BUY MODE BLITZ: Hysterical Paroxysm's Primitive Scroll Phone

[hat_plays_sims]

I use this one to pieces.

Okay, so, Buy Mode Blitz is all about the meshes I either use all the time or want to use but their lack of texture options thwarts me. HP's scroll phone is... sort of both? Or it was, but now! Now I can put this thing all over the danged place.

Also, that shade of oak up there in the title card? That means A Wizard Did It.



You may recognize it from both of my Servo defaults, and from my digital camera and remote control defaults, and I've probably used it somewhere else, too. Oh yes the robot-building station block! Visual shorthand for This Is A Magic Thing, It Doesn't Have To Make Sense.



So, one recolor in Magitek Oak, and twenty Pooklet Project Mayhem naturals over Piggi Wood 03 (I did this one so early on in Buy Mode Blitz that I hadn't started blending Piggi 03with the SDA Kitchen, yet), with the strapping adapted from a piece by tudorartisans.com. Other details include a lozenge brocade fabric texture from my texture stash (either in its original white-and-gold state or with selected Aelia Autumn and CuriousB Any Color You Like actions), parchment from my texture hoard on the handset-scroll, a gold ribbon from the Sims 2 Store Castle Stuff set wrapped around the scroll, and a bright green plumb bob wax seal that you'll only ever actually see when a Sim is using the handset.



I gave a lot of thought to how I should handle my color combinations-- should the seal on the handset scroll have my heraldry on it, should I match the colors of the box lining to the seal-- but since this object only has one subset, I went with 'the green plumb-bob seal shows it's magic' and 'I'm just grabbing a fat double-handful of colors that seem period or pretty and picking wood-and-fabric pairings based on whatever makes me happy.' It seemed fair, given that there's none of HP's original textures left on this thing.



I do feel like I should say this isn't a typical shape for a small chest like this in the Middle Ages-- a large traveling trunk, sure, but a smaller chest would have a lid with flat sides, like a roof, giving plenty of flat surfaces for decorative painting-- BUT it's not like talking into a scroll and hearing your neighbor's voice was a thing in the Middle Ages, either. (Although any box with this much iron on it would probably also have a lock. I couldn't find a keyplate that I liked with all my scrolls, but if you're looking to recolor this object? The front of the box is the bit right next to the ribbon on the UV map, and the points of the scrolls stop RIGHT where the lid separates, for proper keyplate alignment.)

So really, I just did my best to make the chest visually interesting in a way that IS period-accurate, because 'this small thing does not need all the features of the Large Version to work properly, but it'll look so cool' never really goes out of style as an attitude, and was alive and well in the Middle Ages. (This is the attitude that gives us working lights in a dollhouse, or calculators the size of a credit card, or baby shoes for newborns.) And that curly banding is a fairly common thing to see on larger chests.



An important note! Handsets on existing scroll phones will not pick up recolors. If you want my handsets, you'll have to sell your phone and re-buy it.

Hysterical Paroxysm doesn't like her meshes to be redistributed, so you can find the original mesh and HP's own recolors here. Gosh it would be a shame if I forgot to take my own personal copy of HP's mesh out of my folder before zipping it up, as I'm sure I renamed the file to have way, way fewer characters.

Download!

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