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Post by fiftymilehighclub on Sept 14, 2020 3:36:54 GMT -5
So I woke up in the middle of the night with a wild idea that won't leave me alone and I wonder if either someone's already done it or if it would be remotely feasable. Here we go:
I know it's possible to make the bassinet invisible for newborns. I know there are people who have made decorative newborns, but they aren't based on the ingame newborns. So I was wondering if it's possible to extract the ingame newborn model and turn it into a deco/accessory item, for poses and story screenshots and the like. A friend extracted the newborn object and it T-poses like any other sim, so it leads me to assume it possesses the same basic framework that any sim model has... so it should be doable, right?
The end goal I'm picturing is a set of deco (statue or clutter) and accessory (bracelet?) newborns in neutral (maybe plain white?) onesies, in the sleeping position, which can be easily recolored to fit non-default skin tones to fit basically any storytelling need.
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Post by Feyona on Sept 14, 2020 3:59:15 GMT -5
If it is possible (it might) it will be the task not for an average modder. Someone with extensive knowledge needs to look into this and there are probably not more than 10 people in the entire sims community who can do this.
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Post by fiftymilehighclub on Sept 14, 2020 4:05:19 GMT -5
Oh no, I'm fully aware of the complexity of what I'm asking. But given that here lately I've seen a lot of people making deco sims for download, I figured I'd toss my idea out into the aether and see if anybody wanted to take on the challenge.  |
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Post by simmerish20 on Sept 14, 2020 18:05:59 GMT -5
For posing, it's probably easier with scaled-down toddlers. Deco sims can easily get very cluttered in the buy menu. Plus, it's easier to add CAS elements to toddlers.
If you really want to use the infant mesh, you are going to need a rig/skeleton to pose it, or you're stuck with posing via shifting vertices around, and that's not a fun job...
From what I can see, it seems like the infant mesh does have a kind of working rig, and the joint hierarchy works, but the mesh isn't properly aligned with the joints, so that would need fixing (the rig is horizontal, the mesh is vertical, go figure). Not a completely impossible job, but the accuracy could end up being questionable, and I'm not sure if it's best to move the mesh or the skeleton (possibly the mesh - less chance of something going wrong in edit mode than in pose mode, and then you can pose it back in standing later? Not sure).
Tips: If you extract the bassinet and tick the "baby only" option in geostates, you just get the baby when opening the file in Blender, and don't have to remove the entire bassinet. The black dots over the baby's head in Blender are the joints. You can activate pose mode and activate the rig like with other non-anim meshes.
--
Posing babies is fun, though. But I mostly stick to posing TS2 babies (I used to do them via a toddler skeleton onto the infant body which created some iffy poses here and there, but now have a working infant skeleton thanks to someone who does know how to do these things. I have tried TS4 "baby-toddler" posing, but the result was kinda iffy, so I probably need a bit more practice...).
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Post by fiftymilehighclub on Sept 14, 2020 20:45:27 GMT -5
See, that's way, way more than what I'm asking. What I'm looking for is a decorative sculptural sleeping newborn, in a basic onesie, that can be either placed on a surface or set as an accessory for posing purposes, which is easily recolored for people who don't use the 3 basic skintones the current ingame newborn comes with. The resized toddlers always look a bit off to me, the limb/body/head proportions are off. I know Leo-sims made some decorative babies, but they're all either Alpha or weird-looking to me :/
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Post by simmerish20 on Sept 15, 2020 7:12:53 GMT -5
You need the skeleton for the baby to be poseable, or you're stuck with moving around the vertices. I've done that for a set of deco babies a long time ago - I made the original TS2 set Leo converted to TS4 (reason why they look a bit weird to you? Probably because they're actually TS2 babies, because they're MM there...), and back then I didn't have a working infant skeleton to work with - and let me tell you, that method was not much fun, even back when I had a proper 3D modelling program... But I have plans to revisit the project. Anyway, as you can see, baby vertical, skeleton horizontal. Of course, it's absolutely a better starting point than having no skeleton at all. For deco babies, you can move the baby mesh to approximately the place it should be before you activate pose mode, and it'll probably work fine.
EDIT: Or maybe not... Doesn't look like the body matches up with the skeleton... :/
EDIT again: Ah, here we go! Search for "baby", tick "show debug items", click the "babyGEN" item (fully black baby icon, a BG item), and extract this. It comes with the baby fully rigged and working. That should work for anyone wanting to make baby deco/accessory items. You can get the alien baby face by choosing the second option from the geometry states. You'd probably also have to fix the seams to make the baby look a bit nicer (I didn't do that here, just did a quick pose to show it's rigged and poseable).
Poseable babies (for decoration)? No problem
Some of the joints (shoulders, thighs) are a bit wonky, and the hands lack a lot of bones (as per usual with the babies), but that's EA's fault.
For the rest you just need a regular pose-to-deco tutorial (or accessory tutorial, though I don't recommend it for the sheer size of the texture needed to make the babies look halfway decent).
(PS: Haven't updated my game in a while, and I also don't have the knit pack, which is why mine extracted with the old onesies - it's possible they don't have the onesies when you extract them, but that shouldn't be a problem. Hopefully nothing has happened to the "babyGEN" file to render it useless during the update)
And... well, at first I just tested, but then I decided to have a bit of fun...
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Post by fiftymilehighclub on Sept 15, 2020 14:27:53 GMT -5
I know from talking to people who've made baby default replacements that they do extract with the vanilla onesie -- it's part of the texture on the baby, which was how they were able to replace it before. The Knitting pack just throws a new texture over top of that.
That's a good bit of info to know, I'll get in touch with some of my friends who are experienced with this stuff and see what we can come up with. I'm not a modder myself, but I am in a couple of Discords with people who are and know a couple more who specifically do poses, so maybe we can workshop something xD also that last image is hilarious thank you for it
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Post by simmerish20 on Sept 15, 2020 14:43:37 GMT -5
As long as you make this one as a deco object, it will work fine with any texture meant for infants, so any old TS4 infant outfit texture and skins (probably also knit outfit overlays) will work as long as you keep the texture dimensions. I'll see if I can do a little bit of fixing with the seams. Shouldn't be too difficult.
The "not smooth" version is exported directly from S4S.
The "smooth" version is smoothed with "remove doubles" to remove hard edges, and has a fixed hand (no idea what's up with all the chopped-off body parts in the TS4 meshes...)
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Post by fiftymilehighclub on Sept 16, 2020 3:29:43 GMT -5
Welp SFS was down when I went to download it lmao. I'll try it out tomorrow and see if somebody better with this kind of stuff than i am can figure it out. Thanks for your help!
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Post by simonim-toast on Nov 21, 2020 18:55:00 GMT -5
Welp SFS was down when I went to download it lmao. I'll try it out tomorrow and see if somebody better with this kind of stuff than i am can figure it out. Thanks for your help! Yea I did this actually before they released toddlers and there was a toddler floating around in the game files for months beforehand. I used martines PSD reworked a little to easily build your own style of baby and apply those textures to different statues of toddlers that were posed in different ways for pictures. it was really hard and a lot of people yelled at me for no reason while i was trying to help and then when I was done they released the actual toddlers and i was like WELP  it was called BYOT never finished lol just months of work but its ok I have ADHD it was fun |
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