LIFO Files
akatonbo:
Thank you both. A lot of that stuff (aside from the technical bits about the LIFOs) I was already aware of thanks to various tutorials (mostly corvidophile's one for making dark skintones without Body Shop destroying the textures), and I'd even made a skintone set and dependent default package that are working nicely and have pretty good actual image quality, but I started from HP's BMPs of her own skintones that she put up for people to download, and eventually I decided that I could not, in fact, live with the scalp mismatch at the back of the neck, so I'm starting over from Maxis.
What's this about cloning S4, though?
J. M. Pescado:
You should never use bodyshop to extract. I've done some comparisons, the image resulting from the BMP output in Bodyshop is NOT the same as hand-extracting the LIFO to BMP, so something has gone wrong already.
Ambular:
Quote from: akatonbo on 2009 March 27, 04:34:51
Thank you both. A lot of that stuff (aside from the technical bits about the LIFOs) I was already aware of thanks to various tutorials (mostly corvidophile's one for making dark skintones without Body Shop destroying the textures), and I'd even made a skintone set and dependent default package that are working nicely and have pretty good actual image quality, but I started from HP's BMPs of her own skintones that she put up for people to download, and eventually I decided that I could not, in fact, live with the scalp mismatch at the back of the neck, so I'm starting over from Maxis.
What's this about cloning S4, though?
I'm not even sure whether it still applies, honestly, as I first heard it quite some time ago; whatever BodyShop glitch was responsible may have been fixed since. But it seems that some skintones that were cloned from S1, S2 or S3 didn't always turn out correctly--they'd have the wrong scalp color or such. (Dependent defaults are also known to have odd scalp mismatch problems at times, btw, just so you know.) But since any new skintone automagically gets thrown into the custom bin regardless of what color it's cloned from, and since we know to use the extracted LIFO's and not the files BodyShop spits at us as bases, there's no reason not to play it safe and always clone S4.
akatonbo:
I've been leaning more and more in that direction across the board, yes, JM. Or at least not to import anything back INTO Bodyshop if it's the least bit dark-colored; good grief, the hideous-looking dark-colored clothes I've downloaded in my life, and it's not really that much work to export either. Is it also worthwhile to extract textures from custom content with SimPE even though they are not LIFO?
Hm. I've been making my skintones by cloning a template provided by corvidophile2 which identifies the textures by having the purpose (afbodycut, embodysoft, etc etc) actually written on the template texture, so it's much easier to tell which file to import into SimPE to replace it. Do not know what skintone she cloned it from. However, it's not as if I can't make my own, since if I'm just cloning S4 in BodyShop in order to write text on top of it, the textures don't have to be pretty, and it'll be very easy to do. And it sounds like it's time to switch to non-dependent defaults just to be sure I don't end up with ugly mismatch. It was really driving me crazy, every short hairstyle had that problem.
...so much work just to have skintones in default colors I like, with faces that have all the detail I want them to have without being too shiny or having ten different makeup files layered on them. The end result for the HP-based skintones was fantastic aside from the scalp issue, though, and I've got existing default packages for every skintone in the game except the living statue and a tutorial on how to default-replace anything from scratch.
Ambular:
Quote from: akatonbo on 2009 March 27, 14:31:03
I've been leaning more and more in that direction across the board, yes, JM. Or at least not to import anything back INTO Bodyshop if it's the least bit dark-colored; good grief, the hideous-looking dark-colored clothes I've downloaded in my life, and it's not really that much work to export either. Is it also worthwhile to extract textures from custom content with SimPE even though they are not LIFO?
I would say yes. That's how I've taken to doing it, and I find the results are usually better. The game just doesn't seem to render dark stuff very well, or it may be a side-effect of lousy compression, but either way, making anything that's really dark and looks good takes a lot of extra work. (Though even with light-colored items the SimPE method tends to give better results, especially if they're finely textured, bumpmapped, etc.)
Quote
Hm. I've been making my skintones by cloning a template provided by corvidophile2 which identifies the textures by having the purpose (afbodycut, embodysoft, etc etc) actually written on the template texture, so it's much easier to tell which file to import into SimPE to replace it. Do not know what skintone she cloned it from. However, it's not as if I can't make my own, since if I'm just cloning S4 in BodyShop in order to write text on top of it, the textures don't have to be pretty, and it'll be very easy to do. And it sounds like it's time to switch to non-dependent defaults just to be sure I don't end up with ugly mismatch. It was really driving me crazy, every short hairstyle had that problem.
The first defaults I ever made were a dependent set, and some Sims wound up having alien scalps with normal skintones. Looked very weird. XD Also, the dependent variety leave you with two copies of the same skintone cluttering your catalog, which I find kind of sucky. YMMV, of course.
One of my favorite tricks (though this only works if you're more or less happy with the overall coloring of the Maxis defaults) is to edit only those textures that really need changing, then edit the skintone file so that it picks up stuff like scalps and baby body textures directly from the game. Saves a lot of space and guarantees the best quality textures. I've also made skintones in pairs where I wanted (for example) the option of men with body hair or without, and had one skin draw everything except the male body textures from the other.
Quote
...so much work just to have skintones in default colors I like, with faces that have all the detail I want them to have without being too shiny or having ten different makeup files layered on them. The end result for the HP-based skintones was fantastic aside from the scalp issue, though, and I've got existing default packages for every skintone in the game except the living statue and a tutorial on how to default-replace anything from scratch.
For me most of the fun of the game is tinkering with it to make everything exactly the way I want it. I hardly ever actually play. Maybe when TS3 comes out and there's not much new stuff coming down the pipeline for TS2 anymore... XD
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