#rioa

rioa replied to your post “Reply time! :)”

Your textures are the closest I've seen to what would be my "ideal" hair textures! They're a fantastic middleground between Maxis and realistic- especially since there's no shine included so people can add as much or as little as they want to fit their own games :) (mine being on the matte side) The only problems being: 1. I am terrible at anything to do with the "creative" side of CC and 2. I horde way too many hairs and am extremely lazy! (cont)

(cont) Just the mere thought of trying to retexture all those hairs is making my head spin D: But if I was the motivated type, I'd definetly try my hand at "iCad-ing"~!

Yeah, a middle ground was exactly what I wanted. I like elements from both MM and realistic hair textures, but the community in general seems to be more either/or than I am. That might just be because either/or is pretty much all that exists, of course, and people’ve picked what they like best...or what irritates them the least. :) Whatever the case, I wasn’t totally satisfied with anything out there and over the past little while I’ve gotten increasingly irritated with Pookleted hairs, but I’m also equally irritated with MM hairs, just in different ways, so I decided to muck about myself because that’s always the only way to get exactly what you want. :)

But yeah, retexturing IS time-consuming. I mean, for just retexturing existing defaults, it’s just switching out texture images in SimPE, so at least there’s no $*&#ing BodyShop. (Words cannot express how much I hate BodyShop. *laugh*), but if you wanna do custom recolors and/or make new defaults...Yeah, there’s time involved. Although at least I use the DDS method for retexturing, which mostly avoids BodyShop. All you gotta do in BodyShop is make as many “dummy” recolor files as you need of a hair and then you do everything else in Photoshop (or whatever) and SimPE.

Anyway, I’d call retexturing with this texture I made more drudgery than creativity, alas. Literally, if you don't want/need to alpha-edit and/or don't want/need to warp the texture to fit curved parts and/or don't want to add any shine or shading, you can just apply a color action to the texture, then copy/paste it wholesale into the hair's texture image and you're done. The alpha will cut out of the block of texture whatever it needs to cut out, and the texture is sufficiently detailed that it'll look pretty good on most hairs even if you don't fiddle with stuff. (This post has pics of the texture plus Pooklet's "Incendiary" color action just plopped in, with no fiddling at all. No alpha-editing, no warping, no shine/shadow added. Took seconds.) Of course, the same can be said for some MM textures, especially if there's little/no shine involved, but not so much with more realistic textures. :)

All that being said, I COULD share some of this hair stuff I’m making, but to me previews are kind of a pain to make, and I don’t really want to go to the effort if there’s little/no interest. So, for the moment, I just shared the texture so that people can use it if they’re interested in doing so or pick it apart to use for their own purposes, so...Yeah.

strangetomato replied to your post “Big reply for Strangetomato. :)”

Neena was still making hair as Summerdream Sims back in 2009-10 (https://summerdream.dreamwidth.org/1652.html) and even later on GoS, I believe. She hand painted each texture specifically to the mesh shape, which is rather remarkable. As such, I think her shine highlights are placed very naturally. But that's a lot of work, and current methods result in more cc being made. Phobia, miki, and many others used versions of her textures, as well as Simgaroop as I mentioned.

Those are quite nice! They're not quite strandy enough for my personal taste, but very much Maxisy-but-better. :) I guess I never noticed them because I was more focused on Pooklet-type hairs pretty much from the get-go when I started playing and, at the time, realistic was more popular than Maxis-match.

didilysims replied to your photoset “This is the world’s easiest, tiniest, laziest Monday Download™, but I...”

Just curious because I may be misunderstanding this: Did you alter the advertising of easels or add it...in other words, in a vanilla game can townies not use the easel? Because in my game they definitely do, though I don't remember downloading a mod for that before. o_O

As they are, easels are not visitor-enabled in the TTAB in SimPE, and I had never seen a non-playable use one in my game. I wanted them to be able to do so, for the Art “hobby lot” I built in my game, so at first I just visitor-enabled them by checking that box in the easel’s TTAB in SimPE. That resulted in townies choosing to use them very occasionally but not enough for what I wanted, so then I increased their Fun advertising as well, and now non-playables use them as much as I want them to. 

That being said, there could be other mods out there that affect whether or not a non-playable will use easels. It can be done through modding BHAVs, for instance, which I don’t know how to do. It’s possible that I had such a thing that had disabled visitor use, but if that was the case, I’m pretty sure doing what I did wouldn’t have worked because BHAVs will trump the settings in the TTAB. And whatever the case, I was in my “Creating” user account when I made and did the testing for the mod, which has no mods in it except a few that nuke autonomy on non-object-oriented fun things that Sims can do (like bird-watching and jumping rope) so that they can’t be distracted by those things when I’m testing autonomy tweaks I’m working on. So, I’m fairly certain that, in a vanilla game, non-playables can’t use the Maxis easel. It’s possible that there are custom easels out there that are visitor-enabled, though, or that a global BHAV mod exists that includes making all easels visitor-enabled. In a vanilla game, though, I’m pretty sure visitors can’t use easels.

didilysims replied to your photo “Photographic evidence that nannies will potty-train! Still haven’t...”

Whoa, I've never seen this before. Good to know the nanny can occasionally be useful!

Occasionally, yes! I don’t always allow nannies in my game. Just in age-modded ones like the one in question where the combined baby+toddler+child lifestage is 48 days long and one or the other parent can’t possibly take that much time off work -- which is what I normally make them do -- to look after the rugrats without getting themselves fired. :) In both my current age-modded neighborhoods, I’ve seen nannies potty-training. I don’t have any mods that affect nannies because I don’t often use them, so I’m fairly sure this is vanilla behavior, but it seems pretty random. Sometimes the same nanny will or will not potty-train. I haven’t noticed any kind of pattern.

ddeathblossom replied to your photo “This hair has a…um…interesting?….hairline? LOL I’m trying not to get...”

Yeah that one is pretty bad, I could never use it. xD

It’s not too terrible, but it does have a terribly stringy alpha. :P Most hairs do (though I don’t understand why for the life of me because ALL hairs look better when they’re filled in at least a little) but Peggy’s especially do. Once I filled in some of the stringiness in the alpha, the hair looks better overall. I just wish I could make the bit of hairline that shows or the piece that flops over the hairline in front a little wider to fill in that little gap but, alas, they’re as wide as they’ll go. To truly fix it, I’d probably need to alter the mesh or the mapping or both, but I don’t know how to do that. I can paint alphas from scratch now, if I want to, but meshing of any sort is above my pay grade. :)

rioa replied to your photoset “My very own new hair texture! I know it’s not going to appeal to...”

Noooooo you can't do this to me, I just finished changing hair textures! But it's so pretty... so tempting... *__*

:D I’m trying to decide if I should share these defaults I’m retexturing. I just can’t imagine that a lot of people would want them, because they don’t “match” either of the two existing main types of hair textures. So, if people use custom hairs plus defaults -- and I’m pretty sure most people do, if they use defaults at all -- they’d need customs similarly retextured, too, or else things will look weird and...Yeah, I doubt there’d be much demand. LOL But I’m happy to have my own game looking how I’ve always wanted it to look. Hair-wise, at least. :)

lady-silverwolf replied to your photoset “My very own new hair texture! I know it’s not going to appeal to...”

Its like a touch of realism, and yet, not. I really like what you did here! Thanks for sharing your tips too!

You’re welcome! :) I’ve always thought it funny that the Maxis hair textures are somewhat realistic in that they have color variation and thicker high/lowlights, but that “Maxis-match” hair textures are really something completely different. They’re basically finely-stranded hair just like Pooklet-type textures only with no built-in shine so that everything is flat and matte, and in colors that match Maxis’s, IMO, completely terrible ones. But then, I’ve always said that “Maxis-match” doesn’t really match Maxis but rather creates it own exaggeratedly cartoon-like aesthetic, whereas I think Maxis itself was actually attempting -- and mostly failing because of technical limitations at the time -- to be more realistic. It did better at realism toward the end of production, though. I mean, look at some of the textures on the furniture and clothing from AL. Those are realistic yet not photoskinned and are very nice-looking. So...Irony! :D

Anyway, yeah, the hair texture I made results in very Maxis-like textures, only not blurred and stretched, and...Yeah, I’m not using Maxis’s colors because I think they’re awful. The only one that, IMO, is remotely acceptable is Maxis’s brown. The others, especially the blond, are an affront to mine eyes. ;) Which is totally a personal preference sort of thing, of course, so no offense meant to anyone, but it’s definitely not what I want for my own game.

getmygameon replied to your photoset “Yeeeeeeeep, I’m a-likin’ this. Not gonna get too excited, though,...”

Now what are you doing again dear friend? Shampoo style hair? I try to keep up I swear ^^;;; you just do so much amazing its hard! ❤

Aw, you’re sweet. :) And I’m...Multi-tasking, at the moment. Doing lots of hair, though! Two different sets of defaults, even. One that I’m making entirely new retextured defaults for, meant to be used in Castaway Stores, the other where I’m just retexturing existing defaults for TS2. I’d really LIKE to do a full set of new defaults with these new defaults that use newer meshes for TS2, but that would take me forever. I might do it in the future, but for now I’m just retexturing existing ones because it’s faster.

Annnnd of course there are other projects, too. There are always projects. I can’t imagine ever being bored with TS2. It’s just...inconceivable.

eulaliasims replied to your post “Game-loading time replies!”

I haven't had the chance to send a sim to the gym yet, but I'll keep an eye out for the multipress thing. Tbh, I'll be happy to have them paying *any* attention to something besides the treadmills! The townies desperately need to add some strength training to their routines. :P

Their treadmill obsession was really annoying. But, it’s not like they could help it when it was the only object available to them due to “Maxis logic.” *eye roll* I’m actually surprised that it took me so long to address it. It was just one of those things that kept slipping my mind until I was in the game, playing a gym, and feeling annoyed again. :)

nekosayuri replied to your post “Game-loading time replies!”

I tried that but I just went CRAZY in buy/build which are full of CRAP I'll never use or stuff in all the wrong places, just drove me nuts :D... so organising it is

Heh. My idea of “organization” is just occasionally going through the catalog and nuking everything I don’t use regularly. I guess there’s a benefit to building in pretty much one style only and pretty much insisting on full sets of windows/doors, not just one or two individual windows/doors. It means I don’t need/download a ton of build/buy stuff, so I don’t have to purge often. Mostly, I have Maxis recolors and stuff that’s slaved to Maxis objects, with just a few full sets of things otherwise. It keeps things pretty streamlined. It’s sometimes hard to resist the temptation of pretty new things...but then I remember how much drudgery it is to purge the catalogs, and that keeps me from hitting the Download link. :)

...Unless it’s plants. I have a terrible weakness for plants. *laugh*

nekosayuri replied to your photo “Photographic evidence that nannies will potty-train! Still haven’t...”

I also want to get to that point, but I just never played around for it to happen XD I always ended up quitting or losing my progress, and since ages ago my sims used to be all face 1s, it would have been boring anyway. I mostly play with aging off cause I like to be in total control of how "quickly" my sims get through life, but yea, the fact I'm super attached is obvious XD

Yeah, I know people get really attached. I just...don’t. I mean, I like a lot of my Sims, and I definitely have my favorites that I don’t really like to see age and die, but it would never occur to me to keep them around forever, because I like their progeny as well and want to get on with their lives, too, and it’d be weird to have their great-great-great grandparents still kicking around. :) So, it’s easy for me to let go. But then, I’m not someone who attaches strongly to other people IRL, so I guess that’s not too surprising.

pensblr replied to your post “Game-loading time replies!”

Truthfully, I opened Hat's modified ACR controller after adjusting the age spans, went "nope" and closed SimPe. *laughs* I am proficient enough in using SimPe for tweaking mods/creating, but not enough that I felt comfortable mucking about with the ACR controller BHAVS. Though, I'm starting to feel daring enough to attempt it. What else are testing neighborhoods for? :)

The only way to learn is to try! :) And I dunno about you, but I learn best by doing. Just going in and messing around and seeing what happens. Of course, in my case, when I get experimental mostly what happens is crashing the game. *laugh* 

I just don’t understand BHAVs at all, and while I’d like to understand them one day, it’s not high on my to-do list at this point. I’ve got about a billion other fish to fry before I get to that. :)

penig replied to your post “/Why/ would simply putting something on a shelf corrupt something?...”

I remember this being discussed a loooong time ago; long enough that Mootilda was in the conversation. I believe the problem was specifically the Magitray and it was a problem in mausoleums, something about the way the device's restocking code worked. You can't trust my memory but if somebody wants to hunt down the original reference maybe that's enough info to start the search.