#solstice-sims tutorials

Sims Blender Tutorial: Appending Clothes and Dressing Your Sim Model

The first installment in my long-requested series of Sim Blender tutorials is one of the most fundamental parts of creating a render: dressing your Sim. There are many tutorials out there on how to do this already, but this is my own process on how I dress my Sims in Blender. This is a full-length video detailing my process, and it is not sped up at all so that it is easier for you to follow along.

For this tutorial, you need the following: Blender: https://www.blender.org/download/ (I am using v4.4) Sims 4 Studio: https://sims4studio.com/ BlenderKit (Optional): https://www.blender.org/download/

If you have any questions, I'll do my best to help, but I am not a Blender Guru or anything like that. Most of what I know I learned via friends, internet tutorials, or trial and error (of which Blender requires a lot).

Im trying to start rendering my sims but my issue is with how my sims skin looks in the render, its still giving plastic. I am following your Google Doc slides, but I'm confused about what you mean by "apply the skin nodes on the body only."

do you mind explaining a little more?

Hi there! I apologize if that tutorial was confusing, as it's a little bit outdated now.

I highly recommend using the Shey Shaders Essentials skin shader, found here: https://shrenders.gumroad.com/l/shey_shaders_essentials?layout=profile

I'm pretty sure this is floating around some Telegram groups if you cannot afford to pay for it, but you didn't hear that from me.

The skin shader needs to be applied to the body mesh of your Sim—essentially, wherever your Sim has skin.

That means you have to go into Edit mode and press L over the eyeballs to select the eyeballs, then separate them from the body by hitting P, Separate Selection. Then separate the oral cavity and teeth by shift + clicking on the vertices.

This is because you don't want a skin texture (pores, etc) on the eyeballs or teeth.

To use the skin shader, you append the shader via Append, click the Object folder, and there should be a sphere or cube with the textures attached to it. In your Materials tab, note what the name of the Skin Shader is on the appended object. Click your body mesh and change the material to the Skin Shader by choosing its name from the material dropdown menu. Then, you can add your Sim's diffuse/texture map to the shader.

It could also be your lighting set up as well. If you aren't using enough lights or if you are using one big light, skin can look flat.

If your skin is too glossy looking, turn the roughness up, which you can see in that green box in the Shader Editor screenshot above.