More Awesome Than You!

It's not terrible but, once I get into play/live mode, the body textures look nowhere near as nice as they do in CAS.
In CAS the skin is very high resolution, crystal clear and really smooth.  Once I get the sims out of CAS and into play mode, it seems like the skins have been replaced with lower resolution textures or mip maps...Nothing at all like the ones in CAS.
I have a pretty solid computer and get around 150+ fps with all settings maxed, on a normal sized lot with a couple people, so it's not due to lacking hardware or graphics card (4870x2). 
Has anyone else noticed this distinct drop in sim quality outside of CAS?  Is there a difference in how they render the two states which would cause such a drastic quality difference? They would look really amazing if the quality carried over to play mode.

I should note that the quality isn't literally terrible or unbearable.  The textures just look disappointingly dull once they're out of CAS.

Lrn2Srch?

http://linna.modthesims.info/download.php?t=343769

 :)

It wasn't a mod I was looking for.
I wanted to know about the default skins and if other people were experiencing the same thing with the quality difference because the CAS skins are so amazing that no mod would be needed if they were used at their full resolution in-game.

Lrn2Read?

Anyone have anything useful to bring to the conversation?  :P

I've noticed it too, even with HP's new default skins.  I'm not sure why this is, but it seems that the game runs with higher graphics settings in CAS mode.  The lighting of the faces, in particular, seem more stark in CAS, so it may be that they temporarily reset shadows and lighting to Highest in CAS.  In mygame, I have been using Sim Textures at Highest and everything else Low.

Perhaps you also noticed how much better the Sims looked in the start up video.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about. 
After playing a little more, I've noticed that the weather lighting effects are really terrible as well. Even at highest detail, the sims look completely dull and even worse at certain times of day (pink/purple morning anyone?).  I'd much rather use what's available in the game rather than use that mod, or any mod.  I hate the work people do on skintone faces...It scares me more than the original skin tones.  ::)
Does any tech savvy person have any idea what the difference is? I mean, in CAS, do they possibly use much higher quality meshes and textures?  Or is it purely the lighting. I'd love to see a way to force the same settings, if it's at all possible.

Anyone actually know this stuff?

Pretty much. The lighting in TS3 is absolute ungodly shit.

There is a system of swapping out low-res textures for higher-res ones once you close in to a certain distance, which might be a factor if you're not zoomed in really fucking close on your Sims all the time. Sims generally always have looked better in CAS, what because of all the zooming in.

I don't like the lightning either, shadows look too dark, especially on objets inside rooms. Now that you mention it it might be possible for them to use different skins in CAS than in game. But then again, I think they just used very small textures on lots of objects, not just sims. The cheap fridge looks particularly pixelated. And sometimes clothes too show pixellated areas here and there. The night sky also seems to have the different colours set in layers without blending between then. But then again it could be my videocard.

To tell the truth, from what I've seen, most of the graphics are worse than The Sims 2. Even the Plumbobs were better in 2!

The global lighting in 3 is pretty weird. Part of the reason the CAS view looks so good is because it's set up like a photo studio, with several bright lights evenly illuminating the sim. If you turn your sim around so his back is facing you, though, you can see the shitty lighting in the mirror reflection. It wreaks absolute havoc on the face. If you put a sim in a room and face him toward a handful of bright, white lights, you'll get a decent illumination. Take him outside, and it falls apart.

The lighting, in my opinion, actually looks quite good where objects, terrain, and structures are concerned. But it seems exceptionally flat and dull on a sim's face. Two games I can think of off the top of my head that have a similar effect are Everquest 2 and Oblivion. Whenever the sky goes overcast, the lighting changes and you get that same flat lighting on the face that shades the geometry in weird ways and makes a big mess.

The textures shouldn't have that much of an influence on the look of the face in-game as there's not much going on in the default skin texture to begin with. There'll be banding in the gradients, sure, but there's not much detail (pores, fine lines and wrinkles, blemishes, etc.) there to lose clarity.

I do not know why sims' faces seem to take the lighting so poorly, but I do hope someone will be able to modify it in the future.

I've made the mistake of loading up TS2 today after a few weeks of TS3. I say "mistake" because I think that might have spelled the end of me and TS3. The 'look and feel' in TS2 is so much better than TS3 it's ridiculous. I hadn't played TS2 in a couple of months, and I'd forgotten a lot of little details, like the fact that hair was actually animated. And that my Sims are able to look different from each other. And attractive.

I'm suddenly far more invested in completing a half-finished medieval TS2 'hood I'd started a couple of years ago than dealing with the TS3 crapfest any further. The only thing I'm going to miss (and have gone to reach for a few times) is, of course, Create-A-Style. I would have paid the damn fifty bucks for EA just to cram CAST into TS2 and call it a day.

Glad to see I'm not alone in sticking with TS2. ;D

I just got around to installing Sims 3 for the first time (a couple of days ago, to avoid confusion)....I had to keep checking if it actually said Sims 3 because the graphics were SO similar, it looked as though it could have been an expansion.  I don't think I've ever seen a game come out YEARS later and still have the same graphics engine....only it's far worse on most people's systems.
I hadn't been playing Sims 2 for awhile so I am not missing it but, I'm totally unimpressed at this point.
As was mentioned, the thing that has totally blown me away (in a good way) is CAST. But, once I started actually playing, I felt like I was playing Sims 2 again with far worse lighting. Even the sims are just as ridiculously stupid as they were....or worse since I had no mods to de-stupidify them, ha.

All of the process of making them has been really vamped up, and the same with building...But once I started playing, I was totally unimpressed with the way everything looked and felt.  
When I saw the skin tones in CAS, I was really stoked, thinking they'd carry over into the game but they're nothing like what you get when you start actually playing.  It's terrible how ugly they look.

I have to say that Sims 2 CAS looked very similar to the Sims in the game, at least on High settings.  The quality was the same in my experience.
Does anyone think it would ever be possible to figure out what happens to the bodies once they leave CAS?  Can we force the loveliness upon live Sims? Demand that they remain pretty?  ::)

 ??? Is anyone else confused? You made this thread and hinted that you were playing but then you went and said this. Am I missing something?

And yes, I've noticed the same issue. The sims I made in CAS were good looking but once I got them into game I sat glaring at the screen wondering what the hell just happened. There's so much detail loss that they don't even look the same. I guess it is for the better though, CAS seems to be famous for making video cards over heat and the exceptional detail is likely the cause. If we had that in game, there would be more crashing and lag unless you had a super computer. Though it might not be higher detail, it could be the zoom and lighting. They really screwed up the lighting on this one. I have to have a million lamps in one room or it's so damn dark.

I meant just *recently* got around to installing (as in recently within the last few days), not just today.  :D
I went ahead and amended my previous point to avoid further confusion though I never expected to run into any.  ::)

Am I one of the only ones that has zero complaints about the lighting and the textures? I have a very high-end graphics card backed by tons of ramz and I've never noticed any problems with my textures OR my lighting; in fact, I'm really happy with my lighting...in TS3 for me it's like GunMod's raidiance (dDefinder ed.) is built into the base game here. I'm not at home so I can't provide screenshots right now but later on when I'm home I'll provide examples - it may possibly be shader settings on your graphics cards that are causing your game to look a bit less than schmick.

In summary: ewe needs moar ramz and grafiks.

It must be a matter of taste..
I have been playing a lot of very highly graphical games that are absolutely stunning...I realize that this may be why everything looks so dull and plastic to me with the Sims.

There will always be some who have no issue with the terrible anti-harmonious lighting colors.  ;)  The thing is, I like my green floor to look green, always.  Not completely purple in the morning, navy blue in the evening or anything other than said green color. 
That's just me, though.  ::)

What graphics card do you have, Kiki? Sims 3 has made me decide to look into upgrading my three year old card.

Amen, amen.

Have played it on an NVIDIA 8800 GTX OC, 9600 GT, and GTX 280. I'm not sure how RAM is going to make graphics looks better, but all machines have 4gb or above. Generally using a 1920X1200 widescreen. I've tried a variety of in-game and NVIDIA control panel settings. The game continues to look like ass, particularly the sims and their portraiture. As mentioned, though, personal taste is also involved.

 Indeed. Good to know it isn't just me, then.
Does anyone know anything about lighting adjustment?  What would make a world of difference in this game would be the ability to turn off the ambient shaders?  As in, go back to the good old days where it was just light and dark and no failed attempts at creating ambiance.  It would be amazing to see light changes, just no color changes. Anyone know if that's possible?

 I hate to have to run over to MTS and ask. 

I have a gaming laptop with an Nvidia 9800 GTX in it that has 1 GB of DDR3 ramz on its own but can borrow another 1 GB worth of ramz from my system ramz if it wants to, depending on how little is actually being used by the system - for TS3, it takes the extra so I'm essentially running a 2 GB graphics card for the game.

Spore seems to have the same problem with textures being crisp during creation, but very muddy during gameplay. I agree, though. This restriction is retarded, seeing as many PCs far outdo the system reqs.

I bet that it's just an unmodifiable setting that bring things down to a certain level. The textures are there, they just aren't being used to their potential.

Yeah, I hear ya...especially the Neighborhood view. (or is it Edit Town now?)

To clarify what I was saying....I meant keep the light changes from day to night (and in between) as they are. Just take out the horrid colors. Nothing too fancy. That would suffice to make it bearable for me.

Kiki mentioned Gunmod's Lighting hack, and that is what I was reminded of, as well.  Gunmod experimented with different tweaks that changed the lighting of the game.  I suspect there is a more sophisticated lighting configuration used in CAS than in-game.

I tried boosting my graphic specs in TS3 setup to see if it would make the faces look like they do in CAS.  No, it doesn't.  There was an improvement, but it didnt' look nearly the same -- still very puddin'ish, just crisper, better defined puddin'.  And slow.

Tip for those not blessed with high-end cards: The best improvement of Sims appearance versus speed lag cost seems to come from boosting Sims Texture Detail to HIGHEST.  Lighting, shadows and reflection have less payoff and they lag the system more.   I suggest keeping everything else at lowest setting and pushing the Sims Texture Detail as high as you can go without lagging your system.

My only complaint thus far graphics wise would probably be that no matter how hard you work your sim, they will never get abs; seriously, I was very disappointed.

Though I have noticed the occasional texture fuck up- when playing around with terrain I get mysterious flying water and of course the already establish texture issues when sims face water. Other than that, I think it looks great; and my PC has no where near the awesomeness which you described Kiki. How much did that laptop set you back?

$1500 USD at the post-xmas sales at Best Buy, plus I haggled for it. Retails non-sale for about $2100 USD.

I have an extremely high end system, and with everything maxed and getting a solid 60fps, I can see a noticeable difference in the CAS and main game. They look better in CAS, I do not however think it is lighting, I would rather say its how they set their rendering engine up.

This. I think the same.
The lightning is better overall, but they're definitely rendered worse. I have every graphic setting on the highest possible end, and still they looked better in TS2. Anyway, we Mac users are plagued as usual by no smooth edges + no shadows, in addition; I'm sort of used to graphic suckiness in game ports.

While I agree that Sims look worse in game than in CAS, I have to agree with Kiki in that I think the lighting and general texturing is exceptional.  I find myself waiting for the morning light to start filtering through the windows, just because it looks so neat.  Unlike Kiki, I don't have a system that will make you jealous - my system is 2 years old, featuring 3gig of RAM and an Nvidia 7600GS, and the game runs effortlessly with all settings set to maximum (except for trees, I just don't care enough about trees to turn them up beyond medium). 

Aw, I actually came here looking for a camera hack and this thread is what the search came up with. I guess that answers my question, then. :/

I didn't want to pay $50 for the game, now I'm supposed to buy a $1500 system to get it to look right?

I don't think so.

I wouldn't say that's extremely high-end.  Maybe high-end, though. I get a solid 150 fps maxed out.  ;D

A lot of really good LCD monitors won't go over 60FPS. My system is pretty damn high-end (quad processor, 8GB RAM, 2x GeForce GTX 295 videocards), but I never go over FPS because my monitor (equally high-end) doesn't support anything higher - ironically, generally the higher quality/res the LCD, the lower the refresh rate.

And with completely maxed settings, my game handles perfectly smoothly but still has really shitty-looking lighting in game (in CAS, it's fine). I think the in-game camera has a tendency to fuck up the saturation too much, especially at dusk/dawn.

I've never heard of that...I know that refresh-rate can limit your fps, as can v-sync.  It very well may be true. 60 fps is pretty common as a stopping point for things like refresh-rate and v-sync.
Alright then, pissing contest has come to an early end, I guess. ;)
That's no fun at all.

I've been complaining about the lighting since day 1.
I don't think the textures look bad, they look better than Sims 2... I think.  I'm running a 9800GT with all settings max.
The lighting makes sim skin turn a slight reddish hue in the shade (especially pale sims), and detail is reduced.  It turns their eyes inky black and blush looks like bruises.  In full sun, it makes white hot spots on their faces.  In general, it makes them look creepy.  I don't think better skin textures will help much unless something is done about the lighting.
My sims do look a lot better indoors with night lighting.
Their pie menu face always looks sooooooo much better.

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing the blush looks like bruising.  It looks so much better in CAS and I have it working on 2 separate super computers... one with 19" monitor the other with a 24".  Another thing that is noticeable is the splotchiness of the skin for close up shots.  I tried to take an infants picture and it's skin was not smooth at all - it was striped and splotched... I've never seen a striped baby... maybe a splotched one, but not striped.

Do you all have the sim detail on very high? On high makeup smudges and pixelates. On very high I've noticed no issues outside of CAS, except when outside. Then I just get splotches again.

I have everything on high.  The scenery is stunning, the Sims are blah.  They simply don't look as good as they do in CAS.  As mentioned by zolabee the blush looks like bruising and the skin is splotchy when up close.  I don't think that I've noticed smeared makeup at all.  Also, like GnatGoSplat mentioned, the pie menu picture always looks much better than the Sim.

I have 4 GB 800Mhz RAM using XP & dual 8800 GT 512MB video cards.  I've run the game in SLI mode and in single GPU mode and it does not seem to make a difference at all in the gameplay or the graphics.  My gameplay is very smooth.  No noticeable lag at all.

I thought the Sims looked much better in CAS than in the Sims 2 when I first played it, and I was excited. There was so much detail, especially on the body and the face. But then I loaded the game and...

 :o

They looked like mutant iguanas that had crawled out of the pits of fucking hell. I noticed my morbidly obese sim looked fine, but my skinny guy looked awful. It was even worse because he didn't have a fat face. And the sims profile pictures look like lifeless mannequins. While I do like the Sims 3 over the Sims 2 overall (integrated neighborhood, CAST, fast loading times), the Sims look terrible aesthetically. Their smiles make them look retarded, and their facial expressions are over exaggerated. I could make good looking sims in the Sims 2 easy, even without CC, and when they smiled, it actually looked natural, not creepy like in this game.

I'm quite disappointed with that. The Sims look terrible. The males got the real shaft in this game. No good clothes or hair and it's impossible to make a good looking male sim. They all look way too feminine. Luckily, the MTS3 facial slider mod has helped quite a bit with this, but the sims still look god awful in-game.  :-\

ur doin it rong!

There have been some good male sims made here at MATY, if popular opinion here means anything.

Is that some self promotion  :D

The graphics look great in my game, if I don't move the camera at all.  :-\ Baby with stripe in his head would love to get that fixed. Babies in general remind me of Baby Jesus (asdfjkl;). I've been buying cakes to age them up right away just because of those two things. As for sliders, awesomemod can make anti-pudding men, why is anyone even using anything less?

Agreed, the male sims are the only ones that look halfway decent in Sims 3.  Well, at least where pre-made ones are concerned and honestly, I can't say I've seen anyone's custom-made female sim that was a "must have".

HP's defaults look ten times worse than the game skins, in my opinion.  Everything she feels she has fixed is a massive decline for me.

I get it too.
I think that the character models are more angular in-game than in CAS. Not much, but jawlines can become sharper and squarer.
CAS used to crash my game before I updated drivers, so the higher resolution CAS models would appear to be quite strenuous on the video card...

As for the HP skins, well, I didn't notice much difference apart from the nipples.

There are some.

http://i648.photobucket.com/albums/uu209/faceplug/HP-EA_comparison.jpg

Take the lips were HP are more natural and the skin is also with imperfections.

Egad!  I don't need more imperfections.  The skin on my Sims already looks splotchy up close. 

I need a smoother skin texture with better shadowing to give more definition to the Sim. 

How about in-game comparison shots?  Most people post CAS shots, but as we all know, the sim hardly ever looks like that.

There are pictures in the "Share Pix" thread that are ingame (there is an example of weird lighting issues as well as a picture of a woman in a tub that just perfectly demonstrates everything I find wrong with her skins).

(http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/385/screenshothmw.jpg)

"Happy birthday to me...  BUT I WANT BRAINS, NOT CAKE!"

That's with HP's skins installed, although children get the unmodified EA skins.  They're all just awful.  It's a graphics lighting issue, and I'm not sure any new default skin can fix that.  (Where is Gunmod when we need him most!)

I'm anxious to get new tools so I can make my own default skins with heavier contour shading.

This lighting problem really is a huge bummer.  I know it prevents me from experiencing the relaxed sense of immersion I felt with Sims 1 and Sims 2 because these Sims are just so ghastly looking.  There is no point in zooming in for a close-up of their expression, because all you can see is a blobby zombie face jiggling like room-temperature flan.  And, by the way, notice how HARD IT IS to zoom in?  That's a different issue.  It's difficult to get the camera just right to get an actual good look at anything.  Which may be a blessing, I guess.

This mod makes the free camera much more manageable: http://www.digitalperversion.net/gardenofshadows/index.php?topic=12179.msg344565#msg344565 (http://www.digitalperversion.net/gardenofshadows/index.php?topic=12179.msg344565#msg344565)

Oh Annie, cheer up. The sun will come out tomorrow!

In other news, I got the HP skins and I don't care for them. It makes the sims look even worse. The "imperfections" look like blobs of crap. What's with the big color difference on the forehead of females? I'm going to remove them soon unless I want to pretend my sims forehead got attacked with bleach. I only got them for the hair on the males and it's blurry.

I tried HP's replacements too, and didn't care for them...

I have a REALLY hard time believing this is an issue of "get better hardware". I'm running with 8GB corsair dominator RAM and ATI Radeon 4870x2 gfx card on 1680x1050 res, everything maxed and running perfectly smooth. I have hardware to spare.

Regardless of all of this, my once lovely looking CAS created Sims go from looking fantastic and remotely human and attractive by Sims 3 standards, to Miss PlayDough '09 the second I load them up in game.

Case in point:

(http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j218/phrynia/missplaydough2009.jpg)

gross. In CAS they're infinitely cleaner and crisp looking and you can actually make something that looks good. In game they turn to mush even at full settings, and the shit-tastic lighting that miraculously turns every skintone into some horrific shade of mystic tan day-glo orange doesnt help. Its pretty similar to the blurring that covers every bedspread, fabric, or texture when actually placed in-game. Sims 2 looked worlds better, which is pretty pathetic.

I use HP's replacements for the record... like everything else, they're great in CAS and way better than the defaults, but the second you go ingame it looks almost worse because of the game's apparent inability to handle detailed textures, which results in a smudgey mess that makes my sims look like zombies or burn victims. Lets not even go into toddlers/children. That shit is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Wow, The different is huge.

Many people said TS3 is a hunger of resources game, and many people already complain about the slowness and low framerate.

I can't iimagine if the lighting and texture in CAS applied in the game. It will be very very slow....for many people who has slow computer.

Do you think the lighting and texture setting is broken? Like Story Progression option?

May be someone need to take a look and fix it.

It wouldnt be hard to have a decent slider for textures/lighting. There are alot of people with gaming computers that could more than handle a much higher graphical load than max-setting sims 3 in live mode currently offers.

There is a "slider", its options that control the levels of detail.

I taken a look inside GraphicsRules.sgr and I have NO IDEA why the hell CAS looks one way and ingame things look different ... see for yourself ...

option SimQuality
   setting $Low
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimLODDistances "2, 8, 15, 100"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimTextureSizes "512, 512, 256, 128"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimUseSpecular  "0, 0, 0, 0"
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapWidth 1024
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapFilteringEnabled false
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSinglePassShaderEnabled true
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSimpleHairShaderEnabled true
        prop $ConfigGroup CASRenderTargetSize  512
        prop $ConfigGroup MinSimLOD 1
   prop $ConfigGroup ActiveLODLimit 200
   setting $Medium
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimLODDistances "5, 25, 75, 150"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimTextureSizes "1024, 1024, 256, 128"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimUseSpecular  "1, 1, 0, 0"
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapWidth 1024
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapFilteringEnabled true
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSinglePassShaderEnabled true
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSimpleHairShaderEnabled false
       prop $ConfigGroup CASRenderTargetSize  1024
      prop $ConfigGroup MinSimLOD 1
   prop $ConfigGroup ActiveLODLimit 200
   setting $High
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimLODDistances "5, 30, 85, 250"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimTextureSizes "1024, 1024, 256, 128"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimUseSpecular  "1, 1, 1, 0"
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapWidth 1024
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapFilteringEnabled true
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSinglePassShaderEnabled false
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSimpleHairShaderEnabled false
       prop $ConfigGroup CASRenderTargetSize  2048
      prop $ConfigGroup MinSimLOD 1
   prop $ConfigGroup ActiveLODLimit 200
if ($isMac)
   if (match("${cardVendor}", "ATI"))
           prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapFilteringEnabled false
           prop $ConfigGroup CASSinglePassShaderEnabled true
   endif
endif
   setting $VeryHigh
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimLODDistances "25, 50, 100, 1000"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimTextureSizes "2048, 2048, 512, 128"
       prop $ConfigGroup RenderSimUseSpecular  "1, 1, 1, 1"
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapWidth 1024
        prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapFilteringEnabled true
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSinglePassShaderEnabled false
        prop $ConfigGroup CASSimpleHairShaderEnabled false
       prop $ConfigGroup CASRenderTargetSize  2048
      prop $ConfigGroup MinSimLOD 0
   prop $ConfigGroup ActiveLODLimit 200
if ($isMac)
   if (match("${cardVendor}", "ATI"))
           prop $ConfigGroup CASLightMapFilteringEnabled false
           prop $ConfigGroup CASSinglePassShaderEnabled true
   endif
endif
end

I actually suggest that you try them out.  While I'm not particularly a fan, I think these skins look quite nice.  I have a feeling that I'm not alone so, I say, try them out and see for yourself.


Great, great comparison screen.  i actually never took such an in depth look, though I knew they looked terrible.  This is unmitigated proof! Thanks for that.

If we look at the Very High setting above:


There's CAS word in it, Does it mean only applied in CAS only?
And in the real game, those setting above is disabled.




Does it mean the ATI card doesn't support "CASLightMapFilteringEnabled". What it means with Light Map Filtering? Is it bad to be disabled?
I have ATI Radeon 4850, does it mean nVidia card better?

Look at the difference in the angles of the lips and lower eye lids in the comparison shots. :o

No wonder I kept going back to CAS and reducing the lips..

Yes, its the texture size but if you look the texture size for CAS and close up ingame is the same, there are settings for how close the Sim is since its a waste of resources to display 2048 textures zoomed out.


No, you missed "if ($isMac)" were that is only applied on Mac computers.

I guess its disabled because of drivers issues on the Mac.

That bad, huh? Avoid the painted faces like the plague if they are anything like the ones that were so popular in Sims 2.  Scary.

When you tried them out, did they look any different to you than the original (vanilla) ones?  What was it that was worse in HPs, in your opinion? 
I'm just wondering out of pure curiosity, what it is that seems to make them look worse.
 
I don't like not being able to actually view the contents of the mod package to check out what these skintones actually look like as textures.

What happens is that in real virtual life the sims have a neutral face, while in CAS they are smiling, if you make them look neutral in CAS, that's the effect you get in gameplay, once you set CAS to a neutral face you can see how really the lips will end looking like.

Just to make certain - I had all graphics turned up when I began my game but I still had to manually turn up the "Sims Quality" so that may be a factor as while my sims have some weird texture to a degree, they are not nearly as blotchy as the pic above.

Regarding the skin, I go back and forth on whether or not I like it.  I think they did a very good job of making the male skins look as though there is an element of body hair on the arms and chest especially. The underarms are a little weird. 

I'm having a bit of a difficult time with the lips still - another reason I want me some Awesomemod (trying to wait as long as possible for the mod's shininess to be fully polished) and sometimes the skins just aren't attractive.

Speaking of attractiveness, there's something that's been nagging me but is growing each day. 

That is, the fact that when I play Sims2 - I'm especially good at making any teen females(and up) look downright physically beautiful, which makes me want to play that sim a lot more.  I'm having a difficult time finding/creating beauty out of any born-in game sim.  This, paired with Story Progression making my grown kids disappear, is really starting to affect my Sims3 love.  Either I'm just not getting it yet or the makeup in Sims3 is lacking in it's ability to make a sim look better.

There's no reason not to go ahead and get Awesomemod. It won't destroy your game.

There is no point in "waiting" for it to be more polished. AwesomeMod is an ongoing development and will remain such, presumably, for the next 4-5 years.

What do you mean with manually turn up the "Sims Quality"?

Do you mean we still can tune up the graphic setting of Sims model beyond EA setting? Can you share us a trick for it?

I think they meant that all their graphics sliders IN sims were up, except sim quality maybe got toggled lower somehow and they upped it.

That said, I did get a nice little boost to AA and some better lighting on sim skins after I went and fooled around with my graphics card settings in Nvidia Control Panel, or whatever the advanced graphics settings are now. Really love the visual quality of my game, and my performance has taken no obvious hit.

But my computer is a monster, YMMV.

(Preview button =/= post button.)

I played around with my graphics settings to see what would give me the best bang for the buck in terms of better looking sims, and the slider that seemed to help the most was setting Sims Quality (middle/bottom right slider) to VERY HIGH.  If you're tweaking your settings, that's the very first place to start.

Lighting came second in terms of improvement.  There was a substantial lag impact from boosting that.  The best improvement came from the highest setting, which had the worst impact, so I just leave that completely off. 

My graphics card is old, so it's considered low-end now: an ATI 9700 w/256mb on card.

The comparison shot I posted was with graphics all set on maximum.... like i said in my original post. Theres no slider to increase - everything is as high as it will go. It is very zoomed in and played on an extremely high resolution - from afar, the smudgeyness isnt as noticable. I also noticed when playing on my sisters laptop, which plays on a much lower resolution, the difference isnt as obvious because the CAS sims dont look as good to begin with. Dunno.

 My video card is an ATI HD4370 x2 and my computer is godly, so its certainly not a hardware issue. All drivers are up to date. I suppose i can play around in catalyst a bit and see if anything changes.

Also, these arent default skins.. again. They are HP's replacements. Great looking in CAS, FAR superior to default.. turn to blurry smooshy messes in live. The defaults are way lower quality, so there isnt much to ruin when it comes to cas vs live there. It seems the better the original texture, the more it gets destroyed in live vs cas.. it blows at rendering fine detail.

Gah... well unless and until they fix this, any of the fine detail work I did for TS2 for male body hair on the skin tones would be completely useless applied to TS3.

Do you think the poor quality of skin texture is because of video card RAM?

Mine has 512MB of RAM, and the skin texture look bad in dark skin. There's an artifact on the skintone, something like skin disease, or import/exported multiple times from TS2 bodyshop.

Does anyone here has 1GB of video card RAM, do you still get artifact on the dark skintone?

I also download custom skintone and the quality is one step lower than EA original. I get artifact in bright skintone that I never get when using TS3 original skintone.

To me it looks to be pure and simple better skin and hair shader in use in CAS.

In CAS you see individual specular highlights coming from what appear to be more than one light. In-game I never really see much specularity on the skin except from the global light and when its not directly in front of your Sim you get a bleed around issue for faces of the model that are almost parallel with the light direction. So in eye sockets that should be dark you will sometimes get the specular showing up from the sun being behind them. Same effect can easily be reproduced in CAS as well if you spin your sim to face the mirror you see a fugly lighting on the face with bleeding effect occur.

Do the artifacts look jagged?  Perhaps they are shadows.  Like this.

(http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/2922/screenshot5wke.jpg)

Not sure why they look that bad.  I gave up and turned lighting&shadows to low.  High lighting just slows the game down and it makes the Sims look weird, with little boxy squares around their noses and ears. 

Also, I noticed the darker skin tones are terrible as well.  In fact, I have a very hard time wanting to use them because it just looks so terrible.  My Sims 2 neighborhood was filled with all types of skin tones, at least as many darker complexions as white.  I find myself using the lightest color that could be considered "black" and then putting ethnic hair and the like because, as Shazaam mentioned, they look diseased and blotchy the darker they get, unless you use pure black.

I have noticed the same ridiculous shadow pixelation too, Doc Doofus.  I never actually considered turning them down lower, though. I'll have to try that out.

Heh, the pixelated shadow looks like something out of an old Sega arcade game.  I'm glad to know I'm not the only one seeing that.  I wondered if it was just a shitty graphics setting.

I noticed it at first when I saw the weird little square artifacts on their faces, especially around the nose and the ears.  I think they are just shadows being rendered in the same pixelated manner.

Like others have said, I think its just shadows. For whatever reason there is positively no difference between low and high shadow settings -- on high I still get the same pixelated, blocky edges. You can see an example of it on the shoulder of the sim in the screenshot I posted, as well as around her lips and nose. My video card has 2GB ram, so I doubt that has anything to do with it. Really sounds like a bug to me.. hopefully we can get a patch soon.

There is no separate option for adjusting shadows and light which has made me hesitant to use it.  Minx, you mention that there's no difference in quality. Do you mean if you turn the "lights and shadows" on the low setting?  I didn't notice much of a difference but,  I was expecting it to look worse so I turned it back up to high in the end.  Is it really not noticeable enough to bother with using high?

Another thing is that normal shadows look fine most of the time.  Shadows on the ground from objects are smooth and normal. That just makes it hard to believe it could be hardware related (RAM or otherwise).  Otherwise, it would probably go for all shadows and not just sim related ones.

Turning up smooth edges smoothed out the shadows a bit for me but they were still blocky. I only went up to medium admittedly. Both shadows and smooth edges up just slowed the game to a crawl with my crappy card so back down both went.

Shadows don't really get very blocky if you have smooth edges turned up to max.  However, it doesn't seem to help the lighting.

Here's a comparison of in-game lighting vs. pie menu face:
(http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y15/GnatGoSplat/Sims/sims3_weirdlighting.jpg)

Indoor lighting is not too bad, but the outdoor lighting is way too harsh and at night, subtle color/shading is heavily darkened.

Interesting. This might be a driver/video card issue then. I still have the blocky shadows with everything maxed. I'm running an ATI Radeon HD4870x2, latest drivers. I'll have to try it on my boyfriend's computer and see if theres a difference.

I'm curious, does anyone actually know what the difference between high quality and low quality lighting?  I mean, what is the difference in rendering that would cause one to be less taxing on the system than another?
The only thing I can think of is how the light reacts to objects and not the actual light and darkness.  So, if you looked around you at the room, it might not be too drastically different, but if you looked at a bunch of objects it may be quite noticeable.  Does anyone know if that's what it is, or if it's something else completely that makes the difference?

I may well be wrong here (I am still learning how to program graphics).  However, if I understand correctly the reason low end systems display blocky shadows is the size of the area illuminated by each ray computation for the light.  The larger the area of effect for each computation the fewer computations needed for each frame and the blockier the shadow.  The smaller the area illuminated by each ray computation the more gpu cycles used each frame and the slower the system will run, however, the more realistic the shadow.   The system has to calculate each "ray" of light and what it collides with.  In low end systems the rays are larger to reduce the lag.  However, with the larger the ray the more likely it is that part of a ray will hit an object which the system then interprets as blocking the ray and the next object in line gets shadow instead of light, even though it should have been lit.  This is why object lighting on low end systems is sometimes wonky.