#custom content tutorial

You'll need Sims 4 Studio and Blender (don’t ask me what version, I have no idea which ones work or not for S4S lol. I'm using v.2.78)

Step 1 - Cloning the .package

(This step creates a copy that won’t conflict with the original .package)

First put a copy of the .package you want to edit into the S4S Mods folder (the path should be: Documents\Sims 4 Studio\Mods) Open S4S and select the "Create 3D Mesh" option then click CAS (actually I think the CAS Standalone option would work just fine as well lol, I barely know the difference between them tbh)

choose all swatches (or just the ones you want) of the piercings. Change content to Custom, to find the piercings easier. Click Next and name the .package whatever you want and save somewhere.

Then export the mesh

Step 2 - Modifying the mesh

The fun part! If you’re unfamiliar with blender, here’s a useful guide to help you with some controls and navigating around, but I will also mention some of the controls you might need.

s4studio_mesh_1 is the only thing in the menu on the right we care about, since that’s the mesh for the piercings. Hop into edit mode (by pressing tab button while having that mesh selected in the menu) and now do whatever you want to the piercings.

Tip: press numpad 5 for a more manageable view

Press A to select or unselect all

Press L while hovering over a piercing to select that entire one (Shift+L to unselect it)

Press S to scale selection

Press R to rotate selection

Removing piercings:

Select the unwanted piercings and press Delete or X and select “Vertices” option

Moving piercings:

Press G to move selection, then LMB to confirm or RMB to cancel

Adding Piercings:

Press Shift+D to duplicate selected piercing

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Important!

If you move or add piercings they need to stay within the original area. This is to ensure that they’ll work fine in game with different facial expressions and sliders.

Example: In the pic below, the copied piercing is still in the left upper lip area as the original piercing is, which will still work fine in game.

However, if I were to move it to the bottom lip or the right side of the mouth (or any other part of the face that isn’t the upper left lip, which is the original placement of the piercing I duplicated) it would not move or function correctly in game. 

If you want to add/move piercings to different areas of the face you’re going to have to fix the weights. (sorry but I will not explain how to do that lol. If you want to do that, look up an existing tutorial on how to transfer weights ;) )

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Don’t forget to save when you’re done editing the piercings! 

Step 3 - Finishing the .package

Import the finished mesh into S4S and then save. 

Since we only modified the mesh of my original .package we won’t have to do anything else in S4S. 

Now it’s finished! In game it’s going to be next to my sets and without a custom thumbnail.

Extra notes - This isn’t really necessary because of the (usually) already low amount of  polys for face piercings and since they’re small and not very visible from far away. But if you want to make proper LODs add the decimate modifier in blender and lower the ratio. I usually put it somewhere around 0.5.  So LOD1 should have around half of LOD0′s amount of polys, while LOD2 has half of LOD1′s amount and so on. But it would work just fine to either leave the original existing meshes in there or import the modified mesh we made for LOD0 into all of the LOD’s, as long as that one doesn’t have too many polys.

- This modified .package needs my original .package that we cloned to work in game. If you want it to function without needing to have mine installed as well, open it in S4S, go to “tools>modding>embed all externally referenced resources(CAS)”