Front-Laced Lady
Jan. 6th, 2013 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hat_plays_simsOn this fine Feast of Fools, I'm going to start off with the big one-- the Front-Laced Lady.
Oh my god okay.
Let me say first and foremost that, when I did the Du Lac Cotehardies, I promised myself I'd do some nice front-lacing kirtles for the womenfolk, too. I mean, suddenly I had all these colors of this High Middle Ages gown that I really, really liked, and they were all back-lacing. Back-lacing is for rich ladies or ladies with ideas above their station or at least for formal occasions. If you dress yourself in the morning, you front- or side-lace. (Front-lacing is easier, side-lacing may be prettier.)
But I puttered around and looked at meshes and went on hiatus, and then the inimitable Cynnix, long may she reign, converted Iamliz13's Medieval Alpha Dress, one of my very favorite meshes, to Aquilegia's Androgyny, Marvine's Athletic Girl, and best of all, Warlokk's RenGal but without the bodice being vacuum-formed to the breasts.
Suddenly getting my front-lacing kirtles done became a LOT more pressing.
Lemme show you some pictures and natter on about colors for a while, and then we'll get to other important stuff.
Above is Lady Lillianne The Fair (no really, her last name is The Fair) modeling the our kirtle in Aelia's brilliant Royal Blue, and I swear she went to sit under that painting of her own volition-- but she illustrates a point nicely!
Because I use a buttload of color actions, not every color is accurate to the Middle Ages as far as clothing goes. There is simply no way to create the following colors with vegetable dyes:
Aelia's Autumn Actions
Magenta
Purple Haze
Denim
Royal Blue
Teal
Mauve
CuriousB's Any Color You Like
Bluebell
Cove
Kingfisher
Jet
Pooklet's Project Mayhem Naturals
Dynamite
Flash Powder
Denim and Royal Blue were possible using paint, as you can see. (Lapis makes a good paint pigment, but not so much a dye.) They would've worn them if they'd had them. I'll also admit I'm not 100% sure on Blluebell and Mauve; but I don't THINK they could've been done.
Jet, Dynamite, and Flash Powder were only borderline impossible; even these days a true black is difficult to get, harder still to keep, and you'll get black dye all over any skin right next to the fabric until it fades to a sort of charcoal gray. Land Mine is your best bet for a truly historically accurate black (Jet takes second place), but remember that nobody REALLY wanted to invest in black clothes. Black dye was made with walnut juice and iron filings, but the iron filings made the dye acidic enough that it damaged the wool fibers. A black-dyed Medieval garment would wear out, to the point where it was good for nothing but rags, in maybe five years or so. A garment of the same wool dyed any other wholly vegetable color would last ten years or more, depending on how you took care of it and whether or not you cut it down into smaller garments for your kids.
Plum, Tomato, Rust, Aubergine, and Red Wine were all considered purples in the Middle ages. They were made with tyrian dye, which was so incredibly expensive only the super-rich could afford it. (Passing sumptuary laws restricting cloth of tyrian purple to royalty, nobility, and physicians was almost unnecessary... but a product of the paranoia of the super-rich during the rise of the middle classes.) Navy and Ocean, while perfectly achievable with a lot of woad or a lot less indigo, are still very deep, rich colors that would take a lot of time to produce.
Speaking of deep, rich colors, Lady Giselle up there is wearing Aelia's Emerald... but you'll notice unlike the Modest Lady gowns, there's no trim around the necklines. There is also a distinct lack of belts, and not much of the shift showing. The only way to tie one of these dresses to a particular social status is by the dye colors. There's a lot of room for fudging.
In fact, Meghan The Fair here is actually a kitchen maid, she's just wearing her Bullfinch formalwear right now.
Really, that's going to be a theme for me. If a dress will work for a Baroness's day clothes AND a laundress's wedding gown, I'm not going to tie it to one class or the other with a gilt belt or an apron, to save space.
I also want to hit on another thing Meghan is displaying very prettily-- you can call this outfit a gown, but I'm calling it a kirtle, because of how it's worn. The next garment down is the shift (or chemise if you're French or smock if you like that better). Strictly speaking, you can put a gown over a kirtle. I don't know how much difference it really makes, but the next set I have in the pipeline has that as an important distinction.
Here's Lady Jeannette and her jump rope, showing off her shift. Instead of doing the underside of the dress as a solid blob of color, I used the underdress textures from Sherahbim's original gown and tried to give a further sense of layering. I like how it turned out!
The housekeeper, Rosalie, picking up some of the maids' slack and scrubbing a bathtub herself. She is wearing Aelia's Indigo Brown.
And she's cleaning because Lady Jeannette does things like this in the bathtub. (I think Lady Jeanette is wearing either Maple or Poppy. It's a madder red from the later end of CuriousB's actions.)
Okay, lemme do some details. Like the Du Lac Cotehardies, all the Front-Laced Lady Kirtles are available for Casual, Formal, and Outerwear. Nothing is townie-enabled because I wasn't about to upload everything I've uploaded for this set twice. If you want 'em townie-enabled, the last chapter of Quintcia's awesome tutorial has easy instructions for you.
Taking atmospheric pictures only works well if you're just trying to take a picture of the atmosphere. Ella here is the other maid-of-all-work, wearing her church clothes-- a kirtle in Molotov and one of Cynnix's Noble veils. Not only do the kirtles work well with the dramatic scarf on the Noble Veil, they also play nice with Cynnix's Nun Wimple, Marja's edit of Clubkitty's Hijab, and of course Daislia's Altair Hood. That's why I made the necklines so darned high.
And here's Lady Annalise in probably Forget-Me-Not, from the back. The Adult dresses are enabled for Young Adult and Elder, too... and this outfit is available for teens and... Okay, well, that naturally brings me to what makes this SUPER insanity instead of my usual brand of insanity.
My random CAS folks are wearing Spruce (dark green), Robin's Egg (that minty pale turquoise), Red Wine (burgundy), and Jet, through all these photos. Cynnix also made a child conversion of the Medieval Alpha Dress, so for the basic Maxis shape, you can have child through elder in all the same textures, because when I was bringing Sherahbim's lovely spiral lacing texture to the front of the dress, I also did away with any bust shading.
... And she made RenGal Version 2 conversions from child to elder, too. These are REALLY great, because unlike most RenGal clothes, the fabric on RGv2 isn't vacuum-formed to the breasts. Not only is that not period, it's... um, a little bit physically impossible. It's a huge pet peeve of mine; I am a woman of the soft-and-round variety myself, and if there's one thing I can tell you about breasts, it's that they are soft, and react to constraining fabric. (The fault with most RenGal meshes is in Warlokk's magnets, so it's a fault in a LOT of Warlokk-based meshes, not just the RenGal.)
The Athletic Girl is my female badass. (Not that I have an aversion to more female badass shapes, but Athletic Girl exists, and pairs well with Jaccirocker's Runner Guy and Synaptic Sim's Lean Bodybuilder, who both have some Medieval meshes out there.) I really wish I could say more about her... but I can absolutely say I have learned one thing making this set and the Du Lac cotehardies: Teenage girls don't do ANYTHING interesting in the family portrait screen.
(There's some slight stretching over the belly of the Teen Female mesh. At this point, it isn't enough to bother me, but I want you to be aware.)
I love Aquilegia's Androgyny shape. I love that it affects everybody from Teen to Elder, both genders, and I love that since the body is the same as Maxis from the hips down, they blend right in. This dress right here is the first Medieval gown for ladies on the bodyshape, although I sincerely hope it won't be the last.
... And here are the men! Like the female Androgyny shape, they're Maxis from the hips down. However, also like the female Androgyny shape-- and all the Adult shapes-- adults and elders use the same meshes. I don't know if this is going to be fabulously useful to anyone or if it's just me that feels like even Medieval men need the option to feel like beautiful ladies. Or disguise themselves as nuns to escape from the law. Or play out the plot of Il Muto-- but then you'd technically need the ladies' androgyny meshes for that one.
But the really super awesome neat thing is that absolutely everything is repositoried to the AF recolors. When the mesh updates happen, that means you can have a grand total of 996 new kirtles for various and sundry ages, shapes, and sexes... in only a little more space than just grabbing all the AF kirtles. I'm gonna repeat myself in bold right now just in case anybody comes to my Dreamwidth and skims the writing because I usually just blather on about history and how linen reacts to sunlight.
EVERYTHING IS REPOSITORIED TO ADULT FEMALE.
Not AF RenGal, not all the teens are slaved to the default TF shape. EVERYTHING is slaved to the AF Maxis shape.
This means that, while you can certainly pick and choose among the eighty-three colors of the dress you're getting, if you decide you don't want the Maxis AF Kingfisher, you can't keep it for TF or RenGal or CF. (Okay, there ARE ways around that, but you have to be SimPE-literate.)
And hey as long as I'm going on about the technical details...
CF dresses have fat morphs, Teen and up have pregmorphs, too. Everything with a pregmorph is categorized as casual, outerwear, formal, and maternity, so if you have a Plan Maternity Wear mod (I use BoilingOil's), then not only can you avoid ever seeing the Maxis contemporary maternity wear in play ever again, you can make sure you never see it on the loading screen ever again, and without having to cross your fingers and hope the game gives you default replacement maternity wear that coincides with your pregnant lady's station in life.
Even though most of the custom body shapes aren't quite ready for prime time yet, I want to put up some comparison pics so you can see how things look next to the Maxis shapes. All of these are shown in the Time Bomb kirtle:
Yes, the CF RenGalv2 fit state is just a tiny little bit pudgier than the Maxis fat morph.
And the Teen fit shapes. I want to point out that the Androgyny shape has the same hips as the Maxis shape; when the Androgyny meshes are ready you can use them not only with the appropriate skins, but on teenage girls you want to be late bloomers.
And Teen fat, for your slightly lumpier dumplings. To me, it looks like the Athletic Girl doesn't get quite as wide as the Maxis fatmorph, and she also keeps her muscular arms. Gaining squish in the middle doesn't mean you lose muscle in your limbs (the entire basis behind Aquilegia's Imrpoved Male Fatmorphs, I think).
Adult Female Fit. And yes, all of these are enabled for elders. If an EF Androgyny mesh turns up, I may just do those, but as far as I know there's no separate mesh for EF Athletic Girl, EF RenGal is really similar to AF (in fact I almost used the EF mesh for AF, at first), and in my own game, I use a custom elder nude that's closer to the adult shape, because if I complain about Warlokk-based clothing meshes being glued to the nude, you should hear how I complain about plump slumpy elder bodies not reacting to things like snug clothing. Or bras.
And Adult Female Fat. What I love is how only the RenGal is more than a couple steps removed from the basic Maxis shape, even on the fatmorph. That's what I really want in my game; I want the people to all be slightly different shapes instead of all exactly the same.
Androgyny men, of all post-pubescent ages, for Sims who understand that sex and gender are two different things, or for when you have to hide a teenage boy among your ladies in waiting, or for when your thief has to hide from the shire-reeve and there's a kirtle just HANGING there out to dry, or for boys playing ladies on the stage, or if you, for some reason, need to do a Sims 2 retelling of the time Loki convinced Thor to cross-dress and pretend to be Freyja, Goddess of Love-- well, it was a solid, undignified, completely hilarious plan, and in the end it worked.
Let me do my usual wall of thanks and we'll proceed to the downloads, because there are many and they are a little unusual.
SO MANY PEOPLE I could not have attempted this without, so as usual we'll start from the mesh out. Praise be unto Warlokk, Aquilegia, and Marvine for body shapes, praise be unto Iamliz13 for the original meshes, and praise be unto Cynnix for body shape conversions and infinite patience in alpha layer repairs. (Praise likewise unto Cynnix for the Maxis TF pregmorph, which is included in your downloads.) Praise upon the head of Sherahbim, for the original Lady gown textures and the generous permission to mangle them into new clothes. Praise be unto Lyn, for making sure I had a working copy of Photoshop (because even now that I have a shiny new version, I still use old Photoshop 6 for way more things than I probably should. It's faster and I can't figure out how to stop CS5 from sticking new files together like tabs in Firefox). Praise be unto Pooklet, CuriousB, and Aelia for their useful, useful color actions. Praise be unto Quaxi for SimPE and DJ for the compressorizer. Praise be unto Phaenoh and Aquilegia for texture-referencing tutorials.
... I think that's anybody. If I missed anybody, my apologies.
Okay! So let's move on to the BIG downloads.
You'll notice I keep saying I made eighty-three recolors, but twenty Project Mayhem naturals plus twenty Aelia Autumn plus forty-two Any Color You Like actions only adds up to eighty two; that's because the original red texture was still in good enough shape to recolor. So you get that one, too.
Original Red shown original size.
DOWNLOAD Pooklet's Project Mayhem Naturals and Sherahbim's Original Red, Adult Maxis
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Aelia's Autumn Colors, Adult Maxis
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD CuriousB's Any Color You Like, Adult Maxis
>on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
And those are the master files. The downloads get smaller from here to the second-to-last file, but that's because they're slaved. All colors are included in each of these files, but they're subfoldered and only include one copy of the necessary mesh.
DOWNLOAD Teen Maxis
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Child Maxis
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult RenGal v2
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen RenGal V2
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Child RenGal V2
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult Athletic Girl
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen Athletic Girl
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult Androgyny F
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen Androgyny F
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult Androgyny M
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen Androgyny M
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
"So, Hat," you may say to me, "I know a couple other body shapes this mesh exists for. Any plan to do those?"
No, I say to you. With very few exceptions for meshes that don't exist yet (Androgyny elders, especially EF, and maybe the Well-Rounded Sim), even if more meshes get made I am probably done. (I reserve the right to change my mind if I fall in love with a body shape, but still.) If you want this dress available on more shapes, please do feel free to make them yourself-- you can even have all my original goodies.
DOWNLOAD Hat's Enormous Resource File
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
(but it's 184mb I wasn't kidding about ENORMOUS)
Why is that file so enormous? Well, I'll tell you why. The small part is the text file full of texture-referencing info from the AF masters. You can use that to slave a set of 83 recolors to my AF kirtles and save yourself a lot of space. But text files are tiny, and most of the download is taken up with the raw pngs you can use to create non-crunchy textures if you so desire (that's 166 1024x1024 pngs, so, large) and the .PSD files of just the dress fabric textures, which are useful for running more color actions (you know, if 83 colors isn't enough for you) or for changing lacing colors or adding buttons instead, applying trim, or applying grunge before applying things like aprons.
There is a unique policy packed with the dresses and some further info with the resources, but for the most part you can do whatever you want with these that doesn't violate anybody else's policies. I support you. If you do decide to make further recolors of this dress, especially for other body shapes, let me know and I'll add a link to them to this post.
I shall leave you with one more picture:
Meghan the Fair in her best dress, dining on fruit and cream with the fine ladies, and showing off the advantages of bump-mapping your laces. And that's it from me on this one!
Wanna help me feed my cats?
In case you feel like dropping me a buck or two, should you have a buck or two to spare. Donors get two things at the moment: a) a link to the Super Secret Cat Gallery, full of pictures of the cats you'll be feeding, updated sporadically when the cats do something photogenic and I'm fast enough on the trigger to catch it, and b) a link to the list of content I have done-but-not-screencapped, nearly done, partly done, or in the planning stages, and the option to suggest what ought to be in the next batch of things I focus on.
Oh my god okay.
Let me say first and foremost that, when I did the Du Lac Cotehardies, I promised myself I'd do some nice front-lacing kirtles for the womenfolk, too. I mean, suddenly I had all these colors of this High Middle Ages gown that I really, really liked, and they were all back-lacing. Back-lacing is for rich ladies or ladies with ideas above their station or at least for formal occasions. If you dress yourself in the morning, you front- or side-lace. (Front-lacing is easier, side-lacing may be prettier.)
But I puttered around and looked at meshes and went on hiatus, and then the inimitable Cynnix, long may she reign, converted Iamliz13's Medieval Alpha Dress, one of my very favorite meshes, to Aquilegia's Androgyny, Marvine's Athletic Girl, and best of all, Warlokk's RenGal but without the bodice being vacuum-formed to the breasts.
Suddenly getting my front-lacing kirtles done became a LOT more pressing.
Lemme show you some pictures and natter on about colors for a while, and then we'll get to other important stuff.
Above is Lady Lillianne The Fair (no really, her last name is The Fair) modeling the our kirtle in Aelia's brilliant Royal Blue, and I swear she went to sit under that painting of her own volition-- but she illustrates a point nicely!
Because I use a buttload of color actions, not every color is accurate to the Middle Ages as far as clothing goes. There is simply no way to create the following colors with vegetable dyes:
Aelia's Autumn Actions
Magenta
Purple Haze
Denim
Royal Blue
Teal
Mauve
CuriousB's Any Color You Like
Bluebell
Cove
Kingfisher
Jet
Pooklet's Project Mayhem Naturals
Dynamite
Flash Powder
Denim and Royal Blue were possible using paint, as you can see. (Lapis makes a good paint pigment, but not so much a dye.) They would've worn them if they'd had them. I'll also admit I'm not 100% sure on Blluebell and Mauve; but I don't THINK they could've been done.
Jet, Dynamite, and Flash Powder were only borderline impossible; even these days a true black is difficult to get, harder still to keep, and you'll get black dye all over any skin right next to the fabric until it fades to a sort of charcoal gray. Land Mine is your best bet for a truly historically accurate black (Jet takes second place), but remember that nobody REALLY wanted to invest in black clothes. Black dye was made with walnut juice and iron filings, but the iron filings made the dye acidic enough that it damaged the wool fibers. A black-dyed Medieval garment would wear out, to the point where it was good for nothing but rags, in maybe five years or so. A garment of the same wool dyed any other wholly vegetable color would last ten years or more, depending on how you took care of it and whether or not you cut it down into smaller garments for your kids.
Plum, Tomato, Rust, Aubergine, and Red Wine were all considered purples in the Middle ages. They were made with tyrian dye, which was so incredibly expensive only the super-rich could afford it. (Passing sumptuary laws restricting cloth of tyrian purple to royalty, nobility, and physicians was almost unnecessary... but a product of the paranoia of the super-rich during the rise of the middle classes.) Navy and Ocean, while perfectly achievable with a lot of woad or a lot less indigo, are still very deep, rich colors that would take a lot of time to produce.
Speaking of deep, rich colors, Lady Giselle up there is wearing Aelia's Emerald... but you'll notice unlike the Modest Lady gowns, there's no trim around the necklines. There is also a distinct lack of belts, and not much of the shift showing. The only way to tie one of these dresses to a particular social status is by the dye colors. There's a lot of room for fudging.
In fact, Meghan The Fair here is actually a kitchen maid, she's just wearing her Bullfinch formalwear right now.
Really, that's going to be a theme for me. If a dress will work for a Baroness's day clothes AND a laundress's wedding gown, I'm not going to tie it to one class or the other with a gilt belt or an apron, to save space.
I also want to hit on another thing Meghan is displaying very prettily-- you can call this outfit a gown, but I'm calling it a kirtle, because of how it's worn. The next garment down is the shift (or chemise if you're French or smock if you like that better). Strictly speaking, you can put a gown over a kirtle. I don't know how much difference it really makes, but the next set I have in the pipeline has that as an important distinction.
Here's Lady Jeannette and her jump rope, showing off her shift. Instead of doing the underside of the dress as a solid blob of color, I used the underdress textures from Sherahbim's original gown and tried to give a further sense of layering. I like how it turned out!
The housekeeper, Rosalie, picking up some of the maids' slack and scrubbing a bathtub herself. She is wearing Aelia's Indigo Brown.
And she's cleaning because Lady Jeannette does things like this in the bathtub. (I think Lady Jeanette is wearing either Maple or Poppy. It's a madder red from the later end of CuriousB's actions.)
Okay, lemme do some details. Like the Du Lac Cotehardies, all the Front-Laced Lady Kirtles are available for Casual, Formal, and Outerwear. Nothing is townie-enabled because I wasn't about to upload everything I've uploaded for this set twice. If you want 'em townie-enabled, the last chapter of Quintcia's awesome tutorial has easy instructions for you.
Taking atmospheric pictures only works well if you're just trying to take a picture of the atmosphere. Ella here is the other maid-of-all-work, wearing her church clothes-- a kirtle in Molotov and one of Cynnix's Noble veils. Not only do the kirtles work well with the dramatic scarf on the Noble Veil, they also play nice with Cynnix's Nun Wimple, Marja's edit of Clubkitty's Hijab, and of course Daislia's Altair Hood. That's why I made the necklines so darned high.
And here's Lady Annalise in probably Forget-Me-Not, from the back. The Adult dresses are enabled for Young Adult and Elder, too... and this outfit is available for teens and... Okay, well, that naturally brings me to what makes this SUPER insanity instead of my usual brand of insanity.
My random CAS folks are wearing Spruce (dark green), Robin's Egg (that minty pale turquoise), Red Wine (burgundy), and Jet, through all these photos. Cynnix also made a child conversion of the Medieval Alpha Dress, so for the basic Maxis shape, you can have child through elder in all the same textures, because when I was bringing Sherahbim's lovely spiral lacing texture to the front of the dress, I also did away with any bust shading.
... And she made RenGal Version 2 conversions from child to elder, too. These are REALLY great, because unlike most RenGal clothes, the fabric on RGv2 isn't vacuum-formed to the breasts. Not only is that not period, it's... um, a little bit physically impossible. It's a huge pet peeve of mine; I am a woman of the soft-and-round variety myself, and if there's one thing I can tell you about breasts, it's that they are soft, and react to constraining fabric. (The fault with most RenGal meshes is in Warlokk's magnets, so it's a fault in a LOT of Warlokk-based meshes, not just the RenGal.)
The Athletic Girl is my female badass. (Not that I have an aversion to more female badass shapes, but Athletic Girl exists, and pairs well with Jaccirocker's Runner Guy and Synaptic Sim's Lean Bodybuilder, who both have some Medieval meshes out there.) I really wish I could say more about her... but I can absolutely say I have learned one thing making this set and the Du Lac cotehardies: Teenage girls don't do ANYTHING interesting in the family portrait screen.
(There's some slight stretching over the belly of the Teen Female mesh. At this point, it isn't enough to bother me, but I want you to be aware.)
I love Aquilegia's Androgyny shape. I love that it affects everybody from Teen to Elder, both genders, and I love that since the body is the same as Maxis from the hips down, they blend right in. This dress right here is the first Medieval gown for ladies on the bodyshape, although I sincerely hope it won't be the last.
... And here are the men! Like the female Androgyny shape, they're Maxis from the hips down. However, also like the female Androgyny shape-- and all the Adult shapes-- adults and elders use the same meshes. I don't know if this is going to be fabulously useful to anyone or if it's just me that feels like even Medieval men need the option to feel like beautiful ladies. Or disguise themselves as nuns to escape from the law. Or play out the plot of Il Muto-- but then you'd technically need the ladies' androgyny meshes for that one.
But the really super awesome neat thing is that absolutely everything is repositoried to the AF recolors. When the mesh updates happen, that means you can have a grand total of 996 new kirtles for various and sundry ages, shapes, and sexes... in only a little more space than just grabbing all the AF kirtles. I'm gonna repeat myself in bold right now just in case anybody comes to my Dreamwidth and skims the writing because I usually just blather on about history and how linen reacts to sunlight.
EVERYTHING IS REPOSITORIED TO ADULT FEMALE.
Not AF RenGal, not all the teens are slaved to the default TF shape. EVERYTHING is slaved to the AF Maxis shape.
This means that, while you can certainly pick and choose among the eighty-three colors of the dress you're getting, if you decide you don't want the Maxis AF Kingfisher, you can't keep it for TF or RenGal or CF. (Okay, there ARE ways around that, but you have to be SimPE-literate.)
And hey as long as I'm going on about the technical details...
CF dresses have fat morphs, Teen and up have pregmorphs, too. Everything with a pregmorph is categorized as casual, outerwear, formal, and maternity, so if you have a Plan Maternity Wear mod (I use BoilingOil's), then not only can you avoid ever seeing the Maxis contemporary maternity wear in play ever again, you can make sure you never see it on the loading screen ever again, and without having to cross your fingers and hope the game gives you default replacement maternity wear that coincides with your pregnant lady's station in life.
Even though most of the custom body shapes aren't quite ready for prime time yet, I want to put up some comparison pics so you can see how things look next to the Maxis shapes. All of these are shown in the Time Bomb kirtle:
Yes, the CF RenGalv2 fit state is just a tiny little bit pudgier than the Maxis fat morph.
And the Teen fit shapes. I want to point out that the Androgyny shape has the same hips as the Maxis shape; when the Androgyny meshes are ready you can use them not only with the appropriate skins, but on teenage girls you want to be late bloomers.
And Teen fat, for your slightly lumpier dumplings. To me, it looks like the Athletic Girl doesn't get quite as wide as the Maxis fatmorph, and she also keeps her muscular arms. Gaining squish in the middle doesn't mean you lose muscle in your limbs (the entire basis behind Aquilegia's Imrpoved Male Fatmorphs, I think).
Adult Female Fit. And yes, all of these are enabled for elders. If an EF Androgyny mesh turns up, I may just do those, but as far as I know there's no separate mesh for EF Athletic Girl, EF RenGal is really similar to AF (in fact I almost used the EF mesh for AF, at first), and in my own game, I use a custom elder nude that's closer to the adult shape, because if I complain about Warlokk-based clothing meshes being glued to the nude, you should hear how I complain about plump slumpy elder bodies not reacting to things like snug clothing. Or bras.
And Adult Female Fat. What I love is how only the RenGal is more than a couple steps removed from the basic Maxis shape, even on the fatmorph. That's what I really want in my game; I want the people to all be slightly different shapes instead of all exactly the same.
Androgyny men, of all post-pubescent ages, for Sims who understand that sex and gender are two different things, or for when you have to hide a teenage boy among your ladies in waiting, or for when your thief has to hide from the shire-reeve and there's a kirtle just HANGING there out to dry, or for boys playing ladies on the stage, or if you, for some reason, need to do a Sims 2 retelling of the time Loki convinced Thor to cross-dress and pretend to be Freyja, Goddess of Love-- well, it was a solid, undignified, completely hilarious plan, and in the end it worked.
Let me do my usual wall of thanks and we'll proceed to the downloads, because there are many and they are a little unusual.
SO MANY PEOPLE I could not have attempted this without, so as usual we'll start from the mesh out. Praise be unto Warlokk, Aquilegia, and Marvine for body shapes, praise be unto Iamliz13 for the original meshes, and praise be unto Cynnix for body shape conversions and infinite patience in alpha layer repairs. (Praise likewise unto Cynnix for the Maxis TF pregmorph, which is included in your downloads.) Praise upon the head of Sherahbim, for the original Lady gown textures and the generous permission to mangle them into new clothes. Praise be unto Lyn, for making sure I had a working copy of Photoshop (because even now that I have a shiny new version, I still use old Photoshop 6 for way more things than I probably should. It's faster and I can't figure out how to stop CS5 from sticking new files together like tabs in Firefox). Praise be unto Pooklet, CuriousB, and Aelia for their useful, useful color actions. Praise be unto Quaxi for SimPE and DJ for the compressorizer. Praise be unto Phaenoh and Aquilegia for texture-referencing tutorials.
... I think that's anybody. If I missed anybody, my apologies.
Okay! So let's move on to the BIG downloads.
You'll notice I keep saying I made eighty-three recolors, but twenty Project Mayhem naturals plus twenty Aelia Autumn plus forty-two Any Color You Like actions only adds up to eighty two; that's because the original red texture was still in good enough shape to recolor. So you get that one, too.
Original Red shown original size.
DOWNLOAD Pooklet's Project Mayhem Naturals and Sherahbim's Original Red, Adult Maxis
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Aelia's Autumn Colors, Adult Maxis
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD CuriousB's Any Color You Like, Adult Maxis
>on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
And those are the master files. The downloads get smaller from here to the second-to-last file, but that's because they're slaved. All colors are included in each of these files, but they're subfoldered and only include one copy of the necessary mesh.
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Child Maxis
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult RenGal v2
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen RenGal V2
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Child RenGal V2
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult Athletic Girl
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen Athletic Girl
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult Androgyny F
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen Androgyny F
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Adult Androgyny M
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
DOWNLOAD Teen Androgyny M
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
"So, Hat," you may say to me, "I know a couple other body shapes this mesh exists for. Any plan to do those?"
No, I say to you. With very few exceptions for meshes that don't exist yet (Androgyny elders, especially EF, and maybe the Well-Rounded Sim), even if more meshes get made I am probably done. (I reserve the right to change my mind if I fall in love with a body shape, but still.) If you want this dress available on more shapes, please do feel free to make them yourself-- you can even have all my original goodies.
on Mediafire | on Sims File Share
(but it's 184mb I wasn't kidding about ENORMOUS)
Why is that file so enormous? Well, I'll tell you why. The small part is the text file full of texture-referencing info from the AF masters. You can use that to slave a set of 83 recolors to my AF kirtles and save yourself a lot of space. But text files are tiny, and most of the download is taken up with the raw pngs you can use to create non-crunchy textures if you so desire (that's 166 1024x1024 pngs, so, large) and the .PSD files of just the dress fabric textures, which are useful for running more color actions (you know, if 83 colors isn't enough for you) or for changing lacing colors or adding buttons instead, applying trim, or applying grunge before applying things like aprons.
There is a unique policy packed with the dresses and some further info with the resources, but for the most part you can do whatever you want with these that doesn't violate anybody else's policies. I support you. If you do decide to make further recolors of this dress, especially for other body shapes, let me know and I'll add a link to them to this post.
I shall leave you with one more picture:
Meghan the Fair in her best dress, dining on fruit and cream with the fine ladies, and showing off the advantages of bump-mapping your laces. And that's it from me on this one!
Wanna help me feed my cats?
In case you feel like dropping me a buck or two, should you have a buck or two to spare. Donors get two things at the moment: a) a link to the Super Secret Cat Gallery, full of pictures of the cats you'll be feeding, updated sporadically when the cats do something photogenic and I'm fast enough on the trigger to catch it, and b) a link to the list of content I have done-but-not-screencapped, nearly done, partly done, or in the planning stages, and the option to suggest what ought to be in the next batch of things I focus on.
