To celebrate the launch, I spent some time converting my Office Space and Perfect Party Carpets to test out the in-game Modding tools! I plan to play around with it a lot more in the future. I love indie games, and I'm so so excited to see where this game goes!!
⭐ You can grab them both on the Paralives Steam Workshop Hub for freeeeeeeeee! (which is a bitch and a half to link to cause it's technically in beta)
Right now there's an issue with Steam Workshop importing Custom Floors (don't I feel special) but Shoobs was able to find a workaround.
Step 1: Sub to the Mod and open Paralives.
Step 2: Click the Mods Tab on the Main Menu.
Step 3: Find the Mod and hit the Folder Icon to locate the folder on your PC. (You can also grab a zip of both directly here)
Step 4: Move the Whole Folder to C:\Users\YOURCOMPUTER\AppData\LocalLow\Paralives\Paralives
It should work after that.
This isn't a great solution, but I'm going to leave these up in hopes this import bug gets fixed in the future. 👍
To celebrate the launch, I spent some time converting my Office Space and Perfect Party Carpets to test out the in-game Modding tools! I plan to play around with it a lot more in the future. I love indie games, and I'm so so excited to see where this game goes!!
⭐ You can grab them both on the Paralives Steam Workshop Hub for freeeeeeeeee! (which is a bitch and a half to link to cause it's technically in beta)
The siren call of mermay was too difficult to resist! Don't consider me off hiatus though, this was difficult to get done on my mom's laptop and I couldn't even test my own poses 😫 Thank you soooo much to my dear friend Anne for testing all the poses for me, providing feedback and taking a magnificent cover photo for me! ❤ Please take a look at her magnificent work on patreon/tumblr and also her incredible legacy story!!
14 Paired poses (plus 3 poses with variations, so 17 total) for a mersim and human sim. Place teleporters at the very edge of a deck/pier/whatever. Previews below
To show merform either use MCCC (sim commands > occult commands > show mermaid tail) OR input code in cheat menu traits.equip_trait trait_OccultMermaid_MermaidForm (tutorial)
T.O.O.L. Modor WW Pose player (tutorial) recommended for positioning sims
Tag me on tumblr/Bluesky if you use them! Let me know if there’s any issues
Haven't experimented in CAS in a while, so I decided to create some sims inspired by my most favorite (and imo, the most iconic) decade ever: the 70's 🪩🕺
Yvonne Howard - a dance machine, avid discotheque attendee, and social butterfly
Jermaine Gibbs - a romantic casanova with a penchant for dates but zero commitment
Shirley Cooper - a confident yet snobby aspiring actress of high maintenance
I have got to ask. What is your process for making textures, for objects or clothing? Everything you put out looks so nice and detailed. Any techniques you can share? :3
I'll answer this one publicly!!! Since I have the energy today 😅
Rough Tutorial/Process below the Cut
Over Simblreen last year something finally clicked for me about high poly baking!! (I felt very silly it took so long to figure out 💀)
(insert waluigi noise)
When I do my high poly detail sculpts I like to use the Multiresolution Modifier in Blender. This keeps everything light and non-destructible - and helps a lot if you don't already have a specific shape or silhouette in mind. (It also helps with computer processing power)
For full fits, when I already have a silhouette nailed down - I'll make a copy and go in with Multiresolution and sculpting tools to add in some fabric folds and larger details that would be annoying to add in in Substance Painter.
After I'm happy with the sculpt, I apply the multires modifier and then both the Low Poly and High Poly get saved out as DAEs and work moves on in substance painter!
With Il Capitano's Outfit, it was so intricate and a lot of UVs overlapped so in order to have more control over the bake I separated it into about 10 pieces and baked it in Substance. There's a neat tutorial on how to do this here.
ignore the mess, I moved this into the done folder and a ton of high poly meshes got disconnected in the move
When I make a new CAS project in Substance (I have a perpetual license of Substance Painter 2024 on Steam) I'll work on a 2024x2024 map, because Substance hates anything that isn't a square. After I'm done I'll squish this down to the right size in Photoshop.
There is a good amount of cleanup I have to do by hand when doing a bake this way. When I subdivide the model in Blender it's hard to keep all the edges of the garment 1:1 (the high poly usually shrinks a bit) so I'll export the generated maps from substance and do my best to clean up any rough edges in photoshop before re-importing them back in.
And then I start drawing the rest of the Owl basically. Using my baked in details as a base, and also sometimes cutting together pulled textures from EA - I go in and add stitching, fabric textures, buttons, etc. Substance 2024 also has a really great embroidery feature, that I used to make the embroidery and brocade effect on the new dress!
Substance is really good at making hyperrealistic things - making something more Maxis Match is a lot harder imo. 😅
When it's time to export my maps, I set as much as I can to a grey tone (for easy recoloring) and use these export presets!
I'll also export the 2D Material view with Transparency to use as both a quick way to Mask in PS as well as added detail I can blend in.
From there my workflow moves to photoshop, where I bring in my maps from substance, size them correctly, set up my file with all my masks and gradient maps - and hand paint the extra details on top that really make it sparkle.
(speaker example cause I'm not wading through that PSD again WOOF)
I like to build the bump, spec, and shadow maps all in the same file since my masks are already set up. If I need to swap alphas in and out I copy and paste it from channels onto a new layer!
That's a really rough overview, but if you ever have any specific questions or topics you'd like me to go over I'm happy to explain or point you to a good tutorial!! 😁
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