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digitalangels) wrote2022-03-13 04:26 pm
digitalangels) wrote2022-03-13 04:26 pm
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[TUTORIAL] Eye defaults
Reposting this here since apparently Livejournal doesn't allow anonymous comments anymore and could be that the site will soon disappear for good anyway. This was originally posted to tumblr and then to livejournal and now finally here too.
Here’s pretty quick and dirty tutorial about eye defaults, it only covers the 5 default colors, not creature eyes as those often are part of the skins, you can however use the same steps on Alien eyes as those are separate from skin textures. So, you need SimPE and DDS Utilities for it, set of eyes you want to turn into defaults and pre-existing set of eye defaults unless you’re willing to go hunt for the default files from your game yourself so just safe yourself from extra hassle and use existing ones. (I made template file you can grab here to use as base for this, note that it doesn’t contain eye textures so don’t toss it to your downloads folder as is unless you want all your Sims to have very creepy completely white eyes):
1. Open the eye texture you wish to use as one of your defaults in SimPE and locate Texture Image (TXTR) under the resource tree, click on that. Stuff will appear on the Resource List, click on the line and you should see the eye texture appear in the area below, if it doesn’t make sure you have “Plugin View” tab selected at the bottom. Click on Export… and save the texture somewhere where you can easily find it, it’s good idea to give it name to represent which color it will replace so you should end up with dark blue, light blue, brown, gray and green. Repeat step for all five colors.
2. Open the default file in SimPE, often they’ve been made so that all the colors show up in the same file but sometimes they are all made as separate colors, the template file I linked above contains all 5 colors in the same file. I used the template I made to hopefully make this as easy to follow as possible.
3. Right click on the first texture in the plugin view (I mean that actual texture showing up, not the name of it) and choose “build DXT…” (If it’s not showing up you haven’t installed the DDS Plugins at all, they’re installed wrong or you didn’t restart SimPE after installing them, see here for help on installing the plugins)
Note that each texture mentions the color name in its name:
dkblue = darkblue, dkbrown = darkbrown and ltblue = lightblue, the other two should be obvious enough that they’re gray and green.
4. New window will pop up
Click on the “open Image…” and choose the right color of your extracted textures
if your files show up in the same order as in my pictures the first one should be dark blue. Choose the correct texture, then set the Format into DXT3 or DXT5 (either is fine but not DXT1 or you'll end up with glitchy bad textures!) and Sharpen to None. Nothing else should be touched, then just hit the Build button, give SimPE a moment to do its thing and you should see the texture appear in the plugin view.
5. Click on the Commit button and notice how the uuface-eye-dkblue_txt text above turns into cursive and a window will pop up telling that the changes were committed, click OK on it and then move to the next texture and repeat from step 3 forward until you have them all. Save the file, toss it to your downloads (after removing other eye default files and clearing the caches and possibly thumbnails) and test it out. All should be good and you now have new default eyes!
Extra tip: If you don’t want your default eyes to be the five default colors you can literally use any color you want on them, just know that brown and dark blue are dominant colors and light blue, green and gray are recessive (unless you have for example a mod to change that) So if you want your Sims to have for example pink eyes instead of blue ones you can totally do so. If you want them all to be different hues of green eyes you can do that too! Or maybe 5 different Alien eyes and no normal eyes at all? Totally possible. Go wild, it’s your game.
Here’s pretty quick and dirty tutorial about eye defaults, it only covers the 5 default colors, not creature eyes as those often are part of the skins, you can however use the same steps on Alien eyes as those are separate from skin textures. So, you need SimPE and DDS Utilities for it, set of eyes you want to turn into defaults and pre-existing set of eye defaults unless you’re willing to go hunt for the default files from your game yourself so just safe yourself from extra hassle and use existing ones. (I made template file you can grab here to use as base for this, note that it doesn’t contain eye textures so don’t toss it to your downloads folder as is unless you want all your Sims to have very creepy completely white eyes):
1. Open the eye texture you wish to use as one of your defaults in SimPE and locate Texture Image (TXTR) under the resource tree, click on that. Stuff will appear on the Resource List, click on the line and you should see the eye texture appear in the area below, if it doesn’t make sure you have “Plugin View” tab selected at the bottom. Click on Export… and save the texture somewhere where you can easily find it, it’s good idea to give it name to represent which color it will replace so you should end up with dark blue, light blue, brown, gray and green. Repeat step for all five colors.
2. Open the default file in SimPE, often they’ve been made so that all the colors show up in the same file but sometimes they are all made as separate colors, the template file I linked above contains all 5 colors in the same file. I used the template I made to hopefully make this as easy to follow as possible.
3. Right click on the first texture in the plugin view (I mean that actual texture showing up, not the name of it) and choose “build DXT…” (If it’s not showing up you haven’t installed the DDS Plugins at all, they’re installed wrong or you didn’t restart SimPE after installing them, see here for help on installing the plugins)
Note that each texture mentions the color name in its name:
dkblue = darkblue, dkbrown = darkbrown and ltblue = lightblue, the other two should be obvious enough that they’re gray and green.
4. New window will pop up
Click on the “open Image…” and choose the right color of your extracted textures
if your files show up in the same order as in my pictures the first one should be dark blue. Choose the correct texture, then set the Format into DXT3 or DXT5 (either is fine but not DXT1 or you'll end up with glitchy bad textures!) and Sharpen to None. Nothing else should be touched, then just hit the Build button, give SimPE a moment to do its thing and you should see the texture appear in the plugin view.
5. Click on the Commit button and notice how the uuface-eye-dkblue_txt text above turns into cursive and a window will pop up telling that the changes were committed, click OK on it and then move to the next texture and repeat from step 3 forward until you have them all. Save the file, toss it to your downloads (after removing other eye default files and clearing the caches and possibly thumbnails) and test it out. All should be good and you now have new default eyes!
Extra tip: If you don’t want your default eyes to be the five default colors you can literally use any color you want on them, just know that brown and dark blue are dominant colors and light blue, green and gray are recessive (unless you have for example a mod to change that) So if you want your Sims to have for example pink eyes instead of blue ones you can totally do so. If you want them all to be different hues of green eyes you can do that too! Or maybe 5 different Alien eyes and no normal eyes at all? Totally possible. Go wild, it’s your game.