Hey Billie! Did the piccrew ever work for the old TheSims2.com avatars?
Hey again! I saw you messaged me but I totally forgot to reply earlier. Sorry!
Unfortunately, no. The way that they work is sort of weird. So, the original TheSims2.com avatars are actually flash based. I thought that I could just extract the assets and then reconstruct them.
Problem with that is that it turns out that rather than being images most of them were basic shapes cut out that would then have a filter applied to them for color, shape, texture, etc.
I don't remember the avatar creation process very well but it looks like you could pick hair length for certain styles... etc etc. That would fine because I could just create some basic colors for each thing. However, it seems like every accessory, outfit, hair style, would need to be modified.
I'd basically have to construct each asset into an image and then make variants for each one. It's doable but it would take more time than I'm willing to put in right now. Give me a little while and I can upload the extracted assets if someone else wants to take a swing at it, though!