What, in Heaven's name, is up with traits?! Scary Pic included

[Nepheris]

I'd love to know the RGB codes for that lipstick, by the way.

She comes packaged with that lipstick, I just left it on. You can just DL her if you want it and save it as a custom colour.

I think I'm one of the very few people that actually like the new slider system. You can do a lot with it when you figure out which slider does exactly what and how you can make em work together.

[NephilimNexus]

I would theorize that TS3 does not actually meld the nmumeric values of facial traits into an average of the two parents.  Rather for each characteristic (nose, eyes, mouth, etc) it simply picks one parent at random and does a copy/paste of that value.  So what you end up with is a mix & match of the absolute, original values from the parents rather than an actual blend.

Some examples: One parent has a huge schnooz, the other has a small one.  The child will not get an average sized schnooz.  Instead they will either get a huge one or a small one.  If one parent is Asian and the other Irish, you won't get green eyes with an Asian angle.  Instead you will either get totally Asian eyes or totally Irish ones.  The worst violator of reality is, of course, skin tone.  If you have one dark brown parent and one light pink one, you will not get a nicely tanned child like you would in real life.  Instead they'll either be dark brown or light pink.  One or the other, never a blend.

This seems especially disappointing to me considering that the system makes so much use sliders and numberical range values instead of absolutes when customizing characters for traits.  It would seem like doing blending of these traits would be 3rd grade math for the programmers.  Instead they opt for the coin-flip method?  Highly illogical.

[CheritaChen]

If one parent is Asian and the other Irish, you won't get green eyes with an Asian angle.  Instead you will either get totally Asian eyes or totally Irish ones.

You may have just been unlucky up to now with the eye color. My selfSim with medium blue eyes married and had 2 spawn with a very dark-skinned, brown-eyed maid NPC. While I was disappointed that both boys came out with her pale pink skin rather than a nice coffee-like blend, one of them has hazel eyes, and the other brown. So far, both are attractive kids, though I did switch their eyebrows via mirror to improve them.

Of course, maybe there's something in my game that's the aberration. Since Pescado verified that EA couldn't be bothered to make the skin blending work, I may just have been blessed by an oddity when it comes to the eyes, maybe related to the father being originally an NPC. I noticed that the older boy, like his dad, will frequently wake before he gets the fully rested buff, though he does not have the Light Sleeper trait and nothing obvious is causing him to get up.

[SolaceDevotio]

Perhaps hazel was an asspull just like what happens with hair.  I had a kid with grey eyes whose mother had lilac eyes and father had bright green eyes.  He also had brown hair even though mom had blonde and dad had red.  Perhaps mom was inappropriate with the mailman when I wasn't looking.

[CheritaChen]

So, I finally had a few minutes to play with poor Adele. Remember, my goal wasn't so much to turn her into a supermodel as to make her look realistic, using as few tweaks as possible.

Naturally, she blinked for the front shot. Bitch.


You can see that she's still got that interesting nose, and is basically an average-looking Sim (if you don't count the fugliness of the eyelids when she blinked). After a couple of false starts, all I did was move the cheekbone shape slider to the opposite extreme, then adjusted the eyelid height slider until the whites of her eyes weren't prominent at the bottoms, which I think was the aspect which made her look zombirific to me. I did not end up adjusting anything else, such as eye socket depth or even cheek fullness, because I felt these two tweaks resulted in a normal-enough looking human face.

This was a fun little diversion. Thank you, daydreamer, for being a good sport and letting us play with your unfortunate Sim.

[Doc Doofus]

About the genetic melding... 

It would have been much easier to just average out the parents' slider bar positions when making the child, but the problem with that is that, over time, the sims community would gravitate towards the same medium face.

In TS2, they tried to work around that by mixing one dominant feature, like a jaw or nose, with some feature from the other parent.  That way whole families would have some peculiar differences that were passed down from generation to generation.  Or so was the plan.  The problem with it was that some features REALLY didn't mix well and you got bizarre mutants.  Like, most of the time.  I spent way too much time fixing inherited faces and then fixing their genes with SimPe.

Personally, I would prefer the averaging out of SOME sliders.  Even if face distinctions in the gene pool would tend to dissipate over time, that's not that big an issue because if you're playing the game for that many generations, you're probably introducing quite a few new sims of your own.

[OpiumGirl]

Woohoo for non-fugly sims!  Here's an update on my fugly little girl sim.  She grew up nicer than both of her parents and I'm satisfied that genetics are pretty decently done now.    I'm even more surprised of her appearance as an adult than I was of her appearance as a teen.  She's on of the nicer looking female Sims I've seen, in fact. Who would have known?  Except for Ashkitty, that is....

Fugly Bye Bye 1


Fugly Bye Bye 2

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

I think she looks rather lovely with glasses, although something about that hairstyle bugs me.

Now that my freaking game is fixed, I need to upload pictures of the Adele makeover.

[Doc Doofus]

Oh, that reminds me...  Here's my Adele, using minimal changes (as described in a previous post).



And here's Adele after I let myself go wild and change whatever I wanted.  This is the one I saved for my own use.

[OpiumGirl]

Hey, not bad at all, Doc. Definitely an improvement on her.

Question....where is Adele from?  I thought she was someone's Sim but seems now like maybe she's a character?

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

She was the product of Frankenstein and his bride a game-born sim from Daydreamer's two CAS-made sims posted a couple of pages back.

[OpiumGirl]

Oh dear.....

As for the hair on my teen Sim, it's the same hair her mother and uncle have so it's easy to tell apart that family from others.
It is a funny hairstyle which is why I like it.  I can't stand the ridiculous ponytails that are available and I like anything that's unsymmetrical and strange. 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Eh, I tend to favor the shorter pixie-style cuts.  Of course though, something about that hair makes me want to beat it down with a bottle of Bedhead Straightening Shampoo.

ETA (because I don't want to doublepost, dammit):  Here's my Adele makeover pictures:

So here's a profilish picture (with her hair up), so you can get an idea of nose shape changes and cheek changes.



Another from the side.



As you can see, she just needed a few subtle changes to the cheekbone and nose structure for her to look a little less Bride of Frankenstein and a little more Chinese-American.

Here's one from the front.



And here's one where I gave her a haircut and had her embrace her heritage, sort of.



If anyone actually wants her, just let me know.  I can repackage her with a different basegame hair and a different basegame pattern (the hair in the picture is a store hair, and the pattern is some Asian pattern I picked up ages ago on MTS, I think).

[daydreamer]

I love all the altered Adeles. Here's the original in various get-ups (she's in the Criminal career track and frequently changes her look to fool the feds):

Gothic Well-to-Do



Cheerleader



Doudy Mom

[dream_operator]

The children do get an in-between shade of the parents skintones if both of the parents have a skintone from the same color family.  So in my family where the father is dark brown and the mother a lighter brown, one of the two children is an in-between shade (the other is the same color as his father).  So in this case the genetics work just like they do in the Sims2 except with more variety with the in-between shades.  Where people are finding that they aren't getting the in-between shades is when each parent has a skin from a different color family.  Then the kids get one or the other.  And while I agree this is diappointing when one has parents of two normal skin colors, I can see why EA made it this way.  You would get some really muddled and yucky colors if say one parent was red and one was green...or one was brown and one was blue. 

[chaos]

I don't even use the swatches, though. I use the slider that seems to be default for the Basics tab. It goes from pale peach to dark brown, yet the game still gives spawnlets one or the other skintone. This gets frustrating, but that's what editsim is for.

[asmadasrabbits]

I don't even use the swatches, though. I use the slider that seems to be default for the Basics tab. It goes from pale peach to dark brown, yet the game still gives spawnlets one or the other skintone. This gets frustrating, but that's what editsim is for.

That is a swatch, all of the swatches have sliders that range from light to dark.