default/replacement face templates
Liz:
I'm working on a set of replacement face templates for my game, which... well, I have high hopes, which pretty much guarantees the inevitable and fiery dashing of said hopes into a jillion pieces. But until then... I'm still working on the first batch of (adult female) faces before importing to CAS to do the whole gender/age cloning process and thought it mightn't be a bad idea to ask - if anyone here has experience with this sort of project - if there are any suggestions you guys think will help me along the way.
I've read the tutorial posts both here and at MtS2 on the physical process of renaming the files and so forth, but does anyone have any "nitty-gritty" suggestions on details like cloning in BS vs. CAS, which age/gender might be better for creating which clone, inevitable pitfalls I should beware, etc.? If I manage to complete this project (and the results don't ubersuck), I'll be more than happy to share the finished templates, but it remains to be seen whether I can slog through it all without my head and/or computer asploding in the process (^_-)
Cheers!
Liz
Pyromaniac:
Well - I'm not sure if this is a tip per se since it's kind of friggin obvious, but make sure the face proportions for both genders are similar. I once came across a problem where the female cheeks were too chubby and the males' were too hollow, and whenever I tried to slim down the female in CAS, her male children would always come out looking like they were sucking in their face or something.
Zazazu:
When you get to making sims from which to pull the Geometric Data information, all you need is a toddler of one sex and a child of the other. I did/do a toddler female and a child male. I'd do a household full... six kids to pull the data from and an adult so that the game would allow family creation. That's 3 faces in one family. Name them after their template number. Then go into SimPE and work the extract/replace magic. After those three are done, add the files into your downloads folder and check them in Bodyshop to make sure you didn't goof. It's ridiculously easy to goof them up. The first time through, I replaced the LOD files with the vanilla. The second time, there were a couple that I put the child template on the adult face. It's funny to look at, but not really something you want in your game.
Oh, and make sure that you are making these template families in a junk 'hood used just for that purpose. You'll be deleting a lot of sims from the bin.
Quinctia:
As a face template user (I switch out sets when I get bored), I'd just warn in general against making all your faces look too similar. I don't know if you're doing a theme to it at all (I've seen people go for different ethnicities, or simply "softening" the originals for various sets), but don't be afraid to have some distinctive features. There is a happy medium between face template one and Carmen Patch, after all.
There've been a few sets I had no interest in whatsoever, because they were basically all the same, and all "pretty." Bleh.
Ambular:
Quote from: Zazazu on 2007 October 21, 21:52:54
When you get to making sims from which to pull the Geometric Data information, all you need is a toddler of one sex and a child of the other. I did/do a toddler female and a child male. I'd do a household full... six kids to pull the data from and an adult so that the game would allow family creation. That's 3 faces in one family. Name them after their template number. Then go into SimPE and work the extract/replace magic.
Hmm. I'm not entirely sure I follow your procedure there...probably because it's entirely different from how I do it myself. XD
I usually start in Bodyshop with the original Maxis template for the adult female of whichever template I'm working on. When she looks the way I want her, I save the Sim, clone her and switch to teen female, make any necessary adjusments, save her, then continue that process down to toddler. (And then do the same with the males, excluding toddler and child. I check after each 'family' is complete to make sure all eight Sims bear one another a good resemblance, but I don't get too hung up on matching them exactly.)
Elders I do a bit differently because I can't stand the Maxis elder templates. I take my finished adult and clone it, then make some minor adjustments: deepen the eyes and the lines around the mouth, pull back the chin, thin the cheeks or the whole face and the lips, add some sag under the jaw, and save the Sim as an adult again. Then I use the GMDC from that adult to make the Elder template (AFAIK, adults and elders are the only types that have interchangeable face proportions.) So my elders wind up looking like older but recognizable versions of the adults.
Liz, as far as procedural tips, it's not actually necessary to use CAS at all (unless you want to check out how your faces look in-game before you go to the bother of making them into templates.) You can use saved Bodyshop Sims just fine--all you have to do is make a note of what age and gender order you saved them in (AF, TF, C, etc.) and then sort your SavedSims folder by date and time of creation. I find this a lot easier, but YMMV.
I recommend that when you go to import the GMDC for your first template of a particular age and gender, you take note of the filename for the LOD and regular versions of the GMDC and jot it down. The first part of the filename will be the same for each template of that age and gender, so you won't have to try to guess which one is the regular and which is the LOD with each template you make, which becomes tiresome very quickly.
If you haven't already, you'll probably want to grab Argon's fix fix for archetypes 21 & 25 that allows you to make the full families for those two faces instead of Maxis's crippled adults-only versions, along with terraksomos's replacement template packages for the missing faces a few posts down that thread.
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