More Awesome Than You!

I really get aggravated at myself for feeling like this, but there are a few in-game faces that I just absolutely cannot stand!  They're the kind of faces I'd just as soon slap as look at, and when sims like Townies or service workers get generated with these faces I delete them post-haste in SimPE or at times will even kill them.  Now if anyone knows me they know this is a stretch, because I honestly have the worst time bringing myself to kill sims by any other means than letting them die of old age.

I've never been a person to judge others on their looks and honestly have had some of what people would consider the ugliest people in the world as best friends and I think this is why it bugs me so much.

Anyway, these pet peeve faces of mine (and I'm sure someone out there thinks they're absolutely adorable and I think that's great!) are the faces used on the default Townies Kennedy Cox and Benjamin Long (just can't stand that ski jump nose and bizarre forehead combo), and then there's an African-looking face that usually ends up generating on repairmen, and although this isn't the most attractive face when they're in the adult stage, it's horrid on elders.

So, am I the only one like this?  Egads, I hope not--well, it would be better if I was! LOL

You're not the only one. These horrid faces are the CAS archetypes, which are unfortunately used for townies (there's little to no variation from it).

The "repairman's Dubya" face is certainly the most horrible one.

 :) :) yeah i hate the faces.  Like goopy's or The girls that look like men.  :P ;D

Almost all those templates are fugly and drive me INSANE!! Even the ones that are tolerable tend to be too quepie doll eyed animeized and still need a bit of work. I am constantly giving townies and npcs surgery, makeovers and new outfits. I've rescued some real ugly mugs too that even a gorilla mother couldn't love. I just wish the surgery machine had all the options that the bodyshop does and not just the CAS ones. :p

LOL!  I actually think Goopy's kind of cute!  His name is what got me! LOL  In one neighborhood he ended up dying a firey death.  That ornery Joe Carr (good looking as he is!) also met with a similar fate after knocking over my sims' trashcan for the umpteenth time.  After that I learned the deleteallcharacters code. ;)

Motoki, here's a question for you.  I don't have Uni, so don't have the plastic surgery option.  I do, however, use SimPE and know how to replace faces in that.  I decided to do that kind of thing in one neighborhood and went through and changed everyone's skin color to match their features (as in no dark black Asians, etc.).  Then one of my sims married his maid who had been formerly black but now white to match her features--in fact, they were both white and when their first babies (twins) were born, one was black and one was white!  So, is there a way to change the faces on these sims so that the genetics will stick?

Egads!  The above sounded sort of racist!  Indeed, I didn't go around changing all my black sims to white.  I changed some black to white or lighter skin, changed some lights to darker skins, so on and so forth.  LOL

Oh, I've also been using Inge's teleporter-plus shrub and Merola's mind control mirror to change hair styles and such on service workers and game-generated Townies.  I've also used the teleporter-plus shrub to move in service workers, fix them up and turn them into Townies.  Now if I just had a way to fix some of their faces and make the genetics what they now look like I'd be set!

*cough* William Bennett, anyone?

The problem with the facial system is that faces that are really different from the standard are likely to look pretty bad, either because they're just scary looking (a la Goopy) or because they deform in bizarre ways (a la some of those exact celebrity replicas).

I would certainly like to find a way to override those templates, 98% of my townie/npc population are Cro-Magnon and the other two percent are related to the wicked witch of the west.

There's a tutorial to fix the genetics over at MTS2.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=56241

Thing is though, AFAIK it only applies to University and then only to facial structure because I believe prior to the expansions there was only one facial structure entry per sim. I'm not sure why the skintone change in SimPE is not sticking but I know I experienced some weirdness when I installed University and had several sims who had their skintones changed in SimPE revert to their original skin tones (and let me tell you, a bald headed human flesh toned woman with alien features is a scary thing lol).

Anyhow, I only fix the genetics on the facial structures in the DNA on sims I know I am going to breed because it's kind of a pain to do. I haven't really messed with changing skintones via SimPE much since the Uni weirdness. I wish there were some in game way to change them though, like a tanning booth or some bleaching creme lol.

I dont have a problem playing with the DNA strings, (if that is waht you mean, I cant look at MTS2 right now, something about it being a gaming site...) currently I cant get simsurgery to stick in Simpe no matter what I choose, eyes, looks whatever (QA build). But I really dont want a bunch of the same looking people either, I would just like to motify what ever ape like creature the game is using as an archtype, its hideous for them ALL to be like that. *sigh* I guess I already have a bunch of the same looks...oo oo ah ah ah!

Hmm...maybe I should just go with it and make some planet of the apes skins.

Well that tutorial in MTS2 is basically just to copy over a sim's current facial structure (after using the surgery machine) over to their original DNA facial structure. Otherwise if you don't they might look like a model now, but they'll pass the ugly DNA to the next generation. :O

Oh and anyone who figures out a way to modify those fugly Maxis face templates deserves a Nobel Prize in my book!  ;D

Motoki, thanks for the reply!  That tutorial at MTS2 might work even with replaced heads.  The only problem I can see with the SimPE replacing heads on various sims is that then you end up with two identical sims running around your neighborhood.

And speaking of skin color type things I had a very bizarre thing happen with NL.  One of my sims had met a male DJ in Downtown and since she was a popularity sim I decided she'd best make friends with him.  Well, when he was Downtown he had nice red hair and that cool-looking sweatsuit they wear.  But when she invited him to her house, he was wearing a different sweatsuit, his hair was either black or brown, and his skin was totally messed up in that his face color was medium, like it should've been, but around his hair was light.  I even tried grabbing him with the mind control mirror to see if I could fix him up and nothing worked.  Oddly enough, his thumbnail looks like he should.  He's just really warped!  And to think I was planning on having a sim marry him someday!

ROFL!  Now one funny thing is, when I first got my game I thought the face used to make Remington London (the pizza dude) and Marissa Bendett (the Townie) were pretty awful.  I've learned to love those faces, though.  My current Legacy sim married his maid who used the same face as Marissa Bendett and they had the funniest looking son!  He has a very bizarre hook-shaped nose, sort of a depressed mouth, chin sticks out a bit too far.  But when you put the right hairstyle on him, a moustache or other facial hair he looks like he ought to be a swashbuckler!  His looks are definitely from a more erstwhile period!  Because of his oddities he has been chosen to carry on the Legacy while his much better looking brother has moved on and married his absolutely gorgeous high school sweetheart.  The Legacy heir (Burleigh is his name) married a downtown waitress named Allyn (I changed her name to Ally) who has the same face as the original Lucy Hanby maid.  They just had twins and it's going to be, ummm, interesting to see what they grow into.

Yes, this is kind of a problematic aspect of sim surgery, needing to make a dummy clone in the game to use to copy the look over from. Your options here are to delete the sim (which if you really want to do it properly can be a real pain) or try to give them some form of makeover to make them look different. I usually do the latter. I really wish SimPE had an option to do sim surgery from a bodyshop template package file or from other neighborhoods so we wouldn't have to make extra junk characters in our main neighborhood.

Yes, I know what you mean.  There is a good rumor I read about a future edition of SimPE which could possibly allow us to delete the character file and all the attached stuff at the click of a button instead of going through the complicated process of doing that.  I'm not holding my breath but that would be awesome!

I've got both Kennedy Cox and Benjamin Long married to a couple of my Sims.  I never considered them unattractive.  As for Goopy, I cheated him into college to see if it would work (it didn't), and when I moved him back to the neighborhood I gave him the hair with the long pony tail and a little face stubble and he actually looks pretty good.

As for that "african-looking" face, I believe that's actually an Australian aborigine archetype.  I knew a guy in the Army who had that exact face.  A nice guy, but a little frightening. :)  I had a female with that face, and after considerable work with makeup and hairstyles I was able to look at her face in a menu without being startled every time.  She's still not beautiful, but she's pleasant enough.

I mentioned in another thread about my son playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.  Some of the characters wondering the streets of San Andreas make the ugliest Sims 2 townie imaginable look absolutely gorgeous.  And depending on where you live, a visit to the local Wal*Mart to look at the people should give you a new appreciation of our Sims 2 townies. :)

Hook

There is this one dormie in Academie Le Tour, brown hair, who is realllly ugly. I swear I can't even look at him. Wide mouth and lips. Really really ugly. That's a face not even a mother could love.

BAHAHAHAHAHA!

You could make some sims in CAS in another neighborhood and extract the facial structure using SimPE as in the tutorial Motoki posted. This is a pretty time intensive way to do this but it will work if you have the patience.

I think all the base archetypes are ugly. The eyes are too far apart and all the women have enormous lips. I have annihilated the Townie menace using hacks. And as for the service NPCs, I suppose nannies and people who work tills in shops or kill vermin for a living are just genetically inferior proletarian labourers in the world of TS2, and the headmaster of the private school is understandably inbred.

I like the Benjamin Long face. is he that blond succesfull executive? if he is, he is very good-looking.

I think the best way to have sims have the faces you want is to use a hack to stop townies generations, and then using that townie genertor object from MTS2 to turn any sim you want into townie. This way you can create sims exactly the way you want in CAS (or have the CAS create a ramdom sim for you, and if you don't like, you can reroll) and turn them into townies. However, i don't think that they will have ramdom skill points and carreer level this way.

However i don't think this object is NL compatible. it needs updating.

hmmm interesting. About the facial structure data, so basically I can take any sim, copy the facial structure data and plunk into any other sim of my choice? I was under the assumption it had to be from the same sim. I havent ever played with they facial structure data, just the DNA strings.

Any one wanna start trading facial data? I can see where downloading a few sims off the net might be worth while now, I dont have to put them in game, I can just open their package, export the facial data, and save thier thumbnail image to a sim file folder. Then I can delete the sim. Much cleaner than having whole sims, I guess I could make them in bodyshop as well - do the same and then delete the sim afterwards....


I still want to hack that template sim though, because it seems as though I only have one, maybe two archetype template sims in my game and they are both very extreme.

What I find puzzling is the fact that all the good-looking ones are hidden or unusable.  The Tricou family in NL, for instance, are all dead, and they are certainly better-looking than the average townie.  The llama mascot now married and in the neighbourhood in my game is absolutely GORGEOUS, but he still goes everywhere in his stupid costume so I have to boolProp him out of it whenever he appears so I can go all gooey over him.  I also have a cow mascot in the neighbourhood who's quite pretty, certainly more so than the majority of dormies and Uni NPC's.

The ones I dislike the most are those with the ridiculously wide mouths that stretch from ear-to-ear, especially when they have huge flappy lips as well.  I've never seen anyone in 'real life' like that and I don't expect to.  I don't usually bother changing their genetics, but if any of them turn-out to be 3LightningStrike material for one of my Sims, I probably will do.  I do change the hair colour and so on to match the genetics, though (or vice versa).  I think the reason they did this was to cause 'surprises' (like "How come my brown/black-haired Sim married Brandon Lillard/Kaylynn Langerak and they had a red-haired child?" ... Brandon and Kaylynn both being genetic redheads).

I think all of the in-game faces look more or less ridiculous. They're too cartoony for me - I could live with the oversized eyes if they weren't so malproportioned overall! It's a shame Gigge's site is defunct now, she had a tutorial on it with an image that showed that the default faces are too long, the eyes are too big and too far apart, and a lot of the noses too narrow. I make my own sims with more realistic features now and they look a lot better, and I grab any NPC that bothers me and make them over as well. Eyes a click smaller, narrower, and closer together, face a click or two shorter, nose a click or two wider. I then alter things from there to get interesting variation, like small or long noses, wide or narrow mouths, rounder faces, etc. .  I tend to make them all good looking too, which isn't strictly realistic, but hey, at least I have a wide range of what I find attractive... :D

I have absolutely no problem with the townies, except the ones that walk around looking like they have food stashed in thier cheeks. (chew damn you, chew! What do you mean thats natural? Egad!)

All the all, the other townies I think are all rather cute, but maybe I'm just warped. Goopy is adorable, even if his clothing... leaves something to be desired.

I think it was also Gigge's site that got me going on my kick to makeover all the townies. I miss her site. :( After reading that tutorial, I realized even the faces I thought were the nicer looking ones were rather ill proportioned and ridiculous looking.

And I grab all the townies I see too and give them surgeries, makeovers and sometimes changes of clothes. The all end up looking a hell of a lot better, but I try not to make them all beautiful and make some regular looking ones. In general, I try to work with their existing facial structure and just make it look more realistically proportioned, but some of them are so outrageously proporitoned I pretty much have to start from scratch.

I use the same method. The eyes are always made smaller- much smaller, and set much closer together. The nose is usually shortened. The problem is, when doing this in-game, the limitations of the CAS cosmetic surgery make it difficult to put a whole lot of variation in their faces. So my townies are prettier, but all look like siblings. I'm with Motoki- I wish the surgery used more of the options that bodyshop does.

Having been experimenting with the Townie/NPC maker in Nightlife, I've noticed that there are some new "downtownie" templates that have been added with the expansion pack.  But unlike the base game townies, these templates seem to be not just faces, but clothing, hair color, make-up, etc. all locked such that you get an identical sim every time the template is used.  I discovered this after wiping a new neighborhood of all sims then using the generator to auto-create a set a new downtownies.

The list includes:

Blonde woman with braided hair on both side wearing a cowboy hat and a pink-striped shirt.
Nice looking African-American male with short, braided hair.
Another nice-looking African-American male with close-cropped hair, green-lenses aviator glasses, and wearing one of those new vests that came with Nightlife.
A grumpy-looking African-American male elder wearing a suit.
Shaggy, red-headed white male with facial stubble.
Good-looking African-American woman with short hair in two knots on either side of her head, wearing lipstick.
African-American woman with short RED hair and a semi-cirle tattoo around the front of her neck.
Shaggy-blonde haired white male with green aviator glasses.
Blonde white woman with hair hanging straight down wearing a flat cap and dark lipstick.
A sim of what looks a lot like Joe Carr except with that medium-long hairstyle that is separated in the middle.
Medium-skinned Latin-looking guy with black hair and facial stubble wearing a nice blue shirt
Medium-skinned Latina-looking woman with long, full black hair.
Another nice-looking light-skinned African-American male with sunglasses and NL clothes: (bright scarf tied around neck and some kind of leisure suit I guess)
Medium-skinned guy with black hair in bowling shirt
Tan-skinned woman with black hair in bowling shirt

Every one of these is as exact replica of downtownies found in the default NL installation.  Except remember I generated these guys supposedly at random after wiping everyone out at the beginning.  They also happen to be quite A LOT better looking than ones made with the standard templates.  But it appears that as the game kicks in to regenerate downtownies (and let's face it if you want to marry off your townies, THESE guys will be the pick of the crop), your going to end up with some degree of "identical twins" running around.  :(

BTW, there are other downtownies as well that are based on the base game templates.  And it looks as though some of the new NPCs like the slobs and Mr.Big/The Diva are also regenerated with standard templates (yes I got a Diva with those HUGE face-stretching lips).

I figured some people find the Kennedy Cox/Benjamin Long face attractive and in reality it's a good thing there are those different strokes for different folks. LOL  It's definitely not the worst face in the game--it's the nose I can't get past--looks an awfully lot like Richard Nixon's profile!  :P


 ;D Our WalMarts have scads of Hispanics in them and for the most part they're very beautiful people.  OTOH, some of the white locals are enough to scare a person half to death!


Exactly!  And that's just the thing.  While I don't have a problem with my sims looking a bit cartoonish (it is a game after all) I've always wondered just what these people were thinking when they designed all the faces of that kind!  I don't really care if my sims aren't all beautiful--beauty is so far beyond looks--but some of those templates are the stuff nightmares are made from.


I agree.  There are many already made sims in the game but when a townie or service worker is generated, none of those are used.


Uh-huh.  In one neighborhood I was experimenting in, I put the no townie children mod back in my game (didn't know at that time it caused problems) and found some interesting results.  My sim made it to a Downtown lot (remarkable in itself because generally speaking that mod causes the lot to get stuck in a perpetual loading loop) and in that one trip umpteen gazillion Downtownies were generated.  I ended up with major duplicates of the sim looks you've listed.  Oddly enough, not one vampire, slob or big are in that neighborhood, just scads of blonde girls in braids, cowboy hats and the striped shirt and several other duplicates.

Which NPC generator did you use for that?  I haven't taken a lot of time to go look around for everything NL compatible and the one I had in my game is in need of updating.

Her site still works for me http://www.simplyskintastic.com/  It was down for a while but it's up again for whatever reason.

I hate the uglies too and like Motoki I change them all.  I usually nuke and make my own townies but the NPC's all get makeovers.  I use Danny's DMA most of the time and sometime I use inSIMinator which is good for changing ages.  A far as changing skin tones in SimPE, I have had no problems with the new versions.  Eye color is still AFU though.

How are you doing this?  SimPE?

 - Gus

Ooooer! Thank you, MalteseBippy! That was one of my favourite 'stuff' sites out there, and I was sad when I was running out of good clothes for my adults and went to check her site, only to remember she had taken it down. Motoki, her site is also what got me started on making my own townies. I knew something bugged me about the sim faces, but it wasn't until I saw her site that I realized what. I do think she makes the mouths a bit too wide, though, mouth corners generally seem to line up right with the center of the pupil. I find anything too far outside of that to be venturing on frog-faced.  :D

Lefty, I think Goopy is kind of cute too. Shh. I actually had him married into a family at one point... but I did give him a complete name change and makeover!  ;) He actually made a very distinguished elder, with the longish hair and a goatee. Too bad his daughters were a bit monkeyfaced. Benjamin Long and Kennedy the Ass aren't too bad, either, but like Goopy they don't seem to breed well.

Brynne, I make all of my playable sims and homemade townies in Bodyshop ahead of time because of this. I could afford to do so since I don't have any long-standing neighborhoods... I get pretty frustrated sometimes making over NPCs considering the limitations in surgery.

I don't generally worry about the skintones on the sims - if their features don't work with their skin, I change their features entirely. I just can't be arsed to use sim surgery very often. *g* They eyecolours... well, it can be some alternate universe thing. In which they have vampires, zombies, and aliens. Yeah.

No, I make them selectable then stick their faces in the surgery machine, have em use a mirror and if I feel like it, Pescado's clothing tool.

The only thing I do in SimPE is copy their new facial data over their old so they don't pass on their old ugly genes to the next generation, but that's only if I decide to breed them.

And how do you make them selectable?  Is that a console command?

 - Gus

I use boolprop testingcheatsenabled true and then hold shift and click on them. Prior to NL, this didn't work, but since NL it now does. You can also use the mind control mirror or the Insimenator or you could move them in with Inge's shrub and then move them out into the townie bin again with the shrub when you are done.

*edit to add some other stuff*

The Insimenator has options to give any sim on the lot a facelift or makeover without making them selectable. The Woohoo npcs set from Valdea.com also has an item that looks like a red burglar alarm and let's you do surgery on a sim without making them selectable. It also lets you plan their outfits. I haven't used this item since NL so not sure of it's status with it.

Lastly, the vanity mirror that came with university (it's under tables > other) will let you make over (use the mirror to change hair and makeup) any sim on the lot without having to have them be selectable. You sim with approach them for a makeover and bring them to the mirror after which you get to pick out their hair and makeup etc.

Ok, I give...what Townie/NPC maker?


And who are the Tricous?

Useful information.  I knew about the vanity, which helps with some of the deliberately ugly hairstyles that Townie college students have.  It doesn't help with hideously overwide mouths and cheeks, though.  Inge's shrub is clearly the most useful for doing a mass makeover, since you needn't have them on the lot.  On the other hand I may just go with the red alarm from Valdea, since it says it can do surgery on visitors, and usually it's more of an on-demand kind of thing.  As in, ye gods that face is hideous.

Edit: Hmmm, I don't know.  It seems you can't get just the red alarm object, and I definitely don't want the hookers in my neighborhood.
 
 - Gus

I also use Merola's mind control mirror to make them selectable.  What I've done in one neighborhood that had absolutely no Townies at all, was used Inge Jone's teleporter-plus shrub, moved in service workers, changed their clothes, hair styles, make-up, etc., then made them into Townies.  This actually works pretty well when you don't want to take the time to make CAS Townies but you're also stuck with the game generated sims.

Isn't there a way to generate Townies in Debug Mode?  I was thinking there was but haven't pursued it.

There is yes, you do boolprop testingcheatsenabled true and then I think it was shift click on the mailbox and one of the options there. It does take a while too and you will get ones from the ugly Maxis templates, so don't say you weren't warned. Also you'll get tons of the same exact name Sharlene Walton, Aberjit Cho, Tosha Go, Brenda Sims bla bla bla.

There's also the new debug npc generator that comes with NL (the old dead tree, you get it by shift clicking on a sim with testingcheats on then doing spawn and I think it's called NPC Maker or something like that) but I haven't really messed with it yet so not sure if it does mass spawning or just one at a time.

You can do both, you switch to DT townies, make GVs, select gender of what you are going to generate, make sims into townies and so on. Try it, you might like it. Its called NPC/Townie Maker.

The Townie/NPC maker is a cheat object availble in the game.  It forces the game to generate townies, downtownies and NPCs of all varieties.  It also has a specialized function that allows you to turn a playable sim into a townie or downtownie.  So you can create your own townies in CAS first if you want.

You get the object by doing 'boolprop testingCheatsEnabled true'.  Then shift-clicking on a sim.  It's in the Spawn submenu.  In Nightlife the Maker is a leafless tree.  In Uni it was a box.

The Tricous are a family of dead sims that shipped with Nightlife.  Their headstones are in Gothier Green Lawns.  SimPE indicates they are full ghosts so I imagine if you visit the GGL at night you might run into them if you're lucky.

There are also 3 Tricou headstones on the "house of fallen trees" lot, for Fricorith, Gvadouin, and Rainelle (I am sure I mangled the spelling of the second one). With very active ghosts.

I thought I would post a rogue's gallery of my newly generated downtownies.  This was what I meant by downtownie templates.  All these guys were "randomly" generated in a new town that had been wiped with "deleteAllCharacters" first.  You'll notice that I even got a few duplicates in the new pack as well.

But it appears that the new templates are even more rigid than the base game ones.  All these people show up as default NL downtownies as well, although the default ones include a few more that I believe are templates as well.

http://home.comcast.net/~hairysims/images/gallery1.jpg

 :P

Those aren't so bad, but I instantly recognize about half of them. I guess we have to sacrifice variety for better looking sims and I really don't think there is any good way to randomize makeup.  :o

They are a cut above the regular FUGLY townies, but the game also generates some downtownies using the FUGLY templates as well.  Also, all the new downtown NPCs were generated using the FUGLY templates.

In my neighborhood I play, I began to kill off some downtownies to the point where the game started making new ones.  I ended up with TWO MORE of the exact same guy in the bowling shirt (2nd row, 4th column) for a total of three bowling-shirt-guy clones running around my neighborhood.

I've held off killing any more downtownies until I can spend some time making my own that I'll import with the tree.

I tried this last night and now my vampireless, Bigless, Slobless neighborhood is no longer without!  It took something like 10 times of re-loads without saving to generate a halfway decent looking Mr. Big (for crying out loud--someone that conceited has to have something to be conceited about, right?).  I struck gold with the Diva first go-around and it only took a couple of times on the Count.

It works almost exactly like the one I had downloaded before NL which was really just a 'buyable' version.  I did notice an oddity, though.  Under the option for generating Downtown NPCs there are no waiters or bartenders.  You can, however, generate plain vampire Townies which could be fun.  Oh, and generating sims like the Grand Vampires, Mr. Big & Diva and the Slobs is done under the 'special' Downtownies section.

Something else I also noticed about the NL Townie Maker.  There's no option to generate EP1 townies -- in other words students and professors.  You can generate University NPCs, but professors were always listed in the townie group.  Then again... maybe you need to invoke the townie maker on a University lot in order to get that option... hmmm......

That's something to think about anyway, but it does seem odd some of the Downtown NPCs can be generated while others can't.  Still, you could have a point.