There's Something In Your Eye - Sunday Picspam

[orikes]

I've been using the same eyes for about a year and a half. When Generation Three started college, I was still using the Maxis defaults. By the time they were having kids, I'd settled on the set I've been using sense then. They're a default set of Helaene's 3105 eyes by Corvidsomething or another. They were on MTS2, but got taken down at some point.

For the most part, I've been happy with these eyes. They weren't as heavily shaded as some, but they still looked nicer than base Maxis eyes. Still, they were shaded and some of the more cartoony animations looked really odd. There were a couple of times I went in and tried to edit images to ease the impact of these.

I'd been looking at the modified Easy/Lucky/Free set (Pithy's modifications of Phobia's modifications of Sahrah's eyes.. or something like that), but I wasn't completely happy with the color options they had for default eyes. The light blue did not match what I already had and there was just something a little odd about them.

So, this weekend, to procrastinate from writing the update, I decided to play with my eyes. And what do you do when you want to test cartoony animations on Sims eyes?





Changing eyes isn't all that difficult if you've got SimPE and a base set of defaults to work from. I basically exported all of the Helaene eyes as well as one example of the Easy/Lucky/Free eyes. I cut out the iris and pupil on the E/L/F eye, and then dropped that over the Helaene eyes. It seemed to work fairly well. After that, it was just a matter of figuring out how the best way to save it was and then test them out.

For testing, I basically grabbed five sims that have the right eye colors. Elijah for dark blue, Brody for green, Dean for light blue, Kiley for gray, and my simself for brown. I then set them to smustling, took some pictures, then quit the game. I swapped eyes, then went back in and did the same thing. Here are some of the results.



Green



Light Blue



Gray



Dark Blue



Brown

For the most part, I think I'm happy with this. It's still the same eye I've been using and when the eyes are doing non-exaggerated animations, it'll be fine. This will just help for those few times when I capture a really wild expression on a sim's face.

What do you guys think?



In other news, I took a little while last night to play the Thayers. I wanted to get Caleb to teen. I should have been writing, but I wanted to sneak in a little playing. The Thayers really won't feature in the updates all that much, so it's not as crucial to be careful with playing them too far forward. I'd like to keep them in line with the rest of the families obviously, but there was a birthday to be had!



I think he grew up pretty well. He's got Meadow's nose, but Jeremiah's mouth. He's not the cutest of the Thayer boys, but he's a good kid. Here he is, admiring Star. You'd think he would be waiting to talk with her or maybe even congratulate her for growing up hot.



You'd be wrong.

He stood there waiting for her to finish her conversation so he could noogie her. Considering the number of gnomes she's stolen from them, I'm guessing that he was waiting to dish out a little payback. He better be careful, though. She's not a girl to noogie lightly.



Another cute thing happened while I was there. Ndainye was telling me how Dwight in his home hood always zeroes in on kids. Any time he's at a family function, he finds the kids to interact with and reinforce his status as everyone's favorite uncle.

Noah wanted to sell lemonade, so I let him. The first customer... Dwight.



I also snuck a couple moments in the Parker/Thompson/Toyanaga house. It's a large house, so I've been decorating it a little at a time. While I was there, I noticed that Comet wasn't friends with her brothers or brother-in-law yet, so I had her and one of the Adrian's sit down and start chatting.

The other Adrian, not to be too far from his beloved Adrian, had to be in the same room. So he started writing in his diary. But he kept getting upset because they were in the same room as he was...

Sometimes sim coding makes my head hurt.



Finally, I leave you with a pic of Chastity bowling. I'd forgotten what kids looked like when they bowled. It's been a long time since I had a kid in a house with a bowling alley, or took kids somewhere where they could bowl. Unfortunately, it was a gutter ball for her.

In news of the update, I'm about 1/3 of the way through writing the slides. 48 out of 129. Two slides still need to be trimmed and there's one scene I'm not completely happy with, so I may try and restage part of it to get some additional pictures. Regardless, I'm expecting to get this up sometime this week.

So how are you all today? (And what do you think of the eyes?)

Comments

[sarahsuke.livejournal.com]

I adore those eyes; I would've used them for my defaults if they were actually connected with the skins I downloaded. :P

[dgjamie.livejournal.com]

Sunday Picspam FTW!

The Eyes look great. I think they're similar enough to your old eyes that the change won't be drastically noticeable and definitely have the added advantage of not having that heavy shading problem in the smustling.

Clearly Caleb hasn't outgrown the childhood stage yet. Star, he's just picking on you because he likes you ;)

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

I see a little Rhapsody in your user icon there!

I may go in and fine tune the eyes a little bit. I'd still like a slightly darker brown. Even though my eyes are more hazel brown, I find dark brown eyes more attractive and would rather look at them. :)

Actually, Caleb has negative boltage for Star. Jacob (his older brother) has a bolt for her. I'm going to try and keep them separate, though, because they are second cousins. :} Ala Holly and Finch.

[leilia.livejournal.com]

The eyes look very good. Nice job on getting them to work and of course Brody Picspam is always appreciated. ^_^

I love that Caleb was waiting to noogie Star. That is a match made in heaven... ~_^

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

That cracked me up when I saw what he had queued. I was trying to get him to chat her up because I wanted to get the kids interconnected for this generation (and with the rebuild I'm a bit behind). He had his own idea for interconnecting. I don't even remember him being that mean.

[dicreasy.livejournal.com]

The eyes look good: they're still the eyes we're used to seeing on your sims, but without the black blobs of doom appearing when they open their eyes wide.

Caleb's lovely, and it was nice to see the two Adrians and Chastity too.

I'm not too bad thanks for asking. Starting to feel more like simming, and I've been learning how to re-colour items. :)

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

The black blobs of doom drove me nuts. I can understand why some cc creators make realistic eyes with shadows and sclera like that, but those of us who actually like the animations and such suffer when we use those eyes.

Oooh. I'd love to find out what you've been recoloring.

[smoothiesims.livejournal.com]

The eyes look really good! Eyes that work when Smustling are pretty much all-purpose, so yay ^_^

Ahahahaha, the extended family will never fail to bring the awesome. I adore seeing them all.

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

Smustling eyes for the win!

There's actually some other animations that I've had problems with. Rolling their eyes is always a rough one to capture a good picture of with shadowed eyes.

[fireflower314.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I have been out of the simming loop for so long that seeing all those smustle faces was kind of startling, lol. Nice eyes, though! And oh god, the diary coding drives me insane.

[swizzasnake.livejournal.com]

Ditto on the diary coding - I'm constantly looking at my Sims thinking "well MOVE, then!" *facepalm*

Also, Orikes, the eyes look good - I don't really notice eyes all that much to be honest, it's more strange looking skins that bug me, but those look awesome in comparison.

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It always bugs me when eyes are too shadowed and do weird things with the expressive cartoony animations. I'm glad wit how these turned out.

[fireflower314.livejournal.com]

*nods* On the one hand, I wouldn't react well to, say, someone standing over me when I wrote in my diary. (Or in my case, typed in my LJ- I don't keep a handwritten diary). But if it's someone who's all the way on the other side of the room - ugh.

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

Hehe. You have been out of the loop then. Get your smustle on! :)

[profbutters.livejournal.com]

Huh. Took me a while to figure out what the problem was with the first set. I'm not very visually keen, I guess. But the second set do look better. I'm used to the bright candy colors I have, and I've thought about changing them, but they're so extreme that I really couldn't without it being really noticeable. Also, Dean Smustle eyes--whoa! Scary!

I like the way Star grew up, too.

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

I really like the Easy/Lucky/Free eyes. There are some really nice, rich colors in that set. Unfortunately, they were just too different from what I already had.

Dean does have a scary smustle face. He makes some of the funniest faces for me.

And yeah, Star is absolutely gorgeous.

[ndainye.livejournal.com]

The eyes look great :)

That's my Dwight, he shoulda been a family sim.

Noogies are all part of the stalking code, Evonne and Enrique trade noogies about as often as they make out.

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

I think if Dwight's ever in the proper position for it, I'll give him family as a secondary. It'd fit him, I think.

What's funny about Caleb stalking Star is that they have negative bolts. She and Jacob have one, but really haven't done too much other than talk.

[docnerd.livejournal.com]

I like your eye edits--it looks like you're having your cake and eating it too. TEH CAEK IS NOT A LIE.

Caleb makes me giggle. Oh, the noogies...

[katrisims.livejournal.com]

Caleb is quite a cutie. =) And heh, stalking Star to give her a nookie... Heh. Not something I would necessarily do!

The new eyes look nice. I, too, had a bit of trouble seeing what it was that you wanted rid of, but it must have been those round shadows. And they're gone. =)

[traciandrus.livejournal.com]

Star and Caleb would make a cute match. ;)

I can't see that much of a difference. But I've never really been too concerned with eyes. Either one looks nice to me.

[ahrubyblue.livejournal.com]

I think the eyes look great. They're different in all the right ways. Definitely much better for smustling and other extreme facial expressions.

Slightly randomly, I love the dark blue. It's such a pretty color.

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

The only eye color I'm not completely in love with is the brown. I'd still like the brown to be a little darker. I may still play with them a little bit to try and fine tune them a teensy bit more. I also want to add in creature eyes that have the same concept behind them.