#and there's a color swatch!! let's gooooo

[opheliasprings]

eyeliner set 03

anotha one. it ain’t much, but it’s free!

8 swatches (4 black, 4 colored)

teen - elder

female frame

may look different on certain eye shapes

change the hue on the red swatch to have different colors!! and if you encounter any issues please let me know :)

download: curseforge | sfs

i forgot to add a custom thumbnail when i first uploaded on curseforge, but the file is now updated! so if anyone downloaded before, perhaps should consider redownloading.

[nattikay]

Me: Oh yeah, aliens are also a thing in the Sims...eh, well, that’s not really my cup of tea; I probably won’t do anything with them

Sims: Oh hey btw when you make an alien Sim you can make both their alien form as well as a human disguise form

Me: ...

...

...

...OK FINE TIME TO MAKE AJA AND KREL LET’S GOOOOO

So their human forms turned out to be pretty straightforward. I think they came out pretty decent nearly right off the bat! :)

Their Akiridion forms, on the other hand...those were tricky, as they involved a lot of custom content. And when I say custom content I mean literally MADE BY ME. ^^” I hand-altered pretty much every part of their Akiridion forms in some way or other.

Their hair is still a default EA mesh, but I wasn’t satisfied with the default color swatches so I had to go in and custom-recolor them.

I do have some CC I downloaded a while ago for Akiridion eyes, but for some reason custom eye colors don’t show up as selectable swatches in my game despite being in my mods folder, so I had to make some of my own...in the “face paint” category rather than the “eye color” category. But hey it worked! So fyi for anyone interested, you CAN override eye colors with face paint; I’d recommend that route if you wanna make some custom eyes o3o 

(theoretically you could also use this technique to have your Sim change eye color with each outfit, if you want!)

The clothes were the trickiest part. EA does have a glowing “alien suit” that’s pretty cool, but it only comes with green glow. At first I tried to just use that suit with a custom swatch for blue glow, which did actually work (looked a little rougher than the official swatch but was still functional, glow and all):

(screenshot taken before fixing the eyes, obviously ^^”)

...but I still wasn’t quite satisfied with the overall aesthetic. It would be ok for an oc but didn’t really look enough like Aja and Krel to me. But what else could I do? I’m not good enough at modeling in Blender to create my own custom mesh for the outfits, and I couldn’t think of any EA full-body outfits that had the right shape I could recolor....

...UNLESS....

...what if I just painted it directly onto their skin as a “tattoo” like I do for custom fur patterns on the furry mod?!

This was a good start, but of course under normal circumstances Sims aren’t allowed to be “naked”; even if you remove all the clothes you can in CAS it’ll still give them non-removable underwear in its place. In order for the tattoo idea to work properly, I had to find a way around that as the game wouldn’t recognize the “tattoo” as clothes and try to make me put a different outfit on top of it.

So what I did was grab some skintight swimsuits and just...deleted the diffuse texture (as well as specular/shadow/etc maps), effectively rendering the swimsuit invisible in-game. So as far as the code is concerned, they are technically clothed...it’s just invisible so you can see under it without triggering the default underwear...and IT WORKED!!

They’re not perfect, you can definitely see where I didn’t quite line up the UVs right, but I think it’s a pretty darn good start! 

At the moment they’re using the exact same texture, based on Aja; I know Krel’s outfit design in the show is slightly different than his sister’s BUT I wasn’t sure if the technique would work and didn’t want to waste time making two separate nonfunctional textures, so I just used Aja’s as the test. Now that I know it works, though, I’ll go back and make a proper one for Krel later. For now they’ll just have to match haha.

Aja is also sporting @zaneida-and-sims4​’s Angor Rot style legs, cuz I thought it was a bit closer to the show, even if it caused some more issues with the texture lining up. I tried to give them to Krel as well, but for some reason it wouldn’t show up as an option for him. Sorry Krel, you’ll have to stick with regular human legs. ^^; If it makes you feel better, they don’t work on Blinky either (I would be tempted to wonder if maybe they only work on females were it not for the fact that they DID work on NotEnrique...oh well).

I did also experiment with a mod that allowed for extra arms, HOWEVER the arms were basically just an accessory and didn’t actually have any animation on them. While they would cool in screenshots, in-game it just looked really distractingly stiff and awkward, so I ultimately opted for just two arms. 

Varvatos Vex is not currently in the game; I MIGHT add him in later but if I do he’ll be a dog like Aarrrggh. We’ll see though.

So that’s that! I probably won’t play much from the perspective of this house directly, but I look forward to finding them out and about in the world... 👀