More Awesome Than You!

I dinked around with making a new default face last night.  I hate the pudding faces.  I wanted to see if I could make a more contoured face, meaning, more deliberately colored in dark and light areas on the face to represent lighting, since the in-game lighting tends to make everything look like a blob.

This is not for download, obviously.  It's just an experiment at this point.

Here's part of the problem.  This is the default game face (the light one).  As you can see, it really DOES look like pudding.  There is little real detail drawn into it at all, relative to the TS2 skins.  This may, in part, be attributable to the fact that the game conceptually should generate contour detail through the lighting.  Which it fails at.  And it also may be attributable to EA's penchant for cartoonishness.

(http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/697/faceziz.jpg)

The body skins are even less detailed.  Even HP's improved nipply skins.

Now here's an EA default face in CAS (which, remember, shows faces in a better light than the actual game).  This is a YA with skin at the lightest setting.

(http://img66.imageshack.us/img66/2606/screenshot15s.jpg)

Now here is the adult version of the same face, with some contouring.  What I did, and it is sloppy at this point and purely experimental, is I tried taking one of Stefan's old TS2 faces that I liked and twisting and contorting it until it would fit into the new TS3 configuration.  Of course, it's darker, and it doesn't match the rest of the body.  And this is Adult, not YA, like the previous pic. 

(http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/6483/screenshot14a.jpg)

(http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/6431/screenshot13r.jpg)

The eyes need a lot more work because they didn't line up well at all.  The visible crease on the cheek is supposed to be the inner corner of the eye.

I find the coloring very off-putting. Looks kind of like fake n' bake sim barbie. Maybe an in-game shot would look better?

I have to agree that the color looks quite a bit like fake tan.  That might be accentuated by the contrast between the face and body, but I don't think the color will appeal to me.

At least it looks slightly more human than the default ones. color can be tweaked, but detail in the skins is truly necessary.

I don't know. I mean, it looks better, definitely. But I think that tone you made is way too dark to be a light (or one of the light) skintone(s) in the game. I think you're definitely on the right track, though. Maybe you could lighten the skin to the same degree as the pudding skintone so it matches, and then post a picture. The color does look like a bit of a 'fake barbie tan', like people were saying. It might look better on a darker overall body skintone though.

Look, kids, all he's doing right now is proving concept.  If he can make the concept work, then he can fork with the tone issues after.

It's a good start; I look forward to see what more can be done with this... and hopefully, a not-shiny-at-ALL version will be available once the underlay principle is perfected.  *hates shiny skins*

I like it. It looks much less blobby and gelatinous than the defaults already.

One thing though, WTF is up with that big white square in the middle of the forehead?? I thought that was only a result of HP's custom skins (well mostly). Is it just your game's settings? Can someone figure out what the eff that is caused by? I never noticed it before, but now that I have, it's all I can stare at. It's better in your custom skin, but it's still there to me...

I wonder does the file override the default at a higher resolution?

If so you could also be able to increase the resolution of the face too.

You mean this square on the forehead?

(http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/697/faceziz.jpg)

That's HP's default face.  I don't know how to extract the game original face, but I kind of suspect it's the same. 

I think The Square is just somebody (EA or HP's) idea of highlighting the face.

Yeah, this is just proof of concept.  Somebody else should surely be able to do a better job. 

I do need to get an in-game pic, not a CAS pic, something in the park at midday.

I think that "better" is a relative term. I've always preferred skins that don't have any painted-on shading or highlights, because the in-game lighting provides those things, for the most part, and the end result is overkill that ends up looking like stage makeup, IMO. To each his own, I guess. It's cool that you're figuring out how to edit the skin files, though. I'm always in favor of moar CC.

I was talking about in all the photos. Am I just crazy and it's only there in my mind? :o Yeah, IIRC the square was ever-present, but HP's faces just blew it up about x1000. I had to remove hers just because they bothered me so much.

Here's a photo from my game of a Sim with the Forehead Square:

(http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/7580/screenshot480.jpg)

Unfortunately I couldn't find a more zoomed in pic of it since I only had her skins for a couple of days and noticed the ugly right away. I can't remember exactly if that was with HP's skins or not, but I'm inclined to say that was. It looks more noticeable full-size, which I can't post to the board, but in my game the Square was absolutely HORRID.

I would absolutely LOVE a skin that could fix that, if it be possible.

The Forehead Square was brought up briefly on this thread (though you probably already read it): http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,15233.msg441208/topicseen.html#msg441208

I've seen the normal picture. It has little to no shading at all. The skin files are VERY scattered, you can find them at MTS here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showpost.php?p=2644512&postcount=17


Also the picture with the white 'sclera' is in there, in the faces. Those are every file(At the bottom, in the attached files) that is associated with the skin :).

I have to ask though, what's with the make up...?

this looks freaky :)

Hmmm. I'll have to download those skin images and take a look at them.  The problem with the square in the forehead is easily fixable--it's just too much light.  From people who are working with these skins, though, I've heard that the detail on the originals is nowhere near the quality that is in TS2 but more like TS1 skins.

I totally agree about having shading and any extra make-up-y bits on the skins themselves, because it does end up looking badly in game, and if it's around the eyes the Sim tends to look like they have two black eyes.

I absolutely hate the disparity between CAS and in-game.  Every Sim I've created looks awesome in CAS then ends up looking like crap in game.

The Forehead Square is absolutely HP's attempt at 'shine'. Take a picture of an HP skinned Sim and do a side-by-side comparison to the game's defaults; it's night and day.

Perhaps it's just my elderly video card, but the faces on HP's revised skins, without the shine file, look great in indoor lighting in my game. They look no worse than any other in outdoor light.

I used HP's no-shine version and with my old video card could not see one bit of difference in-game.  After I got the newer card I could see a difference and ended up taking them out because of the aforementioned blacked eye look.  I'm not keen on shiny Sims (my Sims, after all, are not from Twilight). When I have some time to devote to it I think I'll see if I can come up with something I like. Shiny sims in TS2 looked like glossy magazine cut-outs pasted onto a cereal box. TS3 Sims are just the opposite. They look like cardboard cut-outs pasted onto a glossy magazine page. It's very weird.