#cjvandever

For @lilleputtu and @cjvandever...

lilleputtu replied to your photo “I think the high-res horse defaults I downloaded were worth it. :) ...”

i bet you can find custom manes that floofy... i would definitely love to see that anyways :D

Maybe! There are a bunch of elaborate horse-specific TS3 sites out there, where folks bred horses in game and then “sold” them via these sites and such. From what I’ve seen from dates on blog entries on such sites, it seems the craze for them seemed to have died around 2015, so I guess because of TS4? Of course, TS4 doesn’t have horses, so I don’t know why such folks abandoned TS3. I mean, the whole setup between those sites was (is?) pretty intense and impressive...

ANYWAY! I actually did look around and PharoahHound on MTS made a Gypsy Vanner breed template. It doesn’t have a mane down to its hocks and feathers up to its hocks and a tail that drags on the ground behind it, but maybe such CC exists out there....

cjvandever replied to your photo “It’s funny how the things I like to do in TS3 are things I hate to do...”

It’s a very handsome face, but what noticed first were the eyes! I never played TS3 much because I couldn’t make my sims look good, or more accurately, they way I wanted. Maybe I’ll try it again. ��

Sorry for replying on this sideblog; I actually meant to post the pic you replied to here rather than on my main Simblr. *eyeroll*.  ANYHOO!

You definitely need a lot of stuff to de-pudding TS3 Sims! Like, better-looking skins and lots of custom sliders, for instance. (Fortunately, there are a million of the latter out there!) Even lighting mods help. And for eyes you definitely need some contacts. It's not like TS2 where you can drop in some defaults and/or a set of custom eyes and everyone has nice-looking eyes because -- at least so far as I've found -- default eyes for TS3 still don't look all that great. Like, I haven't found one with a sclera I like. They all seem to me too flat and white, with none of the details that I like. I’m guessing there are technical limitations involved. Defaults are better than the Maxis eyes, so I still use them, but not as good as I’d really like.

So, contacts are the way to go. Most of them that are recolorable have three or four color channels, one for the sclera of the eye and two (or three) for the iris, so you can blend colors in the iris to get some really nice realistic (or fantastical, if that's how you swing :) ) effects. I'm still figuring out how to get really good effects, but in general it's way more customizable than TS2. Of course, it's also more work on the player's part. Especially if you take it upon yourself to put contacts on everyone in a world. So, you know, pros and cons. :)

Absolutely gorgeous! How do you get the skies to look like that in The Neighborhood view? I’ve got Lowdeus’s skies and Simnopke’s sky fix. I put the little box in the corner of my map, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’d appreciate any help.

Thank you so much! :)

I hope this is helpful -- I’m not sure what issue you might be having, or what qualifies as not working (is it showing up at all?) so I’m gonna throw things at the wall and see if anything sticks! 

1. The skies from that picture are iCad’s (from this set specifically, but I have all of her Great Sky Project skies in her nhood deco tag).

2. My placement is like this on my map:

They’re supposed to be elevated while the horizon should be lower, terrain wise. Also, I have those little placement boxes replaced with ones that have arrows to show which corner of the hood it should be facing. If it was in the wrong corner/facing the wrong direction, it would cut off half of the hood with its dome shape.

3. Greatcheesecakepersona has a great guide to all the little things to do to make the hood seem open and all the nhood deco viewable -- if you’re having trouble like seeing skies in lot view, if you don’t have custom cameras, etc. I know you mentioned neighborhood view, but it’s probably worth it to make sure you’ve done all these things.

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. I also have the skyfix, but I have it built into dreadpirate’s lighting mod so I had to remove the original file -- so make sure you don’t have the skyfix duplicated or anything.