#creation resources

[needleworkreve]

These are the results of my in depth look into how TS4 spec maps work. 

The alpha layer seems to add a reflection or sheen at between 12.5% - 87.5% opacity of the colored channels. It’s more liquid looking than metallic and seems most effective at around 50% strength. 

Green seems to effect the brilliance of the shine making items appear to be made of polished metal. At low opacity, it still implies a metallic quality to an object such as a brushed metal tap. 

The way that blue effects shine makes an object seem curved and plastic-y. Probably best for lacquered effects like automotive paint or nail polish. Would be lovely at 50% strength and 50% opacity on Art Deco furniture for that high-glamor look. 

Red seems the most promising for clothing on its own creating effects from vinyl and latex at high strength to silk charmeuse and crepe on low opacity. 

In combination, just about any effect is possible, but I would suggest a gentle hand. High opacity, high percentage spec maps are very extreme.

[needleworkreve]

These are the two clothing/makeup palettes I’ve developed. The Primary Palette began as literally eye-dropping my favorite children’s clothing company’s colors into GIMP, but then changed as I added more neutrals to it. I find that it works nicely as a Maxis Match feel due to the clear colors. 

I developed Dark Romance because I wanted something with the nuance of Cottage Garden and Rustic Romance but the breadth of color from my Primary palette. It works really nicely with other CC and also with Cottage Living and Incheon Arrivals. 

At 56 and 70 colors each, these are palettes I tend to use more like crayons, rather than doing a swatch per color. If you’d like to use them, you can get the .gpl and s4s files as well as these image files for free from my Mediafire

Dark Romance

Primary Palette

[needleworkreve]

I’m doing a deep dive into how spec maps work and the relationship between what color and opacity to the shine you see in CAS This is my preliminary results from looking at the Blue and Alpha levels. I went into this expecting that the 100% opaque blues would display the strongest shine. I was surprised In CAS how many matte t-shirts I was seeing.

[needleworkreve]

These are the preliminary results of my look at the red channel. Once again, I find it interesting how 100% opacity is so similar to 1% opacity. As I’ve been organizing the data, I’ve been inspired to fill in the remaining rows and columns since my results haven’t been what I would expect.

[needleworkreve]

How to Make Handsome Male Sims.

I’ve gotten some questions on discord about how to make good looking men, so here’s my method when I’m not trying to make anyone specific.

1. Start with your random base sim

2. I then hit random for every part I can 3-4 times which is how I got here:

You can see a character start to emerge, so now I go and roll his personality. He got Hot Headed, High Maintenance, and Active. I gave him the Eco Innovator aspiration because I think he has the drive to do that. In randomizing his name, I go with Noah Esposito. 

3. First we make sure that Noah’s features will translate well to a female sim by going into “personality” and selecting the female gender

I find all those accessories distracting, so the first thing I do is remove any accessories and makeup. If the flipped version were to arrive with hair covering the forehead, I’d swap that to an out of the face style so I can access all the sliders. 

4. Now that she’s all clean, I turn her to the side to check her profile.

You’ll want to pay attention to the placement of the eyes in relationship to the ears. Human eyes are generally about even with the top of the ears. If you’re having trouble seeing their relationship to each other, it can be helpful to put a pair of glasses on them and check to see what direction the arms are going, like so:

You can see that the angle is pretty flat, so I don’t need to move the eyes. This sim needs some work around the mouth, chin and jaw. First I’m going to get rid of the duck mouth and Maxis Smile.

Now I’m going to turn her to the front and make sure her mouth is proportional to her face. I’m also going to start working on her chin.

Her mouth is too wide for her face. Generally, I like to keep the mouth no wider than the center of the eyes unless the lips are quite full. The mouth shouldn’t be too small either, definitely not narrower than the outer edges of the nostrils!

If I bring her mouth in too far, she looks like a Landgraab. 

I fixed the mouth and put her into Detail Mode to work on the chin. Having the sim face front pull up the bone in the chin for a nice curve under the lips for a kissable looking mouth. Look how pretty that looks from the side! Now I am going to do some work on the nose and cheeks.

I made the nose less delicate, but still reasonable on a woman adjusting the bridge of the nose, nostrils and nose tip. Then I brought the cheek bone in a little and squared the jaw. Moving the jaw back and forth can change the look of the mouth. In normal mode, the way to adjust the forehead shape is to hover over the brows until the double arrow shows up. Moving this left to right and right to left brings the bones of the forehead in and out. There is a ear tilt slider on the ear lobe in detail mode and you can control how far the ears stick out by turning the sim backwards and pulling the ears outward.

I’m feeling satisfied with how our sim looks as a female, so I’m going to swap him back.

Now that that he’s swapped back I’ll make further adjustments. He’s got a slight Hapsburg jaw, so I’m going to pull that back. I like how annoyed he looks given his personality traits of hot headed and high maintenance. 

I decided to change out his hair and hair color and adjust his jaw and mouth a bit more. Now he looks ready to make someone’s life hell. 

Basically stay away from features that make your sim look too masculine or too feminine. Overly gendered features don’t tend to breed well, as anyone who has downloaded a “hot” guy from the gallery and swapped his gender in cas.fulleditmode can tell you.