More Awesome Than You!

im sorry, i cant find the answer to my question anywhere, and i wasnt sure where to ask this either. ive been looking for days. i have a bunch of downloaded skins and ive been fiddling with the dna of my townies. a few days ago i found out that custom skin is dominant over maxis skintones. which is fine. but when i have children i would like to be surprised. therein lies my dilemma. i guess its called color binning. i found a tutorial that Syera put on springhole, and its very easy to understand, but i cant find skintone xml. i need to find that before i do anything. i found another tutorial here with pictures, but i believe that my version and theirs is different. i checked the simpe web site and found something like it, but they gave another website that you have to download something off of to do this. i really dont want to download anything else unless its the last recourse. if ive made any sense and you can help me, i would greatly appreciate it. thank you.

There are some tutorials over on TSR2 which deal with these issues. 

Translation:

I've been searching for days and have yet to find a definitive answer. The problem is:

I have downloaded a lot of custom skintones and have discovered lately that those tones are dominant over the Maxis skintones. I wouldn't mind, but I would rather be surprised when the children are born.

I found a tutorial that Syera put on springhole (about color binning? editor is confused since that's hair, not skin...) The tutorial is very easy to understand, but I can't find "skintone xml". Apparently, I need to find that before I do anything else.

I also found a tutorial here, with pictures, but our versions seem to differ.

I checked the SimPE website and found something similiar, but requires more downloads. I don't want to download anything else if at all possible. Any ideas?

ElfPuddle's solution to aubreylaraine's question:

1) Read the tutorials that ZephyrZodiac posted.
2) If they don't help, do a MATY search for "skin color properties". That's the tutorial I followed to fix all of my custom eye colors and skintones. I'm not up to hair yet (not enough energy, and too many files...). It's very easy.

Take a deep breathe, don't worry, and don't be afraid to DL anything that SimPE says you need. Good luck!

And if you can't find the tutorials, send me a PM with your email address and I'll send you copies.  They aren't locked d/ls, so it should be okay to do that.

I just found Syera's tutorial. Apparently that's the one I used (I saved it to my desktop). If you need someone to translate it for you, aubreylaraine, I'd be happy to do so. I was panicked about it when I first started, but it is easy, really.

thanks guys i really appreciate the help. cause i decided to chance it in my game, its not pretty.  ;D ill try what yall said to do.

I used Syera's faq to do my 'genetic coding' for my custom content.

It's pretty straightforward.

Eyes are really easy to code, as are skins once you find the texture.xml file.

Oh yeah, if you have the most recent version of SimPe, I think the actual name for the file you need to edit is different (I know, because it threw me off too) just look for texture and xml. There should only be one file with both of those words and that's the one you want.

in a round about way(using my newly installed sims2pack clean installer, content manager, and simpe :o) and with the overwhelming help and support from elfpuddle, i have figured out my problem. i was just missing steps in the tutorials i was following, and i think i was using a different version of simpe. thank you to those who were able to see through my appearent hysteria and disorganization to the heart of the problem to offer what you could. :-*

Try those tutorials from TSR2, though. there's one on cleaning up hair files by Windkeeper, and it's very clearly explained with pics of the SimPE page to help you.

There was a really good faq somewhere here that gave a pretty thorough walk through the hair file cleaning process that Motoki pointed me to. I got my hair file binned, with extra textures deleted, proper aging, and only one grey file after only 5 tries. =p

I might try that, I have so many duplicate grey hairstyles!  (And the worst ones are the ones where they've been lotbinned!  You get each 4 or 5 or more grey hair-files in the grey hair, plus the same number in custom!)

Someday when I'm 1) really bored and 2) have a lot of time on my hands, I'll get to that color binning. In the meantime, if hairstyles are genetic, I'll live.

i think they are genetic. i married off chloe singles to renee andrews and their little girl has renees hairstyle. and pascals youngest two sons both had his hairstyle when they hit the teens.

Yes, custom hairstyles are genetic unless you've color-binned them. That's what I meant. :)
Note to self...only DL binned hairs until I get myself organized!  ;)