More Awesome Than You!

Have you ever noticed that your Sims and their clothes look way more detailed in CAS than in live-mode? Is there a way to get the same detail in live-mode as seen in trailers and promo-screenshots?

Zoom in really close?

Oh really!! I thought I was the only one who noticed!! But i'm stupid enough to make a big deal out of something that's hardly worth mentioning.

Unless you have the Live Mode camera shoved right up your Sims butt, I bet you can barely notice.

The detail looks the same to me, it's just that to see the same detail level you see in CAS, you have to shove the camera up so close to your sim that you can't see anything else. Otherwise a lower-detail-level mesh gets used for distant-viewing.

Promo videos tend to be too lo-res to really make out any detail anyway, and those promotional screenshots - the same ones that show perfectly functioning lighting that doesn't exist in the game, are almost always photoshopped to hell. Ignore them.

There is one way to get your sims (and backgrounds for that matter) to look better, and that's to override the game's internal anisotropic filtering settings. If your card's suitably fast enough (8800 or higher for nVidia and whatever the equivalent is for ATI), go into your card's control panel and change the anisotropic filtering setting for The Sims 3 from "application controlled" to "16x" (the nVidia control panel lists games via their *.exe rather than by name, so change your settings for the latest one). You might want to override the game's AA setting too. I normally have mine set to 16x, though this is on a GTS 250. Your mileage may vary.

The thing that's made the most difference for me recently is a new monitor (an early birthday present). I was very suprised to see the difference it did make (I hadn't asked for this monitor or even hinted that I wanted one - I didn't believe that I did want one), but changing from a 18" generic monitor to a 24" BenQ GL2430 has added boatloads to what I see.

Hey guys, thanks for answering. I'm glad to see that I'm not the only who has noticed this and is a bit bothered by it. :)

I find it depends on the lighting you have in your homes. Also that day time lighting  is more harsh. If you properly light your home then you will have almost perfect CAS lighting. My computer is just a run of the mill rig from 2007 and I find I have pretty good pics even with running sim detail on high  and tree/background on low/medium.

Doesn't the bloom effect get in the way, though? I often have to set my Sims' lighting to dim just because of the annoying glowing.

The glow doesn't really bother me. I only really notice it when I'm zoomed all the way out to birds eye view most of the time.