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Forum Resident
Original Poster
#1 Old 4th Dec 2005 at 4:36 AM
Default Modifying the default CAS faces...
First, check out the pic below.

What is it? A girl with a very strange, long nose is talking with her CAS-created father. The father is normal looking with a face chosen in the game CAS. He is also the mother (via the Insiminator.) And yet his child has a long nose.

What I did was this: I extracted and modified the Afbase mesh in CASfaces.package. Afbase is the mesh for the adult female of the "base" type (Don Lothario type faces, the second face choice in CAS). I yanked the nose out of shapet with Milkshape and replaced that mesh.

What I would LIKE to achieve is to replace some of the uglier faces in CAS with more beautiful faces. That way the townies generated in-game would be more attractive. I had hoped that changing the default meshes might give all the townies a sudden makeover, but it doesn't work that way. A copy of the mesh for each Sim's face is saved in their character file. Changes to the default meshes only show up in the faces of new CAS-made Sims. Using this approach, old townies would stay ugly, but new townies would be attractive.

Since the change was only made to the female part of the mesh, the father appears normal. But I'm puzzled about this.. How did his daughter get the modified mesh face?

That is the question I'm asking the gurus here.

At first, I thought that maybe the game was using the mesh in my downloads folder when it generated the Sim's daughter, but that didn't sound right somehow. So I REMOVED the mesh after creating the father and tried it again. Same result. (In fact, that's what you see in the picture.) To clarify this, let me slow down and explain exactly what happened.

1. The female afbase mesh was tweaked with Milkshape and placed in the Downloads folder.
2. A male of the analogous type was created in CAS and placed on a lot.
3. The game was stopped and the modified mesh was REMOVED from the Downloads folder.
4. The game was restarted.
3. The male was self-insiminated using the Insiminator.
4. The baby was grown up to an adult. The one in the pic with the weird, long nose.

At each stage of the growing up process, she has a normal nose, until she reaches the adult stage, when... KaBoom! Big nose.

So where is the mesh? It's not in downloads. The male character file only has two GMDCs for himself, neither of which are the female mesh.

What I THINK is happening: When a Sim is created in CAS, a complete copy of the meshes for both male and female, all ages, must be stored somewhere in the character file.

Is this right? And where are they stored?
Screenshots
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Inventor
#2 Old 10th Dec 2005 at 8:11 PM
Doc Doofus, do you know the basic naming process of TS2?
Forum Resident
Original Poster
#3 Old 11th Dec 2005 at 12:57 PM
The naming of Sim meshes? pu, cu, tf, tm, af, am, ef, am, etc? Yes.

However, that does not help explain this. The name of the original "default" "af" mesh that is used to create a Sim is not important after the Sim is created because copies of the "af" mesh and all its age/gender analogues (the pu, tf, tm, etc.) are being stored somewhere in the character file. So it seems to me.

How else to explain the scenario described at the top?

1. I tweak a default "af" mesh, yanking its nose using Milkshape, so I can trace it.
2. I create a new Sim in the game CAS using the tweaked default face.
3. I put the Sim on a lot.
4. I quit and DELETE the tweaked default mesh, so that the next time the game loads, the game is using only the Maxis original default meshes.
5. I restart and go back to the Sim on the lot. The Sim I created still has a tweaked face. And she's able to bear children who appear normal until they grow up to an adult of the same gender as the tweaked parent, at which time they can inherit the tweaked face.

Hmmm... Maybe I need to be more clear about what I mean by default mesh.

There are about 28 types of meshes in CASfaces.package that define the basic faces that you see in Bodyshop and in CAS. These are also the default faces that you see on Townies and NPC's. When you are in CAS, if you choose to modify a face, it will give you a choice from among these 28 faces, representing various ethnic groups and face types that Maxis included with the game.

For instance, the teenage townie Mindy Thayer, in the pink boots that everybody has in Pleasantville, has a face that the game created using the tfArchEasi group of files. Changing the tfArchEasi mesh doesn't affect Mindy Thayer, but it does affect the Mindy Thayer-type face that you see in CAS when choosing a face.

Here is an example of what I mean:
Screenshots
Test Subject
#4 Old 9th Feb 2006 at 8:36 PM
a link to a tutorial to make zombies in fotoshop....

http://www.graphics.com/modules.php...ticle&artid=177
Test Subject
#5 Old 21st Mar 2006 at 10:37 PM
Doc, did it turn out there is another place? Did you find it? Or did someone point it out to you in another thread maybe?
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