More Awesome Than You!

I have two sims who lose their faces shortly after they age from child to teen (on the hour).  You can use "change appearance" as a temporary fix, but it doesn't stick.  At the first change appearance you get an inappropriate default, second change sim gives a face with the correct family characteristics.  The face disappears again not too long after, haven't noted when.  They were CAS made a long time ago with alien skin and extreme facial characteristics - I wanted an alien look.  Problem is they are in Sedona which is up for download and I really need to fix the files.  Please can anyone help? 

Jordi asked if I had faceblending on or off.  I had never heard of that til yesterday, so I guess it was set to whatever the default was in CAS in base game.  DK if that sparks any ideas.

This old thread "faceless guy" talked about missing, blue and other facial disasters a year ago, but I can't see any solutions. 
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2570.50
Mine are completely missing not blue - pics here  http://thesims2.ea.com/exchange/story_detail.php?asset_id=136911
Sedona is an alternative default subhood for people who are sick of Bluewater and is up for download on my website http://users.telenet.be/cwykes/ - lots of aliens and palm trees.

By default it is on. Presumably (if it is related), the face blending fails because of your extreme faces, and randomness appears: faces disappear, or get set to a random template.

Don't know if disabling face blending can help at this point though, AFAIK it is only called at age transition or creation. What you can try is to disable it, use the agesimscheat to set them to the previous age group, and have them age transition with a set to birthday cheat. Hopefully this will call the normal face readjustment and not fail.

I play with face blending off, and have never had a blank face even when merging extreme faces in Sim kids.

Thanks for explaining a bit more Jordi. 
I went away and tried aging the two kids with faceBlendLimits off  They both turned faceless fairly quickly.  So even if that's the problem which isn't proved I think, this isn't the solution.  I say not proved, because of all the other reports on the old thread which didn't seem to involve extreme features.

Are there any in-game tools people could try on their faces?  I don't have Uni or NL, but I think there's a career reward in Uni that might help isn't there?  Otherwise, should I try and clone them and change them a bit in bodyshop?  I've never cloned sims and I have used bodyshop precisely twice, but I'll learn if you think it will work.  I don't want to make a new family for the 'hood and delete the Jones' family, but I'm beginning to wonder if I should.

Am I safe to say that, "the problem is almost certainly restricted to those 2 sims and won't affect every sim in the 'hood".  I mean, surely this thing doesn't spread like an epidemic so that your whole 'hood turns faceless?

M sister had the problem with one Sim (not using your 'hoods), I solved it for her by applying full facial make up to her Sim and removing it again. This forces a repaint of the entire face and therefore may help.
Also try making the affected Sim a vampire and curing them again.

VCline already has them in warpaint I think and it's not helping, but she could try the vampire thing.  Thanks for the ideas. :)

cwykes, I followed your suggestion of "changing appearance" a second time, and that worked on Dee and Eee.  I didn't hang around to see if and when they changed back (they're at Uni and I am involved with the main neighborhood right now).  I've never made a vampire or werewolf or zombie, and I'm not ready to experiment right now.  I'll just keep my eye on them and see what happens when I breed 2 aliens.  This may take some time as I'm currently involved with your Green/Foster/military families.  Many thanks for those, although running an 8-sim house keeps you on your toes.  I may have to install TJ's ACR and see the havoc that ensues.

Facepaint!  wonderful stuff!  never seen any use for it until now.
Take one faceless sim, change them into facepaint.  They get a default face, but never mind.  Change them again out of facepaint and they have the correct face and no face paint.  AND the change sticks.  No more sudenly turning up faceless when you take your eye off them.  At least not in the couple of days I watched them.  Thank you Jordi!  you rock!

If the kid is wearing facepaint while transitioning, they don't lose their face at all.  However that hasn't actually fixed the problem, just hidden it.  When you take face paint off as a teen, the problem comes back. 

I had left the Jones family in the lot bin in Sedona, but I might move them into a lot to give Dee and Eenie face paint.  That way, simmers who leave the facepaint alone will be OK when they transition to teen.  Dee can have fairy face paint to go with the dress.  Eenie the toddler will end up with two black stripes or football paint.  I have to say, I hate the idea of face paint on a toddler all the time!

Are you using any default alien skin replacements?  Or even a default skintone replacement such as paradise sims who have the alien included with the regular skintones?  Someone else had this problem a while back, and that turned out to be the problem, because there were missing textures for the teen faces.

I made this family in CAS when I was a total newbie, so I'm pretty sure it's the maxis alien skin.  I thought I was so clever knowing how to get to it in CAS. ::)  I suppose it's possible, something had crept into downloads that is since gone, but if that were the case, all the family would have problems surely?   

I made mum and Dad and then generated children for them in CAS: a teen, a child and a toddler.  Dad and mum age to elder fine.  The teen ages to adult fine.  The child ages to teen fine then loses her face on the hour but she seems to age to adult OK.  The toddler is fine as a child, ages fine to teen, but then loses his face.  I'm not sure I bothered to try him as an adult. three kids born in game grow up to child and teen with no problems at all.

The fact they age OK and then lose their faces on the hour might be a clue to someone as to what is going on.  Change appearance once sticks for a bit, but they have lost their faces again when getting off the shool bus etc.

Jordi said you just needed to really force the game to redraw the face - which is what facepaint does.

I have a theory - but I may be totally off the mark with this - I came up with this when I had an alien sim with the same problem.  Have you ever seen an alien sim with acne?  I haven't, and I suspect that as teenagers the game is trying to give them acne but there's something about that particular skin tone that's broken.  My alien teen's features weren't as extreme as yours - only to the extreme of being almost, but not quite, identical to the PT's.  His face disappeared on a regular basis until he was a young adult, and though the mirror fixed it it was always temporary.  Does this seem plausable or is it just me?

Acne is implemented as a full face makeup (three different ones actually), thus an overlay, so it /should/ be skintone-independent. I have had alien spawn with zits before without disappearing faces.

Oh, I know that.  I don't mean about the overlays, I mean the acne-related coding perhaps?  Or I could be seeing a connection that just isn't there.  I did sort of see an alien with acne before - the alien I was talking about in my last post once got a facefull of zits after I changed his appearance to get his face back after it disappeared, however, and this was really weird, it wasn't the alien skintone.  His body and head were green, but his face was the tan skintone with zits and had a more default facial structure instead of his own.  I changed his appearance again and he went back to his green face and alien features, but for that bit in between it was really wierd.  He never got acne with a green face.

You could test this with testing cheats on and the toggle zits on/off option.

I use the default replacement laverwinkle alien skin - and I have in the past had them quite happily spawn green zits on the purple skin without issues at all.  It's not something that has happened recently, though.

Ew, green zits!  Sounds like they need a serious antibiotic.  :P  Maybe it's an alien thing.

green zits on green aliens isn't too bad...  green zits on purple aliens, yeah - not pretty!

I just figure aliens have weird genetics, and make sure my teen aliens just don't get dirty so they stay zit free.

Drinking coffee also seems to give the teenaged sims zits.

Never knew that!

My sims rarely caffeinate, so generally not an issue here.

This depends greatly on what you have in your game.

The actual cycle which would lead to this is that drinking coffee results in using the terlet more, which results in lowered hygiene. However, if you're using macrocaffeinate with Bathroom Uses You, the exact opposite will occur as BUY will force them to shower aggressively to prevent that.

I seem to recall that my teenaged sim got zits immediately after drinking coffee, and I noticed the zits on his animated portrait when I directed him to use the toilet, not after he had already used it. Also, I use 'always flush toilet and wash hands' by TJ and rarely let my sims get below 50% hygiene (no, I'm not anal or anything). I could be wrong, but that's what I remember.

Edited to add: It seems to only happen with coffee, not espresso. Doesn't make much sense, but so little does in TS2.

I never use coffee, only the espresso machine.  They don't seem to gain energy as fast with the coffee.

Yeah, I only use the coffee machine for my poor sims, and upgrade to espresso as soon as they can afford it. I do have a 'more energy from coffee' hack, though, which is actually more realistic, since IRL coffee contains more caffeine than espresso (longer brew time = more caffeine). If you steeped your tea for 10 minutes (ewww), it would have quite a high caffeine content, as well.

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I have this exact same issue with one of my Sims.  He is a born-in the game Sim - son of Brandi's third son & Marylena Hamilton the grocery delivery person - no alien genetics in either of their history, no CAS Sims involved.

When I loaded the household, the teen was sitting and studying - his face was blue and floating above his head.  He had an empty space where his face was supposed to be.  After I cancelled out the study action - the floating blue image disappeared and only a hollow head was there - hair and nothing else.  I went to the mirror to change his appearance and all of his facial features changed - they did not look like a default face template to me, but I could be wrong about that.  I thought it was bizarre that his facial features changed - so, I went back to the mirror again - his old face popped up.  I cancelled the action because his new face looks much better.

This Sim has now aged to a Young Adult and is about to graduate.  He still has his new facial features and he has not lost his face again.  However, if I go to change his appearance - the old face pops up - so, I have been just cancelling the action.

He has custom hair that was selected immediately after he aged to teen.  He was a couple of days into his teen years when this happened; so, it was not due to the age transition.  He did not have acne nor do I think that he was about to get acne - very few of my Sims get acne - I make them take frequent showers.  This household did not have a coffee/espresso machine of any sort and I have no coffee machine hacks.  He does not use any facepaint, facial hair or makeup.

I have also seen this problem posted with pictures on the BBS.  Nina was the affected Sim.  She did not have custom hair or clothes at the time and was still in the adult stage.  The poster went to the mirror and stated that it fixed the problem.

So, I have no clue why or how it occurs.  Like you, I hope that it does not spread.

edited to add:
I do not have the insim nor did I use the ageSims cheat to age this Sim at anytime.  I did use the debugging tool to "set to birthday" and aged him to a teen with the birthday cake. 

I see syberspunk comments in another thread that aging sims by any means other than default can cause problems and I'm inclined to agree, I've only had these faceless sorts of problems since I started mucking around. The aging on the debug menu doesn't bring up the aspiration choice screen for my teen sims, users of insim have discovered floating blue faces - that's how I discovered the issue - I think my sims will have to be 'set to birthday' and see if that works better.

I don't have the insim - I've never had it.  I "Set to birthday" and then aged the Sim to teen by having him blow the candles out on a birthday cake.  So, I think that there must be more to it than aging cheats.

Yes, I have had the floating blue faces without InSim or aging cheats, though in two cases I think it was from having aspiration reward objects in the sims' inventories, specifically the Renu-Yu Senso Orb (or whatever it's called).

The two alien teens I posted about didin't have anything in their inventory - in fact they didn't even have inventories when it first happened in base game only.  They couldn't have drunk any coffee/expresso because they had just aged.  I have no idea what the hygiene state was when they aged.  If I play them again I'll check that for completeness, but do they get zits within 1 hour of agining if they had low hygiene as a child?   I don't have insim in my game.  I think I DL'd it once a long time ago, read more about it and took it out pretty quickly.  It wasn't in game when the problem happened.  I shouldn't think I used any aging cheats the first time it happened - I hadn't learned anything about anything then.  When I was testing this time, they grew up normally without the cake and turned faceless.  I then tested using set to birthday and grow up. 

I assumed the "default" face you get in the mirror was just whatever sado-random thing the game decided to choose.   I suppose it might belong to some other sim in the game which might be a clue to what is going on - I didn't recognise it though.