Weekend Project Post

[ex_pooklet817]

Was sick for the better part of the day yesterday and cold meds do some hilarious things to your priorities, let me tell you. So it looks like our first Saturday Project Post will be on a, er, Sunday.

So here's how this is going to work: every Saturday, a mod will make a post with themed threads that members can reply to and discuss in. We've picked some themes to start but depending on what direction the posts take, threads may be modified or added.

See the starter comments below to get an idea of the format, and comment away! If you have any questions or want to discuss something not covered by the main threads, reply here!

Comments

General Sims Chatter

[ex_pooklet817]

How was your week in sims? TELL US ALL ABOUT IT IN THIS THREAD. We would like to know about your new legacy heir or your conquer of that mesh with which you were doing battle!

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

Ok I will go second.
I finally started a new neighborhood because it's ~summer~ and I can actually play the game now.. but I've got no idea what to do with it. Also I suck at building and um... 8D

Re: General Sims Chatter

[ex_pooklet817]

I like to look at pictures of real places and then smush them together into a single location for my neighborhoods. 8D My legacy hood is based in part on Bo-Kaap. 8D

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

I do that sometimes, too. And other simmer's pictures. Everything still ends up boxy with a shit ton of trees everywhere, but it works. 8D

And I love what you've done with that newsea hair. I wish I could help. I can't stand hairs with built-in accessories. D:

Re: General Sims Chatter

[ex_pooklet817]

I have a few standard house shapes I build but beyond that, yeah, everything's a fucking box. :[ I need to get into the habit of downloading lots.

SAME. Which is why I carved that shit off. But I am crap at age converting hair. CONUNDRUM.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

Me too! Then I try to go ~outside the box~ but then it's an even bigger box with a bunch of mini boxes and it's JUST TERRIBLE.

I can't even find any tutorials on it. D: But I'm guessing the hardest part would be scaling it down and fitting it to the scalp-thingamajig?

Re: General Sims Chatter

[ex_pooklet817]

I tend to make boxes with, like, one diagonal wall at a corner. And then another box tacked on for a tiny, useless room. ~CREATIVE~

Yeah. I can just never get it to look right and I'm not comfortable enough with the process to do it without managing to cause a thousand billion errors, throw a hissy, and then just leave it forever untouched. 8-x

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

Yeah. Not only do I suck at making structures, but I always use the same exact doors and windows for almost every single houses. I wish I could steal other people's game sometimes. :C

You'd think there would be an easier way to do meshing stuff by now. I don't understand how can peggy and newsea and other meshers can come out with stuff in a matter of days. I understand it gets easier with practice, but I always manage to screw stuff up! And this is with basic body meshing.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[ex_pooklet817]

OH MAN ME TOO ME TOO. I have been hoarding links for more build stuff but I am crap at keeping things organized so they are all over and ultimately not very helpful. :(

Yeah idek, man. Maybe they use a different program, or have elaborate robots that do all the work for them? WHO KNOWS.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

I feel your pain man. But what about neighborhoods? I actually download pre-decorated neighborhoods half the time. I really want my game to look cool, but am too lazy to do so.

THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[ex_pooklet817]

I haven't done that because then it feels like it isn't ~my neighborhood~ you know?

Re: General Sims Chatter

[hat_plays_sims]

So I'm working on this new Servo default, right, and I've got Body Shop sitting open so I can muck around with it, maybe start deciding where to put assorted mystic symbols. And yet instead of doing THAT, I find myself recoloring this Milano Sims headcloth (if the link doesn't work, it's on page seven of hair downloads) and working on a Pooklet'd version of Mio 0331's Juliet Hair.

This week in Simming is highly distractable. But I DID finally get the joints nice and dark on my Servo, so there's that!

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

I know exactly what you mean. Now that I a lot more free time and a little more skillz, there is so much stuff I want to do but I keep getting distracted by more stuff. :3

Do you plan to retexture or just recolor the Juliet hair?

Re: General Sims Chatter

[hat_plays_sims]

Dude, seriously. Half the things on my mental list of things to do are not on my sticky-posted list of things to do. I'm all like "Oooh I can! Yes! I WILL! Wait, no that other thing..." I'm also puttering away at a MASSIVE live.package mod that I may well release as "Live the Dream," because I'm trying to swap out the more obviously modern UI text (and things like witch names and professorial titles) with something more period.

I... half-assedly retextured the Juliet mesh-- I stole the braid texture from FR's Braided Buns and smooshed a bit of Pooklet's textures with Liquefy (alas for Photoshop 6 has no proper warp tool!) and it looks okay... Still a little dry, but okay. I think it must be a dry-looking mesh, because the textures don't look dry at all when they're flat. Normally I try very, very hard not to retexture hair myself because... well. I'm warpless.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

That sounds pretty freaking epic if I do say so myself. I didn't even know you could do that! The amount of effort you put into your stuff amazes me. D:

I'm not that great at retexturing either (I'd be a lot better if I didn't grumble and give up all the time), but I'm sure it'll look fine! :D

Re: General Sims Chatter

[hat_plays_sims]

Well, text fixes are easy-- I am WAY more confident with words than with Photoshop. Someday I'm doing all the memories, too, but there are a lot of them to sift through.

Just got everything done (well, not binned and whatnot, but colors finished). The blondes look juicier than the blacks, but dang all the browns look good in that style.

... Also, I gotta ask. Who's in your icon? If that's Lady Gaga, she looks surprisingly like Vicki Lawrence there...

Re: General Sims Chatter

[spyroeldragon]

I agree with you there, the coding and all that stuff in simPe isn't that hard, but it's usually all the stuff you're coding and etc for that's hard. Well I look forward to that! :D It'd be cool to have some different memories, because they start to get a bit repetitive after a while.

Binning is always the annoying part. Especially when there are ages to remove. >___>;;

It's actually from a parody vid-thingy of Lady Gaga, found on youtube here. :P

Re: General Sims Chatter

[hat_plays_sims]

It takes considerably longer (most of the time) to make the pretty part than to handle the SimPE work... at least for me, but I'm usually making prop defaults.

If you clone your target hair, remove the texture and property set for the unused ages, and then RE-clone it, you have a base to start from that doesn't have any wasted ages. Which is awesome cos it lets me make fewer tragic mistakes with the binning tool.

... Well, that video was certainly in the spirit of the Carol Burnett show. *snickers*

Re: General Sims Chatter

[eamcims]

I keep telling myself I'm going to start a legacy and I just never do. I want to get around to one, but I'm in the middle of another family. And I suck COMPLETELY at building and designing ANYTHING.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[ex_pooklet817]

I keep telling myself I'm going to FINISH a legacy but I never do. I think I may have to cap the Stranges off at generation 5 or 6 because the neighborhood is just getting so glitchy. :\

I feel your pain on being crap at building/designing, though.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[sheelal]

Due to hitting the damned file limit this week, I decided to start a New New Game, fresh, with a lot less custom content. Aiming for recolors and default replacements of nearly everything before I get absolutely new stuff, mainly to see if I can. Rediscovering how much bizarre Maxis clothing there is.

I had been meaning to start making public posts with this New New Game, even though it's basically a content test, but then I was an idiot and accidentally made REALLY SMALL screenshots. Not entirely given up on it, but I'll have to dig up a fractal image resizer, see how it works. Tiny screenshots BAD.

I also did the Photoshop work for a range of skins I was thinking I'd try, which I haven't gotten around to actually making into skins because... it's a Pooklet 3.0 range using Pixie Chalk as the base to make Volatile from, so that's a range of 42 skins complete. Argh. Also, some of the skins have very clear banding that I'm going to have to smooth out first. Not sure whether I'm going to geneticize them as 0 to 1 with default replacements, for a completely weird neighborhood, or do the naturals as 0 to 0.99 and the customs as 1 to 2.

Re: General Sims Chatter

[wideacrebee.livejournal.com]

So I finally managed to get my nice shiny new game started and started a VDSL for my own amusement and now every time i try to get into my legacy house the game crashes. JOY. So now i get to try to figure out whats causing it D:

I also have massively failed on keeping my game files organized right now most of the stuff I've downloaded is in a lovely folder called "Needs to be sorted" yeaaaah probably not gonna happen. Why am I so useless at this? Grr.