference. Does anyone know if that is right or not? :-\

Changing the archetype files has NO effect on the gene pool of already existing Sims.

I'm not sure I understand the question about tweaking "between ages" and how that relates.

That is one of the things I hate about Sims 2. 

I was a Sims 1 fanatic.  Some of us had spent a lot of time figuring out how to make realistic faces for the Sims in Sims 1.  I had it down to an art, using model and celebrity photos and a kind of formula for transforming and warping the photo to fit the various head meshes.  Then along came Sims 2 and the cartoon heads you couldn't work around.  It was so disheartening I quit the game for about a year.

Ya know, I've been pissing around with this game since the beginning.  It's something to brag about, perhaps, but god, what a shame.  I could have done something more useful with my life.

I recall, back in 1983, I had just asked a girl I loved to marry me and been turned down and dumped in the course of a month.  And been layed off.  I had just got a plug-in synthesizer system for my Apple II, and spent about three weeks holed up in my apartment converting Beethoven's 7th Symphony into a computer synthesizer version.  At that time, I had possibly the last half-civil conversation with my father at t.  He dropped by, and I showed him all the work I was doing, excited.  The floor was covered with cigarette butts and cat puke and sheet music photocopies and schematics.  He shook his head, confused and obviously disapproving, and said:

"So what are you going to do with it, sell it?" 

"No.  Hadn't thought of it." 

"Then why are you doing it?"

"Good Lord, it's Beethoven's 7th Symphony!" I said, outraged.  "What further explanation could possibly be necessary!"  End of conversation.

His ghost still haunts me.  I'm sure his ghost doesn't approve of my spending time on Sims.  But shit, Beethoven you just don't mess with.

Any sane person would instantly regret asking such a stupid question.  :P

If you mean installing the templates and then growing up children who existed before you installed them--no, I don't think it will affect how those existing Sims look.  However, due to the way the game uses the templates to blend features in newly-bred Sims, it may have some effect on what their descendants look like.

Thanks for the correction, Argon, and apologies to terrakosmos - duly noted! :)

As far as the "between ages" tweaking goes, I've been working under the assumption that, yes, the actual elder template face will really just be an issue for CAS/townies, but on several of the models, that little difference actually does matter to me enough to make the effort. For instance, my 02base Elder Female... I don't know why, but it didn't seem to matter what I did with the adult female's chin/jaw, when I switched to Elder, that chin/jaw would insist on shrinking away to nothing. Really, the adult/elder tweaks I'm doing aren't so much about what might happen in-game as they're about tweaking how CAS/townies might pop up looking. And as Amber mentioned, given the possibility of template-related blending in game-born sims (unless using "faceBlendLimits off" in userStartup.cheat), I figured it was worth the little extra effort in a few cases to discourage their excessive withering/drooping later in life.

Okay. Phew. Other than some in-game breed-testing, I might actually be finished with my main replacement templates ~ huzzah and premature celebration!!

I'm about to go in and give Papa PolTech & Daddy Plantsim a shot, but one thing I'm wondering... does the alien eye not come up in CAS's debug mode? I've checked but haven't seen it as an option. Likewise, I have the alien, vamp-e-quin, and zombie skintones showing in debug but don't see the plantsim skin. Offhand I'm thinking that since the SporeBaby is by definition coming from a Plantsim parent, the game will know to give the baby the right epidermis and obligatory leaf hair, but shouldn't I be able to rustle those up in DB-mode CAS somewhere? Or are the Group ID numbers given to these defaults somehow informing which skin/hair/eye to use? I'm going to go muck about and see if I can figure it out for myself, but if you guys have any advice, I'd appreciate it.

Doc - I know all too well what you mean about family just not "getting" it. My husband at least understands that there's something he's failing to grasp, but he knows to let me be when I get obsessive over some new technical/creative challenge. And even when he doesn't see the point, he at least gets that I'm pushing myself to learn/accomplish something new and can be pleased for me. My parents, though... not so much  ::)

For the alien eye the Sim must be already using the alien skin tone. The alien eye is in with the other eyes then, because the alien eye is actually more an absence of eye - the black eyes are painted on the skintone. I think it's a dark brown, the CAS eye 'thumbnail' I mean. It looks similar to the other Maxis eye thumbnails, which confused me at first.

Squinge had a hack to stop CAS animations, but I'm not sure it's as powerful as it should be.

I think the Squinge hack just prevents the little routines they go through when you change their personality traits, and possibly the yawn-and-stretch bit when they've idled awhile.  It doesn't seem to stop their expressions from changing or the teenager slump, etc.

Is that what it does?  But those animations are cute and perfectly harmless.
Stupid thing.

Yikes, I... I think I'm done with the templates! Holy crap! I still want to breed for a couple/few generations before I upload the files anywhere, but thank you guys so very much for all your help. I do plan to have some pics to show soon, in case anyone's actually interested in trying them out or just taking a peek.

Meanwhile, I also managed to whump together what appear to be a decent replacement for the Pollination Technician and the Ideal Plantsim. I'll be posting them over in the Peasantry in a few, along with a few pics, so if anyone's interested in testing/using/pointing and laughing, that's where they'll be (^_-)

Cheers!  ;D

If your replacement faces are as gorgeous as your Pollination and Ideal Plantsim then I'm dying to see them ... :o ;D