Allie

Step 1: Pick your hair

Not every hairstyle will be a good fit! Since Sims and Paras don't have the same head shape, any hairstyle that shows the hairline or head will require a lot more work to shape it and remake the textures. For your first try I'd recommend a medium-length style with no hairline showing. I'm using Sienna's hair from Horse Ranch, which only has a bit of hairline on the right side of the head, to demonstrate.

Once you've picked the style, open Sims 4 Studio. Select "Create CAS Standalone" and hit "CAS." Select the grey or greyish white variant of the hairstyle you like, and create a dummy package (you can delete this later).

Now, under the Texture tab, make sure "Diffuse" is selected and export the texture. Name it something or place it somewhere so that you'll remember it's the original. Go to the Meshes tab and export the mesh.

Step 2: Prep The Hair

Open up your original hair mesh in Blender. It'll come with a bunch of crap you don't need, plus three files labelled s4studio_mesh_1-3. That's your hair mesh and the two hat chops. Shift+select those three files and export as FBX. Make sure you tick to limit to Selected Objects. Now you can open up HumanRig and import your hair FBX. Sims are bigger than Paras, so you can grab all three of them and scale them down in layout mode, I chose 0.85 in this project. There will be a weird cap attached to the hair- move the whole object so that it roughly lines up with the head (it doesn't have to be perfect!), paying careful attention to matching the ear position. This cap will be your hairline later. Make sure all your hat chops are all still aligned.

Once all of this is in place, apply all transforms and reset your origin to the 3D cursor. Do this any time you need to adjust it in layout mode!

Step 3: Remodel VERY CAREFULLY

Make sure all three meshes are still selected, and switch to edit mode. Any changes we make to one mesh should also be made to the other two. When you need to move a vertex, switch to X-ray mode and drag to select all overlapping vertices. Enable proportional editing to move larger areas smoothly. Since paras don't have the same head shape as sims, the skull cap won't match up perfectly- we want to approximate a smooth transition by burying the edge vertices in the head, but keep the rest visible so that the hairline shows up correctly. Be careful not to rip any vertices or create any differences between the three meshes. If you make a mistake, don't be afraid to restart. You should also fix any other issues at this stage- sims have huge foreheads, so my para's head was sticking straight out the top of this mesh, I used proportional editing to carefully lift it up.

Step 4: Fix your hat chops!

Hat chops are the alternate version of the hair that is shown when the character wears a hat. In both Paralives and TS4, there are straight and angled hat chops. Identify and label which is which. Under the HatStandards folder, there are a number of reference models we can use to check our work. For each chop, carefully move the vertices with proportional editing so that they match up with, but don't exceed, the "hair limit." With the angled chop, turn on the "HatStandardAngled" model to test if your hair is visible through it- if so, bring it closer to the head.

Step 5: Oh, Textures...

Textures are maybe the most annoying part of this. Load in your base texture as the Base Colour for the material your hair is using. Looks nice, right? Probably not very Paralives-y. Paralives uses a much flatter and more cartoony rendering style than TS4. To fix this, we're going to edit the texture. Now, regardless of what happens, you're going to have to edit the UVs at some point- I'll be doing it at the end and showing you how, but if you find it easier, skip to that step and go back here when you're done.

Here's a sample hair texture from the game and the hex codes it uses. We'll want to adjust the brightness of our texture to roughly match, that way it won't show up too bright or dark in game.

I have a clever strategy for this in Clip Studio. I make a rainbow gradient map, and adjust the colours until they match each zone.

Now that we're in a good colour range, I'm going to separate any important hairline details onto their own layer, lock transparency of the main "block," and start messing with it until it's a good base to draw on. I posterized it with 11 colour levels and then did a gaussian blur for a decent base. Then I went in with a brush to exaggerate and smooth out the shapes. The Paralives team uses a very blendy gradient with some fingertip pulls to make it look paintery, then some more defined shadows. I go in with my dark pencil to sharpen up the shadows and then blend out the other colours.

At this point, you can start saving your file and importing it to Blender. Check what it looks like and start making adjustments. If you find an issue, you can bring the model into Texture Paint mode, paint a dot on the offending piece, and see where the dot appeared on the map to quickly reference where the problem is.

The rest of the painting process is just art! Try replicating a texture from the game that's similar to your hairstyle.

Now that we're done with the fun part.... it's time for UV hell.

Step 6: Suffer

I've never met a single artist who enjoys doing UVs. Luckily, we don't have too much to do here.

Open up the UV editor and replace the background image with the Parafolks UV Layout we downloaded earlier. Now, switch to edit mode and grab all the vertices of your hair. Under the UV tab, select "Export UV Layout." Save the image using a name that indicates it's the original. Now grab that big box of vertices and move it to the right and down so that it lines up with the cyan box labelled "hair." Move the skullcap part up and align the ears. If your hair has extra textures hidden within the skull part of the head, you'll need to move these around to fit into the remaining space in the purple "head" zone. Once your UVs are finished, export them again, this time marking them as the new ones.

Okay, you survived that far. Now back to the image editing. Import both the original and new UVs to your texture file. Place the new UVs below your texture layer, the original UVs over it, and set the texture to a low opacity. With both the original UVs and texture selected, draw a selection box around your square of UVs, and move it to the bottom corner. Place it so that the UV lines match up exactly, pixel for pixel. Voila, now your texture matches the new UVs.

There's just the issue of the hairline (and, if you have them, any pieces hidden on the skull section). Sadly, there's no way around it, you're gonna have to do it manually. Grab each piece using the same method and the lasso tool, and line them up one by one. For hairlines that you had to manipulate, align as much as you can with the least stretched part of the uvs, and then cut, rotate, and stretch them into place. This is why I didn't paint the hairline during the last part. Now that it's in place, I paint it to match.

Step 7: Set up the mod!

Now that you're happy with your hair's model and textures, you can follow this official tutorial to skin it, create a mask, and set up the mod in-game. This Sienna haircut is not available on the workshop yet because uh.... well it's definitely not because I got lazy and didn't feel like skinning it today (the only thing worse than UVs is weight painting).

So I think Paralives is focusing their team on the big priorities which is good! It's by far my preference, but that means there's not a lot of things like pop up tips or detailed guides when it comes to modding.

But Paralives DOES have things built in to make your own mods wihout needing a third party program like Sims 4 Studio. For eyes, you'll need a texture editor (I use Photoshop). And something like Blender is needed for working on meshes.

File Formats and Locations

Paralives works with .png files for images and .fbx for models. Those are the formats you're going to want to save things into for use in your mods folder. (This is serious basics so I'm not getting into .ini or .config or other things that more advanced most might need.

There are two places that files are stored on the computer. On my machine, the main game files are here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Paralives\

And the files for mods are here:

C:\Users\Kat\AppData\LocalLow\Paralives

But you can look up both with Steam and Paralives respectively.

With Steam, you can right click on the game in the list of your games and from the drop down menu select Manage and then Browse Local Files. That will take you to the game files.

In Paralives, on the main menu screen, below Start New Game and Load Game, Settings, etc., there's an option for Mods, which brings you to this page.

Then clicking on the folder icon of one of your mods in the little bar(you can make a blank new one and name it with your project) will take you to the folder that Mod Files should be stored in for the mod you are making.

Finding Base Textures

Now that we know WHERE things are, we can get the textures that paralives is currently using. These will be stored in the main game files.

Anything that makes up a Para is under Equipment in how they refer to it. Clothes, Hair, Eyes, Skin, Teeth, Body Parts. It's all Equipment.

C:\...\Paralives\Main.mod\Species\Human

For humans kid to adult, this is where I found the textures I started with. You can just search through the different file folders and open up things to see what they are - that's the long route I took - but there is a short cut.

Back to Paralives, on the screen where I showed you how to find the folder for mods, start by editing your new blank mod then click on Control Panel in the top bar.

Eyes are Equipment so we'll go there.

I put in Eye to narrow down the search and it ended up being in 'EyeIrisGlobe', if you open up that, you can see all the details about that specific part. In this case, we want to look at the textures that are applied to the eye mesh. This is where we'll change the texture to a new one for the mod later on but if you go and look it up in the menu that pops up, a hover menu will tell you where that file is located.

So, it's a great way to look at what's point to what. While there's not a lot of documentation, this is SUPER helpful for figuring out what goes to what.

What's in an Eye?

A lot, it turns out. There are several different textures that make up the final look of an eye in paralives.

Since Heterochromia is a built in option, there's a mesh for each eye, what Paralives calls the 'greymask' texture and then a colormap mask for each eye.

There's also a greymask for the inner eye ring and each eye has two different colormaps, one for the simple whole eye color and one that allows you to change the whites of the eyes, the inner ring, and the entire iris.

The Greymask:

The Tri Color Mask

Eye Mask

Inner Grey Mask

This doesn't include the catchlights (the white highlights over the pupil), those are their own entry and have additional images in another folder.

For me, all I wanted to do was replace the base eye texture with a different one, same dimensions and same color locations for the different color wheel options, which meant I only needed to replace the greymask texture.

I'm not going to go over how to make a texture for an eye. There are better ones already out there, certainly. This one is just a remake of the eye texture I made for my sims default eye replacement.

Putting it into Paralives

To make the mod, I needed a right and left eye replacement in png format, and at the ratio that they use for textures (1024 x 2048). I strongly recommend using the base greymask of each to model exactly where your replacement is going to fit. Otherwise you'll end up with textures mapped to the wrong mesh as well. Background should be transparent of course.

Now back to Paralives to make it a mod. You'll need to make a New Mod, if you haven't already. Leave the files in whatever place you've saved them. For me, its a working folder on my desktop.

In the game, after you've made the mod, use the folder icon to open the folder window. Paralives automatically makes a folder for your new mod. The files for that mod need to go in THAT folder specifically.

This is the part that caused me serious issues. The game MAY NOT detect the files right away. What worked for me is to exit the game after storing the new files in the right folder and then return to the game.

You will know when the game finds the files as it will pop up a little notice like '2 files were reinstalled'. (Sorry, I didn't manage to screenshot the exact message. I was in and out a bunch of times trying to figure out why I couldn't find the files in the next steps of this. Its the only pop up you get like it. You'll know it when you see it!)

Once you have the files loaded and you've gotten the little pop up, it should go quickly.

Note: A friend who is also working on modding reported that turning the mod on and off has gotten the files to register as well. That may work for you as well! I had to exit the game to get it to show up.

So, click on the mod and then Edit This Mod.

You are now editing the Mod!

IMPORTANT: You will continue to edit this mod even if you go into game and out of game, it will remain in edit mode until you click the stop editing mod button. Which is great for testing. Not so great for not giving yourself a mild heart attack when you realize you're in edit mode and might accidentally change things because you're not paying attention.

Now, back to the control panel!

All we are going to do is replace the HumanEyeLeft.png and the HumanEyeRight.png to point to the new files you made and dropped in the mod folder.

Once that's done, you'll need to make sure that the settings (the wheel icon next to the texture name), match what they should.

The default eye settings for the base game eyes look like this:

For my eyes, that was brighter than I wanted them so I have 'Is Linear' unchecked personally.

The eye that is brighter has 'Is Linear' Checked, the eye that is darker has it Unchecked.

Great! Now you've changed the base eye texture for kid through elder! All that's left to do is repeat the step of replacing the textures and updating the settings for the 'ToddlerEyes' Equipment. That will make the baby and toddler match.

Final Pro Tips

Remember what I said about the 'now editing mod' staying on and the heart attacks?

It IS useful as well. So, if you leave the mod in edit mode, you can actually go into the game and tweak it live. When you're in, for example, Paramaker, Control+F2 will bring up the mod menu and you can make adjustments to the control panel and see them reflected as soon as you change the eye color.

My final word of advice is: BACK UP YOUR MOD FILES. If you delete the mod, it will destroy the mod folder it made for it and any files stored inside. DON'T put your only copy of a texture or a model you've made into the mod folder. Have a backup. For your own sanity down the line.