More Awesome Than You!

All right, I'm stumped, and I know there must be somebody here who's sufficiently into the squishy guts of actual content creation and editing to be able to give me a clue. (Ambular?) I want to make some skintones. I want to start with the highest quality Maxis images I can get my grubby little hands on. So I've located the LIFO files in Sims08.package and so on, but I do not know if there is a way or even a reason to 'Extract' the 6LI files and get them into some format I can edit, or if using 'Export' to PNG is the best I need to do or the best that can be done, and neither Google search (sims 2 lifo, among others) nor the limited searching I can do here (searching on just 'lifo' brings up every thread in which California is mentioned, so I had to use 'lifos' or add extra keywords) has brought up anything useful.

AFAIK, you just extract them to .png.  If there's a better way to do it, I've not come across that information.  Use the biggest ones in there (can't recall if that's the 0 or 1 files offhand.)

LIFO's seem to be a bit of a mystery all around; I'm not sure why they're even used, since they appear to give no obvious advantages over regular TXTR's of the same size and resolution.

Works for me, then. After all the to-do about using actual LIFOs when extracting Stories objects and so on I was expecting something more directly involving them for the best quality recolors too, but then couldn't find a thing. The PNGs are clearly very HQ anyway and about 1/3 the size, plus SimPE gives them meaningful filenames already, so I'm all for it.

I was never able to get LIFO files to link to a scenegraph as LIFO files. They appear to be the source image for the mipmaps used in the scenegraph, that is the TXTR files, and the game will accept TXTR mipmaps with more levels and a parger size, allowing greater resolution characters. But you have to extract the LIFO image and then remake the new mipmap texture from that.

As Amber said, always draw on the largest ones, because you can still reduce resolution later, but if you edit the lower resolution ones, they will not look good as good in a larger resolution.

I always use the LIFO's when working with skintones now.  They're much better-quality than the crap images BodyShop turns out.  In fact, Bodyshop is best used only to create a new, working clone of S4 (as I have heard that clones of the other default skintones sometimes suffer from texture issues,) into which you then import your modified textures using SimPE.  For best results, use DXT5 or even Raw32 compression, especially for darker skintones.  (Just make sure to Compressorize afterward or you'll wind up with ginormous files.)  XD

Thank you both. A lot of that stuff (aside from the technical bits about the LIFOs) I was already aware of thanks to various tutorials (mostly corvidophile's one for making dark skintones without Body Shop destroying the textures), and I'd even made a skintone set and dependent default package that are working nicely and have pretty good actual image quality, but I started from HP's BMPs of her own skintones that she put up for people to download, and eventually I decided that I could not, in fact, live with the scalp mismatch at the back of the neck, so I'm starting over from Maxis.

What's this about cloning S4, though?

You should never use bodyshop to extract. I've done some comparisons, the image resulting from the BMP output in Bodyshop is NOT the same as hand-extracting the LIFO to BMP, so something has gone wrong already.

I'm not even sure whether it still applies, honestly, as I first heard it quite some time ago; whatever BodyShop glitch was responsible may have been fixed since.  But it seems that some skintones that were cloned from S1, S2 or S3 didn't always turn out correctly--they'd have the wrong scalp color or such.  (Dependent defaults are also known to have odd scalp mismatch problems at times, btw, just so you know.)  But since any new skintone automagically gets thrown into the custom bin regardless of what color it's cloned from, and since we know to use the extracted LIFO's and not the files BodyShop spits at us as bases, there's no reason not to play it safe and always clone S4.

I've been leaning more and more in that direction across the board, yes, JM. Or at least not to import anything back INTO Bodyshop if it's the least bit dark-colored; good grief, the hideous-looking dark-colored clothes I've downloaded in my life, and it's not really that much work to export either. Is it also worthwhile to extract textures from custom content with SimPE even though they are not LIFO?

Hm. I've been making my skintones by cloning a template provided by corvidophile2 which identifies the textures by having the purpose (afbodycut, embodysoft, etc etc) actually written on the template texture, so it's much easier to tell which file to import into SimPE to replace it. Do not know what skintone she cloned it from. However, it's not as if I can't make my own, since if I'm just cloning S4 in BodyShop in order to write text on top of it, the textures don't have to be pretty, and it'll be very easy to do. And it sounds like it's time to switch to non-dependent defaults just to be sure I don't end up with ugly mismatch. It was really driving me crazy, every short hairstyle had that problem.

...so much work just to have skintones in default colors I like, with faces that have all the detail I want them to have without being too shiny or having ten different makeup files layered on them. The end result for the HP-based skintones was fantastic aside from the scalp issue, though, and I've got existing default packages for every skintone in the game except the living statue and a tutorial on how to default-replace anything from scratch.

I would say yes.  That's how I've taken to doing it, and I find the results are usually better.  The game just doesn't seem to render dark stuff very well, or it may be a side-effect of lousy compression, but either way, making anything that's really dark and looks good takes a lot of extra work.  (Though even with light-colored items the SimPE method tends to give better results, especially if they're finely textured, bumpmapped, etc.)


The first defaults I ever made were a dependent set, and some Sims wound up having alien scalps with normal skintones.  Looked very weird.  XD  Also, the dependent variety leave you with two copies of the same skintone cluttering your catalog, which I find kind of sucky.  YMMV, of course.

One of my favorite tricks (though this only works if you're more or less happy with the overall coloring of the Maxis defaults) is to edit only those textures that really need changing, then edit the skintone file so that it picks up stuff like scalps and baby body textures directly from the game.  Saves a lot of space and guarantees the best quality textures.  I've also made skintones in pairs where I wanted (for example) the option of men with body hair or without, and had one skin draw everything except the male body textures from the other.


For me most of the fun of the game is tinkering with it to make everything exactly the way I want it.  I hardly ever actually play.  Maybe when TS3 comes out and there's not much new stuff coming down the pipeline for TS2 anymore... XD

Unfortunately for me, I don't like the Maxis coloring at all, so I'll be recoloring everything.

And boy do I know about spending more time tinkering than playing. I want everything perfect before I get seriously started, only it's never actually perfect... but I'm trying to go for quality over quantity this time, and it's better if still time-consuming.

One of these days I really should get around to playing with the stdMatDiffCoef settings in the Material Definitions for the skintones.  I bet a lot could be done to adjust the coloring without editing the textures at all.