EDIT: Tutorial is now obsolete. Discussion is preserved for the sake of knowledge.
CAS3 has been bugging the hell out of me since I first started with it. I could
almost get my sims to look good, but there was just something that wasn't right. The mouths in particular frustrated me. I just couldn't make them look decent. All my sims' mouths had this weird look about them, almost as if..........oh my God, they're fucking SMILING.
That's right, folks! EA saw fit to provide us with a default face pose of
smile. It is not a neutral face! Every adjustment you make is made against a face whose control points are being pulled into a jolly expression. One of BodyShop's best features was the completely neutral face that allowed you to adjust it properly. Oddly enough, I didn't notice the smiling until I looked at the sim I was working on and realized that she didn't quite look like she did before. Her face had dropped to a completely, utterly, free of emotion neutral position.
I CAN HAZ NEUTRAL?1. Download
Awesomemod.
1. Load up a sim and click the Personality button.
2. Zoom all the way in on his or her face.
3. Click Add Traits.
4. If you already have a full set, drop one and then add another one. It doesn't matter which.
5. The sim will do the little personality animation. Watch carefully, and you'll see the face magically go neutral when he or she finishes.
6. Exit out of the traits menu and get to work on your new blank canvas!When you're in the game, zooms and animations take up time between the face-pose switching, so I at first thought the differences were very, very subtle. Comparing screengrabs side-by-side, though, you can really see the difference it makes. I imagine this accounts for much of why sims look so different in the actual game; they don't stand around with that fucking smile, so you don't actually see the face you made. When I was making sims, I was always trying to use the sliders to make a neutral face, and I imagine many others do the same. One of the side effects of this is that the facial animations look doubly weird because of all the overcompensation made by trying to neutralize the non-neutral face. The image below is a comparison of a sim I designed using the neutral pose. You can see the effect the smile has, particularly in profile, and how it affects not just the mouth, but the rest of the features as well. The cheeks and chin are raised, the nose is wrinkled, the eyes are squinted, and the brows are raised and turned outward.
Hope this helps you all make your sims more to your liking!
More Awesome Than You!
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