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Heeheehee...
Five down and, what, twenty-three to go? I'm still determined to have my fantasy neighborhood. For what I have in mind, it would be far easier for the characters to have meshed-on ears like this than showerproof ear accessories that would require me to only use hairs that would cover up the human ears (or edit every single template and age in Milkshape to make the ears flat against the head, and edit off the ear details on every skintone I intend to use. blah.) And making all of the built families in Bodyshop where this elf ear template is available is all well and good, but the townies and NPCs wouldn't have them, and unless I constantly made new batches of families outside of the game, which is a little too matchmaker for me, the ears would eventually be bred out.
So, I'm making a set of templates where everyone has the ears (except the aliens, who will have Fantasyrogue's Wolf ears.) The faces are a blend of Fantasyrogue's Rhys ears, Selzi's defuglified Maxis-based faces, and the templates AlfredAskew has made thus far, since I want her better mouth positionings. I'm adjusting her mouths to match the other templates as much as I can. The human infant template with the 02Base faces has pointy ears, too.
The usefulness of this to others who don't want a whole neighborhood of elves is being able to choose any of the 28 or so faces you want to have the ears in addition to the usual elf template, or you could go half and half with elves and humans, or I could make a template of the elf face with human ears so whichever face you choose can be the only elf, or conversely, eliminate the elf ears from a realistic neighborhood altogether. Man, there are more options to this than I originally thought.
It's been time consuming but otherwise simple so far, so thank goodness for that. If I can keep doing five per night, I'll be done in a week :D And after having to edit the infant ears, editing faces in Milkshape doesn't seem quite as scary as it did before. YAY.
edit [02/21/110] -- 'kay, things have hit a snag or two.
First, of the templates I made, at least half had modified versions of mouths from other templates that AlfredAskew had made in Milkshape; a couple of them had entire faces, but with pointy ears. It completely escaped my attention that Alfred asks that people do not do this very thing, unless it's only for personal use. So, since I'll never remember which have her parts and which don't, sharing them is out.
Second, this may not be a bad thing. Something is currently causing sims to throw age-related errors in my game. I don't know yet if it's related to my templates or to some hack I might've recently downloaded, but even in debug mode, it's pretty debilitating. It hasn't caused an outright crash, but it's certainly stopped my game from responding while the lot is still loading and there's no way to exit without ending the whole program through the Task Manager. If I don't know what's going on, it wouldn't be right to chance inflicting the same pain in the butt on others.
So, it doesn't look like the templates will come to any sort of fruition. However, I did finish seventeen skintones that will still work, regardless of your sims' ear shapes. I have Bodyshop pictures of those and hope to get them up sometime this century. Templates aside, I can and still hope to make accessories for tails, wings and horns, as well as hair recolors using Pooklet colors altered to fit specific 'family' needs; some need maybe half desaturation, and they'll be a perfect match.
--sanity ends here--
But why would everyone need ears like this in a single neighborhood, you may ask? Well, as a full-blown expansion on an idea I had a short while back in the Sims Confessional: a whole neighborhood full of... My Little Ponies.
I had a ton of them, growing up, and seeing some pony art on dA, especially the work Dizziness has been doing as I greatly admire her talent, has made me wistful for my collection. A couple of years ago, I got all of my ponies out of storage, cleaned them up, and put them on eBay. We're talking at least fifty G1 ponies that I've had since they were each new-on-card, and they sold to a collector in Japan for just shy of $400. That was pretty awesome, not gonna lie. That collection took up a hell of a lot of room, to be equally honest, so all they'd do if I'd kept them or had them back is stay in a box or something. BUT... I have my sims. And through my sims, I can have all of my ponies, plus the ones I always wanted but could never find, and they'll all fit right inside my laptop. Technology is truly wonderful.
And one of the best parts is that I can make virtually everything I need, myself. This of course means I have yet to make my list of about twenty skintones I need, and although the ears are taken care of, I'll still need to make showerproof tail accessories (with alpha-editable bows, 'cause this shit is going for the absurd,) and better unicorn horns than my first attempt. I suppose in the meantime, I could just add a Last Unicorn-like star to the foreheads, and just use wing tattoos on the pegasus families. But regardless, while all of that is still going on, I can get started with some temporarily-tailless earth ponies.
From:
About one of those snags...
"In general, I do not approve of using my templates to make new templates. Getting these in and out of Milkshape is laborious.
HOWEVER.
I want you to make new templates using this one. I didn't make it, I just fixed it. PLEASE, make new templates using my fixes. I want them."
I'm sorry if I sound like a know-it-all or some obnoxious prick (I don't mean to!). You've probably already seen that notice and decided that your project falls under the jurisdiction of what she doesn't want her templates used for, but on the off-chance that you didn't see the notice, please reconsider sharing them (once you've got them all fixed up to your satisfaction, of course). I've been eagerly awaiting an update on this project, since these templates are almost exactly what I want for my own game. If you would like someone to help you test them out to see if the error is in the template files or a hack conflict or something, I would be more than willing to help. Regardless, I'm still looking forward to at least seeing your new skins (I'm such a sucker for unnatural skins) whenever you find the time to get the stuff up. Thank you for churning out high quality stuff for the game and, you know, actually caring about what someone's CC policy says. Um, I'm going to stop right here before my comment gets any more long and rambly (too late?), but just know that you're totally awesome ^.^
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Re: About one of those snags...
And if you wouldn't mind, I'd really like someone's help in testing the faces to see how/if they work. I can't see any reason why they wouldn't, but double-checking a project like this can't hurt. I do have three or four pictures of them working in a tester lot, for teen through elder and on NPCs, but the chance and variety of another's game would be good to see. If you'd still like to test them, I can zip up a folder for beta-ing. These errors are the ones I kept getting, just so you'd know what to look out for. CAS had no problems; the errors kept coming up when the residential lot was loading.
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Re: About one of those snags...
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Re: About one of those snags...
(And if anyone else swoops in on the link, BE WARNED: they are being tested. This is not a final release. Yet.)
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Re: About one of those snags...
From:
Re: About one of those snags...
I thought it best to reinstall TS2 cleanly since I just upgraded to Windows 7, and had the presence of mind to test the templates out in a completely vanilla environment. I got no errors whatsoever, even starting with a blank neighborhood, so I think another update may be called for. w00t! A public beta should be doable as soon as I make sure sharing's alright with Fantasyrogue, as Alfi has kindly given permission ^^ I also got the Bodyshop shots of the skintones and masks cropped down, and ought to get my butt in gear for that, as well.