CardinalSims

Winter Hiatus (Southern Hemisphere) ⧫ see u all when the flowers are blooming ⧫

[thecardinalsims]

NRaas Needs Your Assistance!

Do you use the NRaas mods? Has the information on the NRaas website and forum ever been useful to you? If so, a moment of your time please!

I’d like to share the current situation with Simblr – which you can also read about directly from the site owner here: https://www.nraas.net/community/topic15428

While it seemed like we were entering an era of old-internet revival and indie websites in the fight against the dead-internet, a significant road block has emerged. Prices have inflated drastically for server parts, memory, storage, and server-hosting itself. This puts all non-profit online communities in peril.

As a result, the site owner has opened a Patreon so that the community can help cover the costs of keeping us online.

Important clarification:

The NRaas mods are NEVER going to be paywalled. The project will remain open-source and free for everyone. Donations are optional.

These mods are still in active development! The site and mods have been maintained by Chain_Reaction since Twallan's retirement, providing countless updates and support. Lots of cool stuff over there if you haven't updated in a hot minute.

There is no pressure to donate if your situation does not allow for it. Thank you for the consideration!

Long post ahead with information on the situation and some incentives for reaching membership goals.

If you've had some trouble accessing the site over the past week or so:

The situation is directly caused by the greed and encroachment of something we’re all uncomfortably familiar with: AI companies and the companies investing in them (of simmer relevance, that includes EA and Krafton (InZoi)).

NRaas is not the first nor will it be the last to be affected. Website servers already suffer from bots trawling and scraping their content – including your content that you write and share just about anywhere. Now they’re being bought off entirely. Archives and file-hosting are at high risk. Myrient is a recent example of an archive that went offline for this very reason.

It can feel a bit grim, but I want to assure you that the burden isn't yours to bear as an individual. As a community, it's actually quite easy to become hostile - and more important, unprofitable - to these invasive species as it were.

The past 26 years of modding and storytelling was OVERWHELMINGLY built upon free software, non-profit websites, and shared resources. A few unscrupulous paywallers and corporate greed isn't going to rewrite that history. Greed is the minority - but it does try to eat everything in its path.

That's all I ask - if you enjoy the fruits of The Sims community or enjoy being a part of it, make it just a little more inconvenient to swallow us.

Do not tolerate GenAI in our community spaces.

Do not support EA or Krafton. Let obscurity and irrelevancy devour them.

Do participate in the community wherever you think you'd find a little piece of purpose - make a blog for your stories, come chat with us in the Chatterbox forum at NRaas, make your first mod.

Lastly:

In a separate post, I'll be posting some CC incentives that will be released as milestones are reached. This content will not be paywalled - it will be posted for free as thanks to the community.

This is being offered on my own accord and is not the official reward for any particular tier. None of the proceeds are going to me!

Please look out for that over the weekend, I still need to take all of the preview screenshots which is perhaps the least exciting part of making CC.

And thank you, on behalf of the volunteers at NRaas.

[thecardinalsims]

Update:

Hi everyone!

The NRaas site is going to be unavailable for the next 10 days or so as we migrate to a new server - thanks to the incredible support!

The notice about this on the site will also go down in a few more hours, so hopefully you'll see this or the MTS post to reassure that we haven't fallen off the face of the earth.

Thank you all for the generosity, whether it was in the form of a donation or sharing this post.

[thecardinalsims]

NEAPOLITAN MASCARA SET

As a thank you for hitting several milestones for NRaas, here's a gift! This set includes three flavours of 'mascara' - makeup eyelashes that overlap defaults, automatically fit all eye shapes, and are controlled by the EA lash slider.

VANILLA MASCARA

As the name suggests, these lashes are identical to the vanilla EA lashes.

Intended to restore EA-style lashes when you have a default lash replacement or lash remover installed.

A variant with bottom lashes is included, shown in the banner above.

CHIC MASCARA

Hand-painted texture with bottom lashes.

Dark brown rather than pure black.

A 'true' mascara, intended to add volume and length when layered on top of defaults.

SUBTLE MASCARA

Identical texture to my Subtle Lashes defaults - which I have included as an optional download.

Comes in three 'swatches' - blonde, brown, and ginger.

These act as recolours for my defaults.

Downloads and information under the cut.

SUBTLE LASHES (DEFAULT REPLACEMENT)

Hand-painted texture for the default eyelashes.

Optional, but the mascaras are on top of these in all the previews.

Unisex, but currently only for teen through to elder.

Not compatible with other eyelash replacers, eyelash removers, or face overlays (this includes DR teeth and sclera).

This is custom content for The Sims 3 only.

DOWNLOAD CARDINAL'S NEAPOLITAN MASCARA SET

DOWNLOAD CARDINAL'S DR SUBTLE LASHES

MASCARA INFORMATION

Located in the Eyeliner category.

Currently female-only, but will be updated in the future.

All of the files can be installed at the same time.

Compatible with all eyelash defaults, even those that remove the eyelashes entirely.

Mesh is 68 polygons, 128 with bottom lashes added, so they're safe to use on all sims. You can even layer multiple mascaras together.

Lightweight DXT1 textures, all packages less than 1MB large.

No custom sliders are required.

This CC is unrelated to and does not require CASExtensions.

CREDITS AND T.O.U.

Tamo's eyes are technically on the DR texture, but it's not seen in-game.

The mesh with bottom lashes is EA's edited by me. The textures for Chic and Subtle are mine. The rest is EA.

If you want to make your own mascaras, I would recommend cloning Chic as the base - this gets you the mesh with an optimised UV and bottom lashes.

No need to ask for permission, just follow my general T.O.U.

[thecardinalsims]

NRaas Needs Your Assistance!

Do you use the NRaas mods? Has the information on the NRaas website and forum ever been useful to you? If so, a moment of your time please!

I’d like to share the current situation with Simblr – which you can also read about directly from the site owner here: https://www.nraas.net/community/topic15428

While it seemed like we were entering an era of old-internet revival and indie websites in the fight against the dead-internet, a significant road block has emerged. Prices have inflated drastically for server parts, memory, storage, and server-hosting itself. This puts all non-profit online communities in peril.

As a result, the site owner has opened a Patreon so that the community can help cover the costs of keeping us online.

Important clarification:

The NRaas mods are NEVER going to be paywalled. The project will remain open-source and free for everyone. Donations are optional.

These mods are still in active development! The site and mods have been maintained by Chain_Reaction since Twallan's retirement, providing countless updates and support. Lots of cool stuff over there if you haven't updated in a hot minute.

There is no pressure to donate if your situation does not allow for it. Thank you for the consideration!

Long post ahead with information on the situation and some incentives for reaching membership goals.

If you've had some trouble accessing the site over the past week or so:

The situation is directly caused by the greed and encroachment of something we’re all uncomfortably familiar with: AI companies and the companies investing in them (of simmer relevance, that includes EA and Krafton (InZoi)).

NRaas is not the first nor will it be the last to be affected. Website servers already suffer from bots trawling and scraping their content – including your content that you write and share just about anywhere. Now they’re being bought off entirely. Archives and file-hosting are at high risk. Myrient is a recent example of an archive that went offline for this very reason.

It can feel a bit grim, but I want to assure you that the burden isn't yours to bear as an individual. As a community, it's actually quite easy to become hostile - and more important, unprofitable - to these invasive species as it were.

The past 26 years of modding and storytelling was OVERWHELMINGLY built upon free software, non-profit websites, and shared resources. A few unscrupulous paywallers and corporate greed isn't going to rewrite that history. Greed is the minority - but it does try to eat everything in its path.

That's all I ask - if you enjoy the fruits of The Sims community or enjoy being a part of it, make it just a little more inconvenient to swallow us.

Do not tolerate GenAI in our community spaces.

Do not support EA or Krafton. Let obscurity and irrelevancy devour them.

Do participate in the community wherever you think you'd find a little piece of purpose - make a blog for your stories, come chat with us in the Chatterbox forum at NRaas, make your first mod.

Lastly:

In a separate post, I'll be posting some CC incentives that will be released as milestones are reached. This content will not be paywalled - it will be posted for free as thanks to the community.

This is being offered on my own accord and is not the official reward for any particular tier. None of the proceeds are going to me!

Please look out for that over the weekend, I still need to take all of the preview screenshots which is perhaps the least exciting part of making CC.

And thank you, on behalf of the volunteers at NRaas.

[thecardinalsims]

Hi, I was wondering if you could explain why some CC hair, especially those converted from TS4, have weird streaks or small spots that tend to be a different color from the rest of the hair?

I can't say for absolute certain, as I don't use TS4 conversions, but it's likely related to how different the UV maps are between the games.

Alpha hairs, as the name entails, often use the same generic hair texture (if it's straight hair) and only vary in what's painted in the alpha channel. Changes to these would be made in an image editor, so the textures are laid out in a way that's accessible for the artist.

Clay hairs are meshed with a texture painting workflow in mind, so their UVs are quite messy and have little scraps ripped all over the place. The texture gets painted onto the mesh directly, so the artist doesn't have to work with the image directly.

Special care is needed to make changes to the clay texture (such as converting it to a Specular, Normal, or Control for TS3) without those scraps becoming mismatched.

For other CC hairs, there is a handful of other mistakes that could be to blame.

[veskata]

Sims 3 Taxi Override mod (NYC Ford Crown Victoria)

This is a mesh override mod for the base game taxi, inspired by the iconic Ford Crown Victoria - NYC’s quintessential taxi for decades. While it isn’t a 100% replica, it captures the land yacht aesthetic and those classic, flowing lines. I created this mod to add a touch of realism to the game, and I’m sure you’ll love gazing at it as much as I do!

Download: SFS

Credits:

Original model: New York Taxi Car Low-poly 3D model by rescue3dcom at CGTrader (paid)

Using BloomBase's tutorial on making custom vehicles for Sims 3, using TSRW.

People that helped me fixing normals/UV map : @thecardinalsims

Who tested my mod : @thedawning66

S3OC (Sims 3 Object Cloner)

S3PE (Sims 3 Package Editor)

Blender

Milkshape 3D

TSR Workshop

To support my work, donate me a small tip at Ko-fi!

@pis3update @wanderingsimsfinds @wanderingsimsfinds

[veskata]

New update chagelog:

Added text and a sticker on the side of the car, which can be recolored, as they are part of the RGB mask (maybe later this will be good ground for creating more color swatches).

Slightly bigger roof banner. The old one was not big enought (almost all taxis in NYC have really big, chonky roof banners like this one).

Font on the front/back licence plate are changed in Simlish (sims don't understand English, right?)

Download: SFS

@pis3update @wanderingsimsfinds @eternalccfinds @simfluencer-network @ts3ccmp @kpccfinds

[veskata]

Now available for download at Mod The Sims!

Download

[thecardinalsims]

Hey! I saw you say on an MTS post that you're open to fixing hairs. Is that still the case? Skysims 115 has black streaks on the hair in live mode on medium LOD. Do you know how to fix it?

I most certainly can! It's excellent practice. I couldn't find SkySims' T.O.U., so I've tentatively uploaded these in full (original files not required, they will conflict). CARDINAL_SkySims3_Hair115Fixed The mesh and textures belong to SkySims, I just: - Remade the backfaces on LOD1 and LOD2, all ages. - Removed an unnecessary dupe of the accessory in the hair groups, reducing the polycount for free. - Remade LOD3 entirely, reasoning is below the cut. - I added ValidForMaternity and removed ValidForRandom (townies have no business generating with a 15k hair) - Connected the ages, so a toddler with this hair will age up into the child hair, so on. Enjoy!

For those curious, I've included an explanation and examples of the topology gore below the cut.

Quick-fire context: Mesh is visible from one side only. When you finish making a hair, you duplicate it and flip it to be visible on both sides. Each set of faces is identical. Decimation collapses faces ARBITRARILY. What does that mean for two sets of identical faces? They aren't changed equally, and stop being identical.

[thecardinalsims]

so nobody was going to tell me that the S-Club lashes are 3k poly

[thecardinalsims]

Hi. I did something about it.

I've made a hotfix for all S-Club lashes in three performance flavours, after discovering that 1.1k of these polygons were from a redundant mesh duplicate. That's 1/3 of the mesh just being bloat you can't see ingame!

CHOOSE ONE. Install to Mods > Overrides. Fully compatible with the S-Club eyelash sliders. Compatible with Buckley's CASP fixes. Original .packages required.

Flavor 1 QUALITY 2k polygons / 2k texture resaved in DXT1* for 50% less RAM usage /Identical to original.

Flavor 2 BALANCED 2k polygons / 1k texture resaved in DXT1* for 80% less RAM usage

Flavor 3 PERFORMANCE Ultra-optimised sub-500 polygon mesh / 1k texture as above

All three look almost identical on my graphics settings, but you can safely swap between them if you decide you want a bit of extra crispness.

Please enjoy some sorely needed optimisation for a decade old piece of CC 🤡

*In the past, DXT1 was noticeably lossier than DXT5. However, the wizards at NVIDIA have made the difference between the two basically imperceptible with their modern Texture Tools Exporter. If a mesh doesn't need an alpha channel, you can and should be using DXT1 - it's half the file size for free!

[thecardinalsims]

norwegian Fast Lane localisation my beloved

[thecardinalsims]

so nobody was going to tell me that the S-Club lashes are 3k poly

[lowpolyanimals]

Shrew from The Sims 3

[thesimsnostalgia]

this used to scare lil 10-year-old me lmao

[thecardinalsims]

have another

[microscotch]

strangetown fanatics are truly sleeping on these absolute icons, just saying

[thecardinalsims]

Honorable Ava Cadavra mention (from TS2 GBA, NDS, and Urbz).

[thecardinalsims]

I didn't expect to write another guide so soon, but this one is a simple set of text instructions and I've also provided the fix itself as a download- the method is really just documented for posterity.

After a few false starts, I've finally hit this error on the head. If you haven't taken the plunge to only using .package installs, this was the last unsolved issue I knew of them having ;)

Download + Guide Here

Download contains a fix for (hopefully) every Store counter and cabinet, please let me know if you find one I missed.

I will release an update with the other MDLR objects- sectional sofas and swingsets- as soon as I've rounded them all up and had a chance to fix them.

[thecardinalsims]

31/12/24 UPDATE:

Added a download for ModularFix- the same CASt bug fixed for all modular sofas and two swing sets, plus some misc fixes for bunk beds.

Added a couple of missing counter/cabinets to CounterFix, please redownload!

In the absence of a fix, I have opted to hide the loft beds from the catalog for now. The loft variants of all three Store bunk beds suffer from a duplicate-on-load glitch and they have this behaviour in every format! Meaning EA left them in that state and it will take a while for me to find the least intrusive way to fix them.

All other info is in the document.

A great thing about the download links being in a Google Doc is that they'll always be up to date even for users who first access it from old reblogs :)

[thecardinalsims]

I didn't expect to write another guide so soon, but this one is a simple set of text instructions and I've also provided the fix itself as a download- the method is really just documented for posterity.

After a few false starts, I've finally hit this error on the head. If you haven't taken the plunge to only using .package installs, this was the last unsolved issue I knew of them having ;)

Download + Guide Here

Download contains a fix for (hopefully) every Store counter and cabinet, please let me know if you find one I missed.

I will release an update with the other MDLR objects- sectional sofas and swingsets- as soon as I've rounded them all up and had a chance to fix them.

[freezerbunny-sims2]

Colony Worker and Telesforo find the icebreaker.

[thecardinalsims]

It's BIG.

It's BLUE.

It's UPDATED.

Hiya Simblr, it has been a while. I have a big update today- it's one of my oldest guides on MTS, but new and blue! The changelog is in the MTS comments- but the short and sweet is that two years of learning Blender has been squeezed in there for your convenience, complete with graphics and GIF examples.

ModTheSims tutorial Google Docs tutorial Blender Templates

[roaldamundsen]

never ask a woman her age a man his salary your mutual how late it is in her timezone when she starts posting about that bisexual man

[roaldamundsen]

?

[roaldamundsen]

can people stop saying insane things on this post