I usually don't post here anymore, but since it looks like the OP has gotten some, um, confusing information, I thought I should step in and clear things up a bit.

Lyran is a different person from Louis is a different person from Enayla is a different person from RenSims. Unless I've totally missed something, none of these people have collaborated on any skins.

All skin makers include nipples on the female teens/adults/elders, and should all be google-able by name.

Lyran makes very nice skins that are matte and have the 'cartoony' feel of Maxis skins, but with a nicer tone and shading. She also has a skin paler than the default pale, a pale skin with freckles, and a dark skin darker than the default darkest.

RenSim makes skins that are a bit more realistic than Lyran's, but still fairly stylized. The textures are very smooth and nice and s/he also has a pale and very dark skin. You will have to donate to get the complete set of defaults, although it's only $2 and then I think you are eligable for donation gifts forever. Do note that they are anatomically correct.

Louis makes still more realistic skins, still rather matte but with a bit of a shine on some parts. Features are defined better than on Maxis skins, and there is a wider range of colours. I suggest the Lin edition on ShinySims.

Finally, Enayla at MTS2 has a couple of sets of skins available. Her skins are fairly realistic but somewhat ethereal. The first set of defaults she made are extremely glow-y, but the second set is much better. These have somewhat of a glow (NOT a shine; the skins do not look wet) but it works fine with the ingame lighting, and is fairly realistic since humans don't actually have flat matte skin, magazine models nonwithstanding.

Happy simming!

Oh, I wasn't so much defending you as I was taking the excellent opportunity presented to me to get into a verbal fistfight with Pescado. So don't worry, Nailati - I'm sure your MATY street cred is still intact. 

I had to log in just to compliment you on this house. It's really beautiful, and I especially like that it's on a very small lot, so my poor computer will grump less when I play it.

Ah, the "But HE started it!" argument. Well JM, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck... 

Ah, the gaping anus flaps again, releasing its gas into the atmosphere. Hmm... this would this be an ad hominem attack, an argument from ignorance, or a combination thereof.

Haha, the 'you people' argument - couldn't find anything to personally insult me with, hmm? Have fun beating up that straw man! 

JM, you are a gigantic windbag and more full of shit than the NYC sewer system.

Nailati, I'm sorry to hear you've been having troubles with your personal life - I hope my PM didn't pester you too much.  The revised #2 templates look great, and it's really cool that you're going back and revising them all to fit even better. Take your time and take care of yourself.

I just got a chance to test these tonight. Holy shit, Nailati! These are wonderful! I was floored by how much better the sims look with those faces, much better than even 'realistic-izing' the faces with Gigge's method. Even the faces I don't particularly like look human.

All of the CAS blending I did resulted in suitably human-looking sims as well. Some faces don't blend super well, as usual, but the results from these are much, much better looking than with the game defaults - not a single one I made was hideous or even unfortunate (and with face blending limits off some of the problems I saw with unlike faces being blended, like really big cheekbones, smoothed much better). The only remotely monkey-faced sim I ended up with still looked decent, and she would have been pretty with the right lipstick.

The eyes may be a little close together after all. Some of the faces they seemed like they could stand to be a click apart, others they seemed like they'd be better a click narrower, sideways. But this was up close, zoomed out the faces looked good. Up to you, I'll use these either way.

As a side note, these faces look really good with the Louis skins (I'm using the ShinySims versions).

I'm REALLY looking forward to having the completed set. Testing these has made me want to play again.

I'm going to give them a go, but what am I supposed to be testing, exactly?  I'll presume that we're supposed to be seeing if they look all right. I can do that, all I HAVE are test neighborhoods right now. I'll try to get to them in the next few days although I can't make any promises; writing eats up most of my time anymore.

I'm with everyone else when I say to just hurry up and get these done.  They look good! I'm not going to cry if they aren't absolutely totally perfectly flawless, because they're already 100% better than the Maxis templates. I suspect if there are any I can't live with, I can deal with changing one or two templates (where I ran shrieking from the thought of doing 27).

Also, thank you very much, Jordi, for that info about face blending. It explains a lot of things I was confused about and why kids in my all-custom neighborhood were losing some of the features of their parents and getting something template-y instead.

The eyes are not too close together. They appear to be, at the closest, one eye width apart, that width changing with the width of the eyes on that particular face. That is human-normal. Many of the faces have eyes that are slightly farther than one eye-width apart.

Leave the mouths how they are. Sims always smile in CAS and that is exaggerating how turned up the corners of their mouths actually are. Also, while it is indeed more realistic for the corners of the mouth to turn down slightly, it doesn't look good on the stylized faces of sims. Rather than making them look neutral when they don't have an expression like on real people, it makes them look sad, angry, or miserable - not something one sees normally on a real person unless they are quite old and have been frowning steadily all their life. It also doesn't breed well (as I found out with one of my first sims... yikes).

Grouped all together, WOW, it's really amazing to see the difference! Your templates looks so much better and real. They've kept the stylized look of the game but they look so much more like people I can think of people who look like them for pretty much all of the templates - there was no way I could do that with the freakish exaggerations Maxis provided us with.

I would prefer not to have any hideous or particularly ugly templates. They are templates after all, which are supposed to be a kind of a baseline. If I want or need ugly townies I can make my own, and there's always surgery if I want to mutilate an NPC.

Whoooops, I should have said, "CBAN might very well be Bangladesh, as vilia said, ..." but I forgot to do so.  Credit to you for that, of course.

Why do I persist on posting on message boards before morning coffee? 

You're doing a good job and it's something I want to use when it's done, so hey, why not help make it even better?


I think choosing Chinese references for #8 was wise - the default female face reminds me of the doll-like look women in traditional Chinese art are given.

#10 - Err, I wish I could remember what I was thinking yesterday because now I've completely forgotton. How embarassing...  Perhaps I was thinking of the Chinese guy in the International Relations club when I was in uni, who looked a little like the default but without the slits for eyes, I seem to remember he had somewhat prominent cheekbones. Thai is as good as any as far as I'm concerned, though.


Yeah, I figured.


Buh. No idea. C and E could mean Central and East, but why would they only have Central and East prefixes? *fires up bodyshop, waits half a billion years* ... CMAS looks to me like it may be some sort of African group, but I can't tell. CBAN might very well be Bangladesh, in which case I'm irritated as I have NEVER seen an Indian person who looks like that abomination (and it would be awesome to have an Indian template). CPLA and ETGE I have absolutely no clue. ETGE looks like some sort of Scandinavian or maybe Russian if I were to guess, but it's a wild guess. CPLA baffles me utterly - it could be a mangled Finno-Ugaric ethnotype, it could be some equally mangled Middle Eastern or Indian ethnotype. If the answer is not forthcoming relatively soon, I'd suggest you not waste time on figuring them out but decide what ethnotypes are underrepresented in the templates so far and make some of those. It's not like those templates couldn't be just about anything anyway, what with the cryptic labelling and the ham-fisted work Maxis did.

This is the only reason I come back here anymore.

Part of the problem with making a Sim that looks Asian with the Maxis controls is there is no good way to make the epicanthal fold. It's not -too- hard to give them an almond shape, but if the sim is of an ethnotype where they should have the single eyelid, that has to be faked. Since all but #7 of these are Asiatic... wow, quite the headache! For you reference, I refered to this - http://www.deviantart.com/view/32046017/ - guide when making my critique as well as remembering what my variety of friends with Asiatic roots look like. I trust the maker of that guide; she's a professional artist and has spent years researching this information.

#11 looks good - while Mayans are way too far south to count as Mexican I don't recall seeing any images of South Americans that had them look like Maxis has them. I don't think it would hurt to go ahead and push the noses and mouths back in a tiny bit, though - the Central and South American natives have very Asian ethnotype features. The guide I linked to actually does have a Amazonian face reference, as well as an Andid (from the Andes) face - while I do like this one how it is, it wouldn't hurt to blend some of the Amazonian features in to give the face a more modern (ie grab bag of ancestors  ) look.

On #10 I'd say that the chin juts too far outwards - I can't tell precisely what ethnotype that face is, but if it's what I think it is, it should not have a prominent chin. The face overall should probably be a bit flatter, with the features not so prominent, and the men not having their lips be quite so fleshy.  I do like that the eyes aren't so narrow - yes, yes, Maxis, many Asian ethnotypes don't have wide open eyes but they certainly do not liike like human masks with little slits for eyeholes. I do suggest making them less round and more almond-shaped, however - sure, the controls that change that are essentially faking it but that's as good as we're going to get with this game!

#09 is also much better - I have an Indonesian friend and your version is a hell of a lot closer to what he looks like! However, again the features are too prominent, no jutting chin, the nose should be shorter and the face rounder/more square. Again, eyes need to be not-round.

#08 looks to be a generic Asian face, so not much to say. It looks pretty good, but yeah, the eyes again. The woman's are now too small.

#07 I'm thrown off by the pale skin but it looks much more authentically, err, generic African. Haha, oh Maxis. I do think you should keep the prominence of the features, however, pushing them in gives the face a little too Caucasian look, and a little thicker lips on the women. Honestly, this is one of the templates that I didn't find stupidly insulting, even though it has it's obvious flaws (eyes so far apart they are near unto being fish eyes and general Maxis ick).

In general - the Asiatic faces should still have eyes that have that almond shape (due to the epicanthal fold that is there on real people), somewhat round faces, and non-prominent features (especially chins). Unless you want to make one of them Ainu, but that's a whole different kettle of fish of another colour.

Don't get me wrong, I think you're doing a great job.  I think you'll be able to get a lot of milage out of that ethnotype guide, probably more than out of my rattling on. 

I've also noticed that faces can look considerably different in CAS than they do in bodyshop. The lighting definitely has something to do with it - it's extremely bright in CAS, especially compared to how very dim bodyshop is.  Having the faces static vs. animated makes a big difference as well, even when they aren't grinning like loons in CAS.

You're doing an excellent job so far.

The nose-chin area being higher is probably going to have some weird effects anyhow, if some of my earlier experiments are any indication. I'd personally prefer the foreheads to not be as high as the default since I find it to be much too large. As it is most of the changed templates you've posted do improve on that at least a little.

As for the eye width, from what I could tell by eyeballing and by-the-thumbnails measuring the eyes on the changed templates are less widely set than the defaults and generally one of their widths apart from the other. Some are a little wider set, none seem to be narrower set. Perhaps some templates could have slightly narrower set eyes for variety.

These kids weren't that bad once they got out of the face-mangledness of toddlerhood, so yes, I'd say to leave them alone. However, I get a bit tired, myself, of people rattling on about 'embracing the ugliness' of sims that look nothing like any actual human being. My philosophy (so to speak) is that they're modeled after human beings so they can damn well continue to look like human beings, even if I have to force the issue and correct blending mistakes myself.

Not a dig at you, maxon, I know you meant the former (a bit ugly as adults maybe but still human) and not the latter (eyestalks, f'rex). I just can't seem to resist dragging out my soapbox sometimes. 

I can't seem to say it often enough - you can't judge how a sim will look by its looks as a toddler, as how the code interprets an adult face into a toddler face is faulty and often doesn't work.

900-some-odd megabytes. I need to go through and get rid of some stuff I never use and put the various "Trashed" items in an outside folder for later use, if I ever decide to do the story I wanted to do.

The woman is fine, but with the strange structure of the man's face it's absolutely no wonder their children looked so bizarre as babies and children.

Especially as the anti-copying measures continue to get more and more extreme and start impeding the use of users who purchase the software legally.

Heh, sometimes I wonder! Although consider how fashionable low-low-low cut "Does she hold those things in with tape?!" shirts are - but nipples are still a big taboo. Maybe pasties will end up being street fashion.

... The idea both fascinates and horrifies me.

[EDIT: Forgot a word.]

They aren't, but it's still Really Weird. Male sims have nipples all of their lives, but female sims only have them baby through toddler. THAT gave me pause, let me tell you - for, while I am aware of the (pointless, silly, ridiculous) reason why they de-nipplized the women, I'm surprised they'd bother to include them at all for anyone else, in that case. Even Barbies are more egalitarian - Ken doesn't have nipples either. Friggin' BARBIES, man...

Better yet - Females have nipples up until they become teens, but male sims keep them all their lives. ...Yeeeeah.

I replaced the defaults with skins that at least had nipples for everyone the moment I could.