The Many vs The One True Face
Okay, I meant to spend about five minutes on this today... yester... four days ago. As long as it took me to set up these pics. Yeah right. (Unfortunately, I can't remember exactly and replicate how I finally got it to work four days ago but since I"m here, gonna post this anyway.)
Top row is basically same as I showed the other day of baby Goldie Hart. The bottom was using Lifa's WSO actions.
With her original face, to minimise the sunken eyes I used Goldie's child mesh and iterated twice because the sinking sockets are already present on her toddler mesh. There is a difference. But I don't want the socket pockets at all. With my earlier attempt to offset the sunken eyes, I already had a toddlerified version and just wanted to see if it would revert back to the same face with the WSO action. Not quite, but close.
It didn't matter anyway. In game, Goldie's face always reverts to that face in the first picture from the infant template, which seems to be accurate to how the game interprets and renders Goldie's particular face on younger ages. Even in a freshly generated game folder where that mesh was nowhere in sight. Regardless what mesh I import - even a version with her eyes pushed out and cheeks slightly pulled in to be practically flush!
(In all ages just in case older age states were the reference points.)
This is what I get. This is what I always get.
The meshes do not matter! At least not in terms of the GMDC, the game just isn't referencing that or that only. Bodyshop isn't even referencing that...at all (?!?)
I replaced the meshes in a Bodyshop sim of my 'unsunken' toddler Goldie with meshes from toddler Sharla Ottomas (at one point I thought Ottomas genes might give me some kinda insight into wtf because in all my years of simming you change the mesh and that's what shows up) and despite having Sharla's meshes it was still Goldie's face on that sim. I generated another fresh game folder and put it in a new SavedSims. Still Goldie. Aged up. Genderswapped. Aged back down. Always Goldie. Checked the GMDC again, still Sharla behind the scenes! So obviously the mesh information is being stored somewhere other than the GMDC, which is being overlooked entirely.
I kind of knew that in the sense that Bodyshop sims only store GMDCs for the age they were saved as but you could always Simsurgery from a sim who wasn't the same age as the one you were replacing. (Not always a great idea! It seems to depend on how the source sim was created. But I'll save that for another post.) So obviously there's more happening but I had still presumed that the mesh itself was being referenced and aged correspondingly by the game.
Now I don't think so. Not in a straightforward, render the GMDC kinda way. And this is where I will diverge from the rest of the ramble that was here a few days ago because my hypotheses were wrong. But not completely?
The Goldie/Sharla thing made me suspect that it was actually the LxNR that held the key. That inscrutable property that, to my knowledge, no one has ever fully deciphered and made readable/editable in a useful way. And when I replaced Goldie's LxNR with one from a Bodyshop generated toddler with my preferred un-sunken sockets face I finally got this in game:
But then I couldn't replicate it the next day and started doubting the sequence of what I took from where (was it a toddler sim at all? which one? etc.) so I just left it alone for a bit. Yet there is the proof. It did work. Once.
Based on how I just today disproved that any ol' LxNR will do:
I think it's still the key reference point but it matters what sim it's pulled from. Some contain all the information they need for each age and gender and some clearly don't. So, no, I don't think I'm getting out of having to make full templates for each of these frickin' sims for them to have a linked baby face. The game categorically will not fill in the blanks. (See Little Miss Blank-Blank above.)
