Fun with Facial Hair

[maxon]

OK - so I've been binning my facial hairs - beards, stubble and eyebrows - well, only eyebrows so far, but I think I'm getting the picture.  Eyebrows are showing up correctly in their bins.   

Anyway, there are a couple of questions I wanted to ask (if anyone knows the answer) - one because I'm puzzled and the other because I would like to know the answer before I give in to the temptation of poking about and seeing what happens (usually fatal but that's what SimPE makes back up files for).

1. I want to know whether it's possible to delete - safely - some of the categories that eyebrows appear in.  For example, I DL some bangs (fringes to us English) which I don't think are really suitable for men.  Can I delete the Texture Overlay entry relating to males?  Actually, now I think of it, I can think of some men who would like to look like Shirley Temple but not, perhaps, in my game.  Similarly, I have some bushy eyebrows that really only suit demented craggy old men. 

2. Can anyone explain why the filesize shot up nearly 10 times when I did the following.  I was working on an eyebrow file and found, to my annoyance, that the maker had simply used the same texture for the grey category (elder) as they had for the infants to adults categories.  You have no idea how much this annoys me.  I did one of my standard corrections on the elder texture (basically stripping out all the colour and lightening it a bit) but when I reimported the texture, the file size shot up from 161Kb to over a MB!  Before I delete it in seething irritation, can anyone explain what happened?

[maxon]

I just discovered a partial solution to question 2 which is that if you re-create the file with Bodyshop, the file size returns to more normal proportions.  I must be doing something wrong with SimPE, I think.

[Argon]

BodyShop compresses any packages it creates, however if you do any editing in SimPE then the compression will be lost. It's normal and as far as I know, there is no way of getting around it.

[aqualectrix]

As to 1, everything I know points to "I'm pretty sure that should be relatively safe".

In other words, back up the file and give it a try.

One artifact that you're probably going to get is this:
Let's say you've deleted all the male Texture Overlay XMLs from an eyebrow file.  In bodyshop or CAS, if you create a female with these eyebrows and then switch to male, you'll get either no eyebrows at all or possibly a random assignment.
Likewise, if you delete everything except for elder TOXMLs, create a Sim and age it down, you'll get some weirdness.

Seeing as these are rather unlikely and more or less what you'd expect, I'd say go for it.

[maxon]

Thanks both,

Yes, Argon, I guess it makes sense (sort of) about the loss of compression - anyway, it's not a big deal, I just need to make sure I remake the file before I reclassify it for the colour bin.  I have found out that any eyebrows I had already classified no longer appear in Bodyshop as available for cloning/creating new content.

Aqualectrix, Yeah, I think I'm going to give it a go.  There actually isn't really any pressing gameplay reason to do it except that it makes the selection screens in Bodyshop/CAS that much clearer and more usable - which is kind of the point of doing it in the first place.

Anyway, thanks again for helpful replies.

[Regina]

I'm not sure what you're using or what you've read or haven't read.  I've used Theo's binning tool for fixing up my hair files, then started on facial hair and ran into the same problem you did.  I posted about it in Peasantry in the relevent thread and my daughter told me there was an explanation and fix, but then didn't get back to it because of MATY going down.

You may want to check that thread.

[maxon]

I'm not sure what you're using or what you've read or haven't read.  I've used Theo's binning tool for fixing up my hair files, then started on facial hair and ran into the same problem you did.  I posted about it in Peasantry in the relevent thread and my daughter told me there was an explanation and fix, but then didn't get back to it because of MATY going down.

You may want to check that thread.

Umm - are you referring to the increase in file size?  Argon gave an explanation further up this thread and the solution is to remake the file with Bodyshop which will recompress the file.  You need to do it BEFORE you change the coding to bin the (facial) hair properly because, once that is done, the eyebrow won't show up in Bodyshop for cloning.