TS3: Facial Expressions Converted From The Sims Medieval
This is a mod that replaces The Sims 3's set of facial idle animations with their (slightly tweaked by myself) The Sims Medieval counterparts, resulting in subtler, more natural facial expressions. 🙂
More info, full previews and download under the cut!
This little package is one I've had in my personal folder for quite a while, but recently I got back to working on it to fix a couple issues and make some small adjustments before putting it out there.
The mod replaces 15 (out of a total of 20) facial expressions for Sims aged teen and up with their equivalents from Medieval. The 5 remaining expressions are left intact because they are identical in both games. These facial expressions are those that Sims make when idle depending on their mood; the expressions they make during interactions, socials, etc. are unaffected by this mod.
Though the facial expressions in TSM are far from perfect, the artists definitely learned a few lessons from TS3. TSM's facial expressions have reduced clipping and noticeably less distortion of the Sim's facial features, which means we can bid goodbye to Sims' eyelashes clipping through their eyebrows, noses scrunched up to oblivion, and humanly impossible facial contortions. Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on each particular Sim's facial slider combo; you will likely see more distorted animations on more distorted faces.
See a full in-game comparison of the vanilla vs. replaced facial expressions + notes here!
Now, on to the slight tweaks mentioned earlier:
By default, all facial expressions have a full blinking animation and a "noblink" pose. The TSM animations had some sort of blinking, but the Sim's eyes didn't actually close for some reason, so I took care of that for every facial expression this mod touches to bring them more in line with the few remaining TS3 ones.
The Sad 1 animation originally looked quite awkward around the lips, with the bottom corners being pulled out while the rest of the mouth was shut; I pulled those corners back up to make the facial expression a little more bearable to look at.
Moreover, from the beginning I thought the Sad expression would fit the angry mood better, so I've also made an alternate version of the mod that swaps around some expressions. In the alternate version, TSM's Sad will replace TS3's Angry 1 (untouched by the main version; not pictured in the previews,) TSM's Sad 1 will replace TS3's Sad, and TS3's Sad 1 will remain the same as vanilla.
Compatibility
Both versions of this mod have slightly different sets of replacements for a_expression_ and a_expressions_ CLIP resources, and will conflict with any other mod that replaces these resources.
This mod is technically compatible with other mods that alter different resources in order to change the frequency of, or entirely disable, the facial expressions, such as Esmeralda's No making stupid faces when idle. Of course, if you used that mod, then you'd never see the facial expressions this one has to offer. 😉
Download: SFS
Choose either the main version or the alternate version. Place the .package in your usual Packages folder or in your Overrides folder.
Additional Credits
s3pe: Exporting/Importing resources, creating the package file.
Blender 2.79, Clip Tools: Importing/Editing/Exporting animations.
Gimp: Creating the preview and comparison images.
Thanks to TheSweetSimmer for nudging me in the right direction when the animations weren't displaying as expected in-game!
Thanks to @misspats3 and @xiasimla for their feedback during testing!
You are face to face now!