Splish Splash: Mermaid (mostly) Separates
Jan. 8th, 2021 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hat_plays_sims
So, Splash was something of a formative experience. Sure, I'd liked mermaids well enough in things like Peter Pan, and on the Submarine Voyage at Disneyland, but then sometime in... like, 1986? My parents taped Splash off the Disney Channel and it became one of those videos I watched and re-watched until the tape wore out, basically. because Daryll Hannah in her beautiful goldfish tail with her crimped hair and her tits out, swimming so fast neither the underwater camera crew nor the professional diver with the tank of air could keep up with her was the most fantastic thing Little Baby Hat had ever seen in live action.
It should be a shock that I haven't had mermaids in my game until now, but I've never found any fins I liked... until first Gryning and then Meduza converted the TS4 Island Living fins. The proportions of the TS4 flukes look SO much better than basically any I'd seen anywhere before. And then Midgethetree's mermaid mod happened and...
Look, if I can't indulge my little-girl fantasies in the Sims, why even have a simulation game with all this power of creation and control?
Look at this stuff, isn't it neat?
Let's jump right in.
What you can grab here today includes: 16 recolors each of Meduza's bottom-only TS4 Fin 2, Meduza's bottom-only conversion of Gryning's TS4 Fin 1, Meduza's full-body child conversion of Fins 1 & 2, and 16 photoskinned recolors of Meduza's TF-EF TS4 seashell bra, Meduza's TS2 fish net top (no not that kind of fishnet, you'll see) for Magpie's Androgyny TU-EU, plus an edit of Midgethetree's Mermaid Overlay using edited Sherahbim's Sea Maid gills, and some courtesy-copies of Meduza's TM-EM fish net top and top-only nudes by various people who are not me (but are credited in the download).
All of these goodies have had their BINX numbers edited; they are not EP pinned because I love tooltips, but they are just. Way back there. The BINX numbers start at 0x00000020 for the mermaid-specific goodies and at 0x00000001 for the true-nude tops. (1 is Maxis-size True Nude for CU-AU; 2 is Maxis EU in case you want your AUs elder-enabled but also want to use the default elder meshes. 3 is Androgyny. ... Four and Five, included but not useful, are the numbers I give to true-nude fullbody, top, and bottoms for Runner/LBB and Athletic Girl (4) and Renaissance Gal and her mythical brother (5). RenGal v2 mermaids would look AMAZING.) Nothing is townie-enabled. Fins, fishnet tops, and seashell bras are enabled for Casual and Swim only; nude tops are enabled for Casual, Swim, Undies, and Sleepwear. Necessary meshes are included. Shoe sounds have been disabled on fins.
Ages! Especially EF. I use a more AF-shaped EF nude/undies/swim default (because I've been playing this game since it dropped and nobody's made any other EF defaults with reasonable boobs in all that time, that's why; I will spin you an entire rant), but I still keep regular-EF bottoms around because Androgyny uses the Maxis bottoms and it's a whole. Thing. If you want elder-enabled adult fins and/or seashells, grab the YAEF/YAEM files; if you do not, grab YAF/YAM. (For the record, the seashell bra is the first bra since TS2 dropped where I have LOVED how it looks on EF.)
CU is full-body because there isn't a CU separates mesh for either fin, that I know of. If such should appear, I will add them in a goddamn hurry. Children also do not get seashell bras or conversions of Meduza's fishnet tops, since they have no bottoms with which to wear them, and, in the case of the pasted-on seashells, no meshes anyway.
*spends ten minutes wondering why that pic is so small, culminating in digging out my original* ... Okay I guess I just... made that one smaller, then. Imgur is not pulling anything weird on me.
Fin textures are from TS4 Island Living, but mad props to Gryning for extracting them, and on some of the already-been-done textures, to both Gryning and Meduza for doing some fitting for me. Seashell textures are free-for-noncommercial photos mined from Google Image Search; I would have better credits for them than I do, but a NUMBER of photo-hosting sites SURE DO WANT YOU to sign up and log in in order to look at image descriptions, and that was not happening. Nothing is texture-referenced but everything could be; do not link Fin 1 and Fin 2, though, the tail and side fins are mapped the same, but the tail-fin shapes are different and won't look as pretty. Fin textures have not been replaced in SimPE (not even black seemed to need it!), but the seashell bras have.
I just want to put out there that it's actually really hard to take pictures of Sims swimming in the ocean.
The gills overlay is an edit of Midgethetree's 8-8-2020 update of her overlay using carefully but intensely edited gills from Sherahbim's Sea Maid textures. They should work with a variety of skintones; I did my color testing on Very Dark, Very Light, and In The Middle There skins, but on paper-white or near-true-black human skintones or on cooler fantasy colors, they may look a little weird.
Midge updates her mods as and when bugs are discovered and new features are developed; I have included a png of the gills texture so you can edit any updates she puts out after this point.
Hey, here's that fish net shirt I was talking about!
The gills are an overlay, and as such, are applied to the skin. (How the overlay works with tattoo overlays and other supernatural overlays is probably a question best asked Midge.) The shirt goes over the gills, and bottoms always go over tops so I actually should've edited the shirt or lowered the scales. Oh well!
Why gills?
Because I like the idea of my fishy folk having something all the time, but I wasn't a fan of the TS3-like idea of scaly legs. (Sure, I also don't like the hairtone correlation, and the scales Midge picked out don't match the TS4 tails, but it's not like I couldn't have done translucent scales or something.) But gills felt right-- I considered putting them on the neck, but then I thought "Lower ribcage! In my game they'd be covered damn near all the time!" Hidden, unless the merperson is naked or in their aquatic form. Or possibly wearing some Castaway Stories tops.
What else do I need to talk about...
Did I do over-the-boob recolors for anyone? I did not. This is because a) I cannot for the life of me find smooth nude tops that don't use the default mesh (I like nipples but... scaly nipples?) for the ladies, and b) I have to futz with the boob shading for the gents, kids, and androgynous merfolk, and that's too much effort for something that either can't cover the nipples or can't exist for ladies, AND has to be gil-compatible. Should the appropriate unrestrained-nude meshes appear for people with boobs, I will get right to work on scaly tops.
I took all these pictures, so I'm posting all these pictures.
Meshes have fat morphs, which is always nice. Scales stop below the breasts for women and avoid the navel at least on the skins I've tried them on. Only adults have pregmorphs, due to the likelihood of the two halves not lining up on teen or Elder separates. But they're not flagged for Maternity so... Keep pregnant teen merfolk out of the water?
As swimwear and just... tails, I actually wish the fins were straighter, even though they'd clip into the ground in-game and in Body Shop, but. Do I mesh yet, I do not. Your merfolk will not dramatically flop their fins out of the bathtub, more's the pity. Nor do they totally straighten out in the water.
Do these fins work with all tops? They do NOT. Bottoms cover tops so if you try to put your merfolk in T-shirts their scales will creep up over them unless they do that neat new group thing that Skell does with tops, in which case you may end up with your scales ending in a hard line at the waist seam. But I wanted scales creeping up over the belly and I didn't want straight lines and I defintely wanted to leave my gills exposed. These will work best with crop tops, bikini tops, bras, and delightfully, all those Castaway Stories separates by Digital Angels. (Yeah no gills showing in Body Shop previews, though.)
Okay let's do us some downloads!
First, FINS. What else do you need to know about the fins?
Both fins are very swishy and Betta-like in terms of shape. Fin One is narrower at the fluke and much curvier. Fin Two is still feathery but wider and straighter. To my frustration, Fin One has two little fins on each side, while Fin Two has one little side fin on each side. Also, while the elders and elder-enabled adults do NOT conflict, they do gap if you mix your meshes.
All colors are both NUMBERED and NAMED, for ease of finding what you want to find. That said, I done goofed up on the rainbow fin; sometimes I wrote "rainbow" and sometimes I wrote "pride" and I just didn't care enough to make them the same.
Textures are from TS4; most of the colors (both fins' white, black, and silver, and Fin One's orange, bright green, dark green, soft teal, bright blue, true blue, and dark blue, plus the solid red fluke) were made by me by tweaking hue/sat sliders.
FIN ONE
Softer, curvier, narrower, available in solid colors (plus Rainbow/Pride) only.
Male Swatches: 1-4 | 5-8 | 9-12 | 13-16
DOWNLOAD FIN ONE, TM
DOWNLOAD FIN ONE, YAM
DOWNLOAD FIN ONE, YAEM
DOWNLOAD FIN ONE, EM
Female Swatches: 1-4 | 5-8 | 9-12 | 13-16
DOWNLOAD FIN ONE, YAF
DOWNLOAD FIN ONE, YAEF
DOWNLOAD FIN ONE, EF
FIN TWO
Straighter, wider, includes three fantastical patterns and three angelfish patterns, but fewer solid colors.
Male Swatches: 1-4 | 5-8 | 9-12 | 13-16
DOWNLOAD FIN TWO, TM
DOWNLOAD FIN TWO, YAM
DOWNLOAD FIN TWO, YAEM
DOWNLOAD FIN TWO, EM
Female Swatches: 1-4 | 5-8 | 9-12 | 13-16
DOWNLOAD FIN TWO, YAF
DOWNLOAD FIN TWO, YAEF
DOWNLOAD FIN TWO, EF
Again, these are all photoskinned; I didn't like the cartoony TS4 textures and I'm not sure how much I love all of these. Most scallops work better for me than the clams (though Clams 4 is striking), and if I were to go so mad as to decide I needed 82 color-actioned seashells, I'd start with Scallops 4 and lighten them up to suit. Seriously, though, the EF bra looks amazing. Well done Meduza I have never liked an EF bra more than I like this one.
DOWNLOAD YAF SEASHELL BRAS
DOWNLOAD YAEF SEASHELL BRAS
DOWNLOAD EF SEASHELL BRAS
THIS IS ALL MEDUZA'S WORK, all I did was re-sort the BINX numbers so all the merstuff stays together in the catalog. It's basically a courtesy copy; I didn't even change the tooltip. Also courtesy copies that are not getting pics so I don't test Imgur as a photohost, nude tops for a variety of bodyshapes!
Nude Tops Courtesy Copies
This one, though, this one I claim some responsibility for; it's Meduza's textures (not referenced, but could be) on Magpie's Androgyny untuckable top. And this kind of thing is why I was so excited about bottom-only fins.
Gills! We also need gills. Remember you need Midge's actual mermaid mod (and whatever all else) to make the gill overlays work.
And that's my first offering for merfolk.
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.
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Date: 2021-01-10 03:41 pm (UTC)Btw. I use name "jellymeduza" only on tumblr, so you can leave out the "jelly" part if you want to. :)
- Meduza
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Date: 2021-01-10 04:10 pm (UTC)I will definitely note that only the adults have pregmorphs-- at least they're not flagged for maternity? And thank you for the reminder. (Man I wish I could see/test pregmorphs in body shop.) If I had to guess on why you went full-body on the kids, I'd guess it's because all the top-only scales had breast shading?
And thank you on the name correction-- I should probably link you, actually, because one time I tried googling for your tumblr, before I bookmarked it, and wound up with a lot of pictures of jellyfish. Which was cool, but was not what I was looking for.
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Date: 2021-01-10 05:37 pm (UTC)There is a full-body version of fin one for teens. (link: https://jellymeduza.tumblr.com/post/186469594048/grynings-ts4-mermaids-converted-for-teens-come-in ). It has both morphs. There's no full-body version of fin two, though.
When it comes to my nick, both "jellymeduza" and "Meduza" are fine, I just use the latter more often. As "meduza" was already taken, I named my tumblr "jellymeduza", because I was too lazy to name it "jellyfish-meduza" or something like that.
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Date: 2021-02-02 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-03 05:19 am (UTC)The mermaid mods aren't actually required to use the tails, just the gills overlay.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 07:23 am (UTC)