Hat Plays Sims

So there I am, looking at a bunch of stuff I've recolored that has gone Funky under indoor lighting, and I didn't notice until I was trying to take title card pics because my swatch lot is just. Walls on two sides.

"Man," I says, "Man, I wish I knew why the originals looked fine in the original screenshots, but in my game they look like a lowered wall item with a too-big shadow mesh. I wonder if it's my lighting mod or...

"... or...

"... Hang on a second."

Plonked one of the problematic items onto a shiftable OMSP, lifted it up a couple clicks, IT IS THE INDOOR SHADOW MESH. Which means a) Apartment Life shifting is to "blame" and b) the fix will be a lot faster than replacing 326 TXMTs and c) it's the sort of meshfix I may actually be able to fix myself. Possibly. By slapping HP's Placeholder Mesh in there.

This is very exciting! I may in fact be able to get all of Buy Mode Blitz shared by the end of the month!

So there I am, going through my Buy Mode catalog trying to figure out if there's anything I need to delete, move, reprice, fix, maybe write an entertaining item description for, when my nephew (who will be eight this weekend) invades and takes over.

Behold, what he did to my swatch lot:



I'm not saving that, I need my swatch lot, but. I had to at least immortalize it in a screenshot. He says this is its finished form.

So I'm right in the path of this storm.

Progress continues apace, but if the power goes out, it's gonna get really hard to post anything-- and this poor old box has been through enough, if we get the promised lightning storms on the eighth? I'm unplugging everything. (I am not concerned about flooding, exactly. I live on a flag lot on a REALLY steep hill; water doesn't flow down to us so much as around us, usually, and if it rises UP to us we've got bigger problems than 'oh no the house might flood.' Like 'oh no the only way out of our subdivision, at the bottom of this hill.' And 'oh no the freeway has become a new river.')

Also, current 'yeah, I think I can get that up,' includes Mage College, Faraday Tunics, more underwear separates, rucked kirtles, at least one more installment of Buy Mode Blitz (I also need to install a bunch of new stuff), and possibly more mermaids. Maybe a little jewelry, probably some seasonally-themed accessories.

Also also, texture-referencing hairs is terrible. There are so many property sets. (There's hair in Mage College. I would like to have a hair dump ready, but that requires naming the hairs. We'll see.

Okay so magical_girl_sandbox remapped someone else's 4t2 hat for me (so that there wasn't a ton of wasted space, because TS4 is... like that?), towards my goal of making some halo bonnets but. I am thwarted by some very TS2-basegame-esque Maxis mappping.

The dang brim blurs.

Not enough to not DO the hat (I have encountered a few where the textures make recoloring look easy but whatever underpaid modeler made the thing did not account for anybody ever wanting to put a pattern on it), and I can definitely do solid contrasts on the underside of the brim and a nice bit of banding around the edges, but I wanted to trim the HECK out of them, so I am slightly bummed I can't, like. Add brocades and ouches and criss-cross trimming and otherwise going hog wild the way I did on my crispinettes. The underside is too blurry for anything but Very Straight Lines to look okay, but the top...



I seek opinions. Would that edge trimming be worth it in a contrasting color? That's as good as it gets, and I can still sorta tell what kind of trim it's supposed to be, but.

Would you download that?

(Also I had to settle for very plain brooches on this hat already. Every time I tried to fancy them up, either the mesh's math and Medieval math did not want to cooperate, or they fit the mesh but looked like delicious cookies. The things I do for hats.)

1. Hair Dump XI: The Long-Awaited Beard Dump
2. Hair Dump XII Part One: Amazon Hair Dump From The Moon!
3. Hair Dump XII Part Two: Mars Needs Hair Dumps!
4. Hair Dump XIII: Rise of the Hair Dump
5. Epiphany 2013 Scraps Post
6. Epiphany 2014 Scraps Post
7. Epiphany 2016 Stealth Hair Dump (this stuff hadn't even made it onto SFS!)
8. La Esmeralda (And never mind that I'm not exactly proud of those pics now)

I think that's everything.

Stay tuned, I'm about to host a scavenger hunt.

1. Hair Dump VII: Revenge of Hair Dump part one of three
Hairs that only have working SFS links because Mediafire is being cruel to my antique Firefox on my Vista machine: Tumbledown
2. Hair Dump VII: Revenge of Hair Dump part two of three
Hairs that only have working SFS links because Mediafire is being cruel to my antique Firefox on my Vista machine: Wild And Free, Seven in One Blow
3. Hair Dump VII: Revenge of Hair Dump part three of three

I wanted to get a lot more done tonight but Imgur decided to test me. ... And/or I found out imgur doesn't like it when you think 'oh that's three parts of one hair dump, I can put all the pics in one album.' I cannot. It does not like that. Errors errors everywhere and I lost the album itself (not the pics, just the album) repeatedly.

I have edited the stickypost, because I keep leaving it to sit there for seven years at a stretch. (Importantly, I have removed my to-do list and links to resource posts that I haven't updated in years.)

I have also updated my list of SimPE tricks, including how to make modular stairs work as intended if they're missing prices or catalog descriptions, how to Time Bin (make custom hairs function like binned hairs), how to actually adjust the Environment score of an object (hint: it's the price), and although it's been a while since I added it, how to edit the comfort and energy of beds. Because those little numbers in the catalog are purely cosmetic.

So I'm doing a little experiment, trying to fix the whole 'infant hairs make toddler heads disappear' thing and I think I might have it? Very simple mod, I just gotta make enough Sims to have babies and let those babies grow up into toddlers.

... But I entered the wrong value at first and in doing so I also think I may have just discovered a way for elders to keep their colors without having all the colors in the gray bin, for people who are into that.

Or, at least, in my real quick CAS test, all my grays were in Colorful (because Clean UI re-enables Colorful), and all my multi-binned hair coverings and plantsim hairs and such were all that was available to elders in the black-brown-blond-red bins. Because I don't have colors enabled for elders.

So what I did was I grabbed one of those equal-hair-genetics mods, put the genetic values back to Maxis values, and changed the age values to 7f, as that is Correct for Time Bomb and other custom-genetic hair colors. And I swear I saw... Ove or Rio, I forget which, say that their custom-genetic babies did not grow up missing the backs of their heads.

But 7f is infants (20), toddlers (1), children (2), teens (4), young adults (40), adults (8), and elders (10). 5f is toddler-through-elder, which is what most hairs made in Body Shop have in their Hairtone XHTN thingy. 2f is what all the equal-hair-genetics mods I've poked at have as their default value, which is very confusing? I think that's infants-through-adults. (1+2+4+8=15, F in hexadecimal.) But that leaves out Young Adults, and so is very confusing. Basegame artifact? Anyway.

While I think what I need for my purposes is 6f (currently testing; elders are back to normal function in CAS, anyway, gotta see what infants do, no notable change in YACAS), does anybody out there who plays elders-keep-their-colors want to test the 7f version?

This isn't a formal testers-wanted or anything, download away!

Just let me know...

1. If you have Clean UI or not
2. What happens with Elders in CAS and at the mirror
3. How your elders keep their colors (colors binned as grays, adult colors enabled for elders, if you use 48 for colorful hair and 18 for gray streaks, whatever)
4. ... Other? (YA-without-college mods, do those normally affect what hairs, or what Maxis hairs, show up on teens aging into young adults, are your infants doing weird things, does this work if you don't bother with custom infant hairs, whatever you notice)

I think what's going to work best is a) making sure that package loads after your hair folder and b) having elders keep their colors by way of having them share property sets with adults (age value says 18 instead of 8), rather than having colors binned as grays.

I have GOT to learn to make swatches and take in-game screenshots as I make stuff. Oof.

State of the uploads, I've got in-game swatches for everything for Buy Mode Blitz, and all the screenshots I need for Body Shop swatches for clothes, but title card pics are taking longer, and in-game shots of clothes, longer still-- my testerhood has two Sims in it. That is not enough Sims to display clothes properly.

So how about a break for some educational videos? Stuff that makes me want to make content. Not always content I have the skills to make, at least not yet, but-- you know, things you can look at and go 'oooh, that'd be nice to have in my game!' ( Let me just wheel in this AV cart... )

I will admit I've watched Secrets of the Castle and Tudor Monastery Farm at least three times each now. ... Possibly four for Secrets of the Castle. (I also like If Walls Could Talk with Lucy Worsley, but that one doesn't have an embeddable playlist.)

So I've been sort of tearing through Body Shop projects since my last post, some old and pre-planned, some 'well, I have all the pieces, I might as well.'

What's my Where-Can-I-Find, first, though:



So I was making some witchy stuff. (Also normal colors, but a lot of the normal-colors on those particular meshes are actually by Skell. ... And I rearranged BINX numbers so the AL-pinned witch stuff always goes good-neutral-wicked-red.) Which is mostly a personal project, but if there's interest I'll share it? I'm kind of having fun with the idea of an Official Mage College or something, because I have just enough coordinate-y clothes to justify it. And anyway I have questions, as google has failed me and I just want to shove things around in Photoshop.

1. Anybody know where to find any wizardly robes for men, ideally using the AL ambodywitch coat as a base? I have three options for TF-EF (Skell's ambodywitch conversions, K8's Fairywitch, and Skell's Celtic Makeover), but only two for TM-EM. I dig the Comfortable and Dashing options for the classic coat, but I'm hoping for Stately, too. (Honestly most of what I like about the Maxis witch aesthetic is color scheme and coat-thingies.)

2. Has Yuxi's Traveller's Robe (the shorter coat with the thigh-high boots) been converted for kids? Or is there anything for this kind of fantastical wizard kid? Again, I've got two for girls, one for boys, and the boys' option is basically gender-neutral.

3. Are there any more toddler-specific witchy meshes out there? Fairywitch and afbodywitch are... probably too much in the lacings-and-boots department for the littlest rugrats, but... toddlers. Toddlers all dressed up like their parents for no good reason other than cute.

4. I know Trapping converted the AL wizard's hat for all ages, but there's a corresponding Sims 2 Store hair called uhhh.... I forget but it's on the redheaded guy on the bottom right here. Has that been done for all ages? The guy hair isn't just a bun, so it's tricky to say 'oh yeah no he just changed his hairstyle.' (I did Digi's all-ages accessory hat in Neder's Red Mage, but it looks best with bigger hairs, you know?)

... So, yeah, effectively I am looking for Apartment Life style witchy accoutrements, mostly for menfolk and kids.

( Teasers for upcoming downloads behind the cut! )

Also, I am tinkering with the idea of, like, mesh kits? Resource packs? Like:

"Here's a director's cut of useful Medieval meshes in case you want to convert them to other ages, genders, or bodyshapes, or if you just want a mesh starter pack."

"Here are some meshes with Interesting Sleeves but historically-inadequate bodies, and some bodies they'd work well on, and/or some period portraiture or images of reconstructed garments showing how said sleeves COULD be used."

"Here are some meshes that are almost Medieval shoes and some images of the shoes they remind me of, plus some pantsless bottoms/FantasyRogue's chausses they could be stitched onto."

"Here is a Volatile texture, a Time Bomb texture, and some select guides for various parts you might want in different colors, stack the .pngs and make your own recolors of my stuff the easy way!"

"Here is a text file with the texture-referencing info for all 82 colors of that thing I uploaded; if you find/make it for another age, gender, or bodyshape, you can just copypasta!"

"Here are some hairs or outfits that have Pieces that deserve to be accessories, or accessories that are almost Medieval but need a couple of little tweaks, or some meshes (that are probably from TSM) that would be much more useful if the clothes and attached accessories were separated."

"Here is a collection of full-body tunics that would make great separates."

Useful? Weird? Convenient for inspiration? (I may have already put together a mesh kit for Things What Custom Bodyshapes Need.)