vampires will never hurt you

1920s Lilith for @tiallussims​

fake, loud, and obnoxious ✨ a lookbook

Because fuck EA. Custom content creators are the heart of the Sims community, donate to them instead if you can! The links go in order of appearance!

Modern Farmhouse Kitchen "Kessler" by imfromsixam

Laundry Day Kitchen by simsza

Me at 3am

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐬 ⚜️

AVANT GARDES : A discord for creators whether it be stories, edits, or something else entirely! @valentinicvamp & I recreated the server from its original conception as well as putting in some new things. We also run the server together.

Choose your roles from our role menus including: what type of simmer you are, what games you play, and a Pleasantview family associated with a colour.

Play games together & join movie nights.

Stream your game in Sims, or other games in General Games.

Share your interests such as books, electronics & technology, video editing, music, and more.

Talk about your sims! Show off your builds, custom content, works in progress, and more. Also, a Simblr Spotlight we shine on our members every week.

As the original Avant Gardes was, solely, a storytelling server, we also have a workshop! Includes channels like character development, plot development, and story help. Also contains writer’s bootcamp: a channel where writing prompts are posted twice a week.

A section to talk about your mental health and get support.

Adults can also choose whether they want to see NSFW or not.

i’m sure many of you have the best intentions when you do, but i’ve seen a lot of people tag their food, but not anything like weight discussions, calorie counting, or other disordered eating behaviours which actually are triggering and do need tagging. in fact, tagging food as a trigger warning is actually triggering than not tagging it. tagging food as a trigger warning can reinforce our idea that “food is a bad thing, and therefore, must be avoided,” or “food is a bad thing, and therefore, i should feel guilty for eating and get rid of it as soon as possible.”

eating disorders aren’t pretty. they kill. something as harmless to you like tagging food can actually have very detrimental effects on us. tag your weight discussions, calorie counting, missing meals, etc. that’s the shit you’re not tagging when you should be. eating disorders are a mental illness, and while food plays a huge part, that’s not all they’re about. while not everyone gets triggered by these things, a large group of people do.

food is not, and should not be, a trigger. part of recovery is improving our relationship with food, and tagging it as something bad and to be avoided can make it much harder.

The amount of times I have seen people mention about how a well known paywall creator has gotten models for their CC from one of the three sites above is amazing. So, I decided that it might be a good idea to reach out and ask the support teams of those sites how people using their 3D model meshes and then reselling them as sims CC affects their TOU. So here’s the basic question I sent all three sites in an email to their support department: 

Hello, so I have a question.

Is it allowed for people to take the 3D meshes you guys offer, modify them to work as modified content for a game (Ex: The Sims 4), and then sell that mesh as part of a patreon? There are multiple people in the Sims 4 Custom Content community who do this. Is this sort of usage allowed? They also are using 3D models from your site that have luxury brands like Chanel and Gucci.

Thank you.

So here are the responses I received, and they are interesting: 

Sketchfab’s response was the most direct, which I loved. 

CGtrader’s was a little bit more complex, but I’ll touch on that in a second…

And finally, Turbosquid. 

So let’s talk a bit about some of the things discussed in these emails and what they mean.  First let’s talk about the idea of extracting/retreiving the mesh/content, which IS actually a valid concern on the part of these sites. Because here’s the deal…it IS POSSIBLE in Sims 4 Studio to extract the mesh out of people’s custom content. I asked a good CC creating friend of mine @bill-l-s4cc​ about it, (he’s amazing, meshes his stuff by hand, and is early access…), and he confirmed this for me. 

So let’s say you got some CC from a paywall creator, and they bought a model of a luxury bag from CGtrader. They then made it work in the Sims 4, lowered the polycount a bit, and created a few recolors/retextures of that bag. You could STILL go into sims 4 studio, and grab the mesh that they bought from CGtrader, and potentially use it for whatever they want. That is what has sites like them all up in a knot. 

Now let’s talk about this whole “what is a larger derivative work”/a derivative work in general? For this, I’m going to use an example from the world of graphic design to help you (since I love graphic design myself). 

So I have a membership at Creative Fabrica, which offers tons of graphic design elements, fonts, SVGs, and other elements for anyone who does graphic design of any kind. They are very clear in their licensing about the fact that you cannot RESELL the products you get as-is. You have to REMIX them or create a larger work out of them. Here’s an image from their license that gives an example of this: 

Notice how in the first image, all the person did was literally copy and paste one of their graphic elements on a card without adding anything else or changing anything? In the second, they used that element and other elements to create something entirely new.  It’s the same concept. If you’re taking a mesh (Ex: a perfume bottle) and literally just changing the color and selling it on patreon as a sims 4 item, that is not enough remixing to constitute a larger derivative work. If you put multiple perfume bottles together on a shelf, perhaps that might count (although it’s murky at best), but again, with S4S as mentioned earlier, the meshes can be extracted. So…that legal problem doesn’t go away. 

So what do we do about this?  1) First and foremost, mesh your own stuff. If you are so inexperienced at meshing that you HAVE to use content from these sites to offer CC to people, then you need to get to work on practicing that craft, or somehow find a site that will let you redistribute the mesh on a game like the sims 4. even when people can rip it from your content. (Which considering that many 3D modeling sites have next to identical terms, is going to be next to impossible.) 

2) If you see a creator paywalling/charging for content that is from these sites, you’re free to send an email to Turbosquid, CG trader, etc letting them know that their content is being resold in that format.  I would also include a link to that person’s patreon. Since selling 3D models is literally the livelihood of the people who run those 3D model sites, and they’re not a massive multi-million dollar company that has the luxury of ignoring stuff like this, they’ll probably take some action. 

3) You may ask, are FREE creators/early access creators still in violation if they use these models. “Technically” yes. But they should not be as much of a concern to Turbosquid/other sites since they are not making bank off of it, and the money gained from early access can be seen more as a donation/contribution to the creator. (It’s still “bad” for these sites, but not as bad as redistributing the content with the pure intent of making a profit.) 

Again, see point #1. I would suggest that free/early access creators who are using this practice consider trying to mesh these objects themselves just to save themselves the legal/ethical trouble that comes with it. 

————–

I would also like to note that I feel for some people, using meshes from these sites is literally just another form of laziness. (Mainly when they claim the mesh is 100% theirs and it’s not instead of giving attribution of any kind or admitting they converted.) They could hand mesh stuff, but why do that when they can just grab a model and modify it?

But the problem with this bad habit is that it starts to get into the problem of copyright and terms of use. The whole “I bought it, so it’s mine” mentality doesn’t work there. (Also, I find it ironic that paywall creators treat their meshes this way, yet get so mad when pirates use that excuse to share the paywalled content with others). 

I told y’all. I effing TOLD Y’ALL that this is what’s gonna end up happening if y’all keep charging for CC/UGC, especially the meshes & textures y’all know good and dang well y’all downloaded off some other website.

I don’t even like EA charging us for DLC, and it’s their dang game! Simmers have had donations & commissions & paywalled CC for DECADES, but they’ve always been in the minority, as people like PaysitesMustBeDestroyed have championed against that crap for DECADES. But things just get worse and worse with every Sims generation, as y’all find new insidious ways to monetize something that should’ve never been monetized. Other game modders like Skyrim’s don’t charge for CC/UGC–people laughed Bethesda out of the door when they tried (SEVERAL times).

But OF COURSE, EA’s rat ba$tard$ would be the ones to push the normalization of monetizing DLC, CC, microtransations, and all the other seedy money-making scams bleeding all over the fabric of gaming community. Of effing course. 🙄 #EAYouSuck

You TS4 simmers especially grate on my nerves, and I blame YOU for the sad state of the CC community.

Paypal & Ko-fi donations weren’t enough.

Adfly wasn’t enough. It got so bad that Tumblr had to MASS BAN all y’all.

But Patreon’s been the utter worst. It’s especially crazy, cuz for all the crap y’all talk about how “hard” you’ve “worked” to make “quality” CC (which is all debatable)–the VAST MAJORITY of content creators on Patreon are really just content converters. If you use assets from other games & mesh/texture sites, and port it over to The Sims, you’re a converter, and that content should be FREE. The CC is only “yours” in the sense that you converted it, yes, but I have to laugh when these simmers use the wildest mental gymnastics to try validating their Patreons to people who call them out on their theft & abuse of EA’s TOUs, and the TOUs of the original sources of the assets they’re making MONEY off of–in a sense, stealing. 😂

First of all, the CC you make was never yours–it belongs to EA, as per their TOU, which you agreed to when you used any sims-specific tools & programs to port said CC/UGC into a sims game (TSRW, CTU, Sims4Studio, SimPE, S3PE, S4PE, etc).

Second of all, I hate that EA gave the ok for allowing the 2-3 week early access content (which most of y’all flat out ignore), but never bothered regulating the prices. The Patreon tiers I’ve seen out there vary so dang wildly. Some of y’all have no business in the world setting your monthly tiers that dang high, and you know it, and it baffles me how people don’t raise more of a stink over the ripoff prices on Patreon – yet people complain the livelong day about EA’s prices at the TS3 store, as if TS4 is doing something BETTER?!?! O_O Are you effing joking? 😠

EA charges 25 cents to a $1.50 for CAS DLC (kids’ hair & clothes is the cheapest). Their build/buy DLC is 10 cents - $9 (varying from basic decor/clutter (a couple cents), to furniture & electronics/appliances (a couple bucks, depending), to Premium Content). Their PREMIUM content is $1.50 -  $9 – you know, the fancy crap that actually ADDS NEW GAMEPLAY???? Yet I’ve seen Patreon tiers for basic RETEXTURES charge that much – GTFOH!!! If rotten EA isn’t charging that much, ain’t no way in HELL some random AF simmer should be charging that much, if not MORE, if ANYTHING. Cuz I repeat: most of the times that CC was only CONVERTED–you didn’t make that mesh or paint that texture and you know it, you just imported it into a format that The Sims can read, period.

Y’all have been using & abusing Patreon for years now, and I knew people were gonna get sick of it eventually, and start asking the serious questions about the normalization of paywalled CC, and who holds the rights to monetization of gaming assets.

💥✨⚡