#iCad does hair

[dramallamadingdang]

Y’know....Some of the Maxis 3t2 hairstyles are really cute -- Like I really like the one on the left -- and they’re nice and low-poly and all that...but the transparency issues they generally have drive me batshit insane. :P

Yeah, I know colored scalps will help in some cases, and I do use them, but in some cases they just won’t help. Like with the style on the left, half the head is sort of half-shaved, as if it had been previously shaved but is now growing back in in a patchy, uneven way. Using a colored scalp would make the style lose that effect, which is pretty much the whole point of the style. *sigh*

Ah well...In other news, only four more male hairstyles to go for default retexturing! :D When I’m done with them, I’ll share the male ones in one big batch. I was going to wait until I had the female/unisex ones done, too, but I still have about 100 more of those to do....Yeah, I think I’ll share the males ones when they’re done and the others when they’re done. 

THEN I’ll make and share some new defaults. Like, for hairs where I disliked all of the existing ones. Or where none exist at all (I guess people like the European-style Santa hats or something? Well, I don’t because because I don’t do real-world holidays in my game, and it’s a waste to have those hairs as-is in my game, so...out they go!) Or where the one(s) I liked was/were way too high-poly for what I want in my game.

Then maybe I’ll go even more insane and do some specialized clothing defaults for the pseudo-Amish. *headdesk*

[siofrasims]

New Colors

So, I did something completely unnecessary and created a set of color palettes. Each of the 5 (!) sets has 13 colors each, making for a total of 65 colors, but it’s not as much as it sounds, because you certainly won’t use every color for every thing. 

Palettes 1-4 are entirely of my own making, but I used other people’s stuff for the Woods palette. I saw no reason to reinvent the wheel on that one.

Disclaimer: these are colors that I like, that I do/would use. I got sick of downloading sets of recolors, then never using 2/3rds of them. There has been no attempt made to make these cover all bases. But, I think they get pretty close. There’s at least one representative of the major colors in each palette, but different palettes skew toward one end of the spectrum or the other.

Disclaimer 1b: Most recolors I do from now on are going to be in one of these palettes.

Disclaimer 2: As much as I admire creators who can make actions, I am very happy just using hex codes and fiddling. Actions sometimes don’t treat a texture well, and it’s not like I do recolors particularly complicatedly anyway.

Quick download link

Included in the link are the same previews below, but larger; more basic previews with no pattern (for those of you who like to color pick); and lists of hex codes. All of the patterned previews were created with a base of the color grid, then I laid a texture over it in a multiply/soft light pair in photoshop, so you can see how it interacts with depth, and then a color layer on top to make sure the colors stay roughly true.

Anyway, I ramble when I’m tired, pics after the cut!

First up is the Brights swatch: (all swatches are downsized to make posting easier. Full sizes are in the download)

Great for kids rooms, or those of you who hate your eyeballs. This is a pretty heavy texture on them, but this is the final result I wanted. Super bright reds like Fire Engine (or Flammable or Aelia’s Retro Red) tend to wash the color out, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t like actions. Needs more fiddling!

Next up is the Darks set:

Deep, rich jewel tones. Makes me think of an old, high back library chair. Or really heavy curtains. Stuff that gathers dust if you don’t use it well. This set often needs color correction after a texture is applied.

Next is the Mutes:

Stuff that almost certainly does have dust on it, or have faded with time. Or just for people who like toned down, calmer colors.

Last of the colorful swatches, the Pastels:

Pretty self-explanatory. Soft, spring-like colors. Good for eyeshadow, nurseries, and fertility rituals. Orchid can definitely get bright, as can Spearmint. Champagne is not really champagne-colored, so pretend it’s pink champagne.

And, finally, the Woods, shown here on Goat’s Latia wood:

I love Shasta’s Pirate woods, but they can get a bit... dim, I guess. Which I often love, but I need some more brightness. iCad’s woods are rich and lovely, but they can often look too similar. So, hey, best of both worlds! (I love the variety in using Pooklet’s hair colors, but the blacks all look the same, and it’s just way too large of a set. This is still pretty big, but it’s better.) Also threw in the Ikea Malm Birch, because it’s a nice blonde wood.

Edit May 27: I replaced Aelia’s Latte with Curious B’s ACYL Caramel, because Latte and Twig were turning out too similar in game. The download link has been updated.

As you can see, I like theming my colors. I certainly wouldn’t use all of them on... anything, really, let alone everything. 

Well, that’s it. Here’s another download link, to save you scrolling back up.

[smoljoly]

tagged by @joly-and-the-satellites​!! ☄️

1. Are you named after someone? 

no one in particular i believe!!

2. When is the last time you cried? 

at a local play that i watched on friday lmao 

3. Do you like your handwriting?

 no it looks like chicken intestines its disgusting 

4. What is your favorite lunch meat?

what is lunch meat

5. If you were another person, would you be friends with you?

honestly no im too extra and annoying to hang out with but maybe!! since no one else likes les mis irl so maybe i’ll be desperate and be friends with myself?

6. Do you use sarcasm?

wots that??? 

7. Do you have your tonsils?

HAh funny story so i had to get my tonsils removed because of nasal issues and whatnot and after my operation everyone was like “YOU CAN EAT AS MUCH ICE CREAM AS YOU CAN! :-)” and that’s when i found out that im lactose intolerant so

8. Would you bungee jump? 

 yes please i love death and almost dying 😩💯

9. What is your favorite kind of cereal?

corn flakes or frosties!!

10. Do you untie your shoes when you take off your shoes?

no im terrible!!

11. Do you think you’re a strong person? physically? no. mentally and spiritually and emotionally? also no to all of them. gotta catch them all

12. What is your favorite ice cream flavor?

cookie dough or caramel or earl gray!! come fight me toby

13. What is the first thing you notice about people?

if they have the same sense of humour as me tbh :-)

14. Red or pink?

yes.

15. What is the least favorite physical thing you like about yourself?  

pm me for a list ;;-)))

16. What color pants and shoes are you wearing now?

uhm pastel blue and no shoes so

17. What was the last thing you ate?

fried chicken and rice. mmm

18. What are you listening to right now?

silence? i guess?

19. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?

the white crayon. the one nobody uses.

20. Favorite smell?

the smell of people’s shampoo or perfume when they walk by tbh is that weird oh god i made that weird

21. Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?

i called my mum to ask her to pick me up i think?

22. Favorite sport to watch?

does haikyuu!! count

23. hair color?

 very very dark brown or black. 

24. eye color?

very very dark brown or black. 

25. Do you wear contacts?

they creep me out tbh so no!!

26. Favorite food to eat?

chicken rice with milo!!

27. Scary movie or comedy? comedy, but not like slapstick comedy? 

28. last movie you watched?

im not sure? i don’t watch a lot of movies! 

29. What color of shirt are you wearing? 

my shirt match my pants so like pastel blue as well?

30. Summer or winter

ITS E T E R N A L  S U M M E R HERE SAVE ME FROM THIS FIERY HELL WINTER PLEASE

31. Hugs or kisses

,,, yes

32.What book are you currently reading? 

a selection of plays by a local playwright!! 

33. Who do you miss right now?

all of my internet friends i want to meet yall so badly ;(

34. What is on your mouse pad?

 i dont use mouse pads!!

35. What is the last program you watched? 

rewatching b99 probably?

36. What is the best sound? 

when any enjolras goes “AT THE BARRICADES OF FREEDOM”

37. Rolling Stones or the Beatles? 

 beatles? i wasn’t exposed to a lot of rolling stones as a kid so 

38. What is the furthest you have ever traveled?

europe!

39. Do you have a special talent? 

uh 

40. Where were you born? what is this supposed to mean??

tagging @phantaysia,  @usarii, @drasticmagpie, @marshmallowessence, @brohorel and @foolishly-fond!! :-) 

[michellemee0-blog]

Skin As Well As Hair Care, Fashion Jewelry, Physical Body Fine Art, As Well As Fashion trend

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[dramallamadingdang]

Warp Factor 5, Mr. Sulu.

[dramallamadingdang]

My very own new hair texture! I know it's not going to appeal to probably anyone else's tastes because it is neither Maxis-match (or, actually it kind of is, literally, but not in the way that people now think of that term) nor Pooklet-type, but it is exactly what I want for my own game, so I'm very excited. :) Its features:

1) Color variation included in the texture itself for highlights/lowlights.

2) Stranded-but-rough overall texture for a more realistic but not-shiny appearance in-game. Items 1 and 2 are actually what Maxis textures have:

...but they're much...I dunno...lower-res, maybe, and the meshes are mapped such that the textures just end up looking stretched and blurry rather than rough.

3) Shine/shadow are not part of the texture at all. This makes using the texture on any hair much easier because you don't have to fiddle to make the highlights hit in the right spots. In fact, if there's no warping needed and shine/shadow isn’t desired, this can just be plopped in and then the alpha will cut out of it what it will. Quick and easy.

Shine/shadow, if desired, can be added by painting in white/black on layers on top of the texture and then using an appropriate layer blend to blend the white/black with the texture and desired hair color in a more realistic way. That way, you can also custom-paint the size/intensity/placement of shine/shadow that you want. The pics above have both highlight and shadow painted on to add shape and realistic shine.

4) Works well on any length hair, straight or wavy/curly, though of course it loses some detail when stretched on very long hairs.

The texture itself looks like this:

And for anyone who might be interested, there's a 1024x1024 grayscale PNG that you can download and play with here. Also, there's a PSD (if you want to see/fiddle with the layers) here. Some more "techy" info is under the cut, mostly meant for @furbyq, since we’ve been talking about this a little in comments, but that might be of interest to anyone who might want to try to make their own hair textures from scratch.

This started life as @zeusar's textures but is unrecognizable as that now. They proved too...straight/smooth/simple, I guess, for the look I wanted but of all the existing textures it had the most potential to become what I wanted, with editing. So, I decided to play with it in Photoshop to see if I could make what I wanted.

At the base of this is three copies of Zeusar's texture on different layers that were each heavily edited and warped and had some hand-painted bits added in different ways and that were then blended together with layer blends to create a wavy underlayer. Those layers were then merged into one layer and its opacity reduced to 65% (over a floodfilled-white layer) to mute the overall effect. Over that merged layer is a layer created with Photoshop's "Fibers" filter with some additional Gaussian, monochromatic noise added, which is blended with the edited-Zeusar layer with a Multiply layer blend. This adds roughness, more chaotic color variation, and some verticality to smooth out the waviness of the Zeusar layer a little. Over that is a simple layer painted in a medium-gray on my Wacom tablet with a custom hair brush that I made. It creates some thinner but more-defined and mostly-straight stranding and is set with a Multiply layer blend and ~50% opacity.

In addition to all of this there are a few Curves, Levels, and Brightness/Contrast adjustment layers interspersed throughout that adjust some or all of the layers, mostly to enhance high/lowlights and to make it so that the results of color actions are about the right color...although I confess I'm not excessively fussy about that. :)

So, yeah...For folks who are or might like to mess with making hair textures, that's essentially what I did to make this one.

[dramallamadingdang]

Why Checking Polycounts is Important: Reason #8,452

The hair on the left? ~6K polys

The hair on the right? ~21K polys

Which one looks better/is more detailed? Well, I suppose that’s a subjective decision, but me? I’m gonna go with the lower-poly one.

*sighs deeply and adds another hair to the “make a new default” list since the 21K-poly one is the only one linked on the Default Database* 

[dramallamadingdang]

This hair is kinda hilarious:

I mean, I’m all for a good beehive, having been born in the 60s and all, but that looks like she’s got a hair-wrapped cantaloupe sitting on her head. I mean, I have enough hair on my head for five people, at least, and it’s currently waist-length, but I don’t think even I could manage a beehive that big...

BUT! It’s relatively low-poly (~6K) and my texture looks good on it, so...giant beehive it is! :D

[dramallamadingdang]

This is probably my favorite male hair, ever. :) (Lapiz Lazuli’s “Blue.”) So happy it looks good with my new hair texture on it. (That isn’t always the case with really short hairs.)

In fact, I kinda love all Lapiz hairs. Yeah, they’re kind of stupidly-high-poly for short hairs (IIRC, this one is ~14K, which is ridiculous), but...I find I don’t really care, in the end. They look good, they seem to look good with most Sim faces, and, for the most part, they are what I consider to be “normal” male hair styles. Meaning, they’re generally not anime/j-pop/k-pop kind of styles but styles that a non-pretty-boy average-joe-on-the-street over the age of, say, 30 would be likely to wear. It’s not that I have anything against hairs that aren’t that -- I love pretty boys and pretty-boy hair, too -- but it’s nice to have other kinds of styles, and there really aren’t all that many of them, especially not many that look...well, good. 

Sooooooo, since I have a (steadily growing) list of hairs for which I don’t like any of the existing defaults for various reasons (Too low-poly for my textures to look good on because the textures are too “crunchy,” or they have hats and I’m really not fond of hairs with hats, or they’re too high-poly for my preferences, or I just plain don’t like the styles, etc., etc.) so I will need to make some entirely new ones, eventually...Yeah, I’m gonna use all of Lapiz’s that haven’t yet been made into defaults...  

[dramallamadingdang]

In which iCad spends hours of effort for not much of a difference. LMAO. It looks a little better and probably as good as it can be without editing the mesh -- fuller overall, which this style definitely needs, and the hairline is a little better -- but I’m not sure it was worth...um, two hours of effort. :) Still, with all this practice I’ve been getting, I’m getting really good at painting swatches of hair, so there’s that, at least. And I still like my new textures, too. Which is good because usually I start to not like them after retexturing a dozen or so hairs/defaults.

[dramallamadingdang]

Me = Forever trying and failing to create a realistic-ish but not super-shiny, shampoo-commercial-type hair texture because that's what I really, really, reaaaaally want for my game but it doesn't really exist and if I ever succeed in making one I'll retexture defaults with such a texture for every single Maxis hair for my own use if nothing else.

After many, many failures, this one might actually have some potential. It’s just the texture plopped as-is on the hair, no strategic placement or anything and no shine/depth painted on yet.

Looks like this in the texture for that hair:

[dramallamadingdang]

Yeeeeeeeep, I’m a-likin’ this. Not gonna get too excited, though, because now I gotta see if it’ll work on long hair. That’s always the thing that shoots me down. :p

[dramallamadingdang]

This hair has a...um...interesting?....hairline? LOL

I’m trying not to get bogged down in alpha-editing these defaults I have when retexturing them, but...Yeah, this one needs a liiiiiittle help, I think.

[dramallamadingdang]

Big reply for Strangetomato. :)

strangetomato replied to your post “Reply time! :)”

The early Maxis-Match hairs used the Maxis textures or attempted to replicate them. Neena/Ninika/Summerdream sims is (to me) the best example of beautifully hand-painted textures that match the look of the game. And Simgaroop textures are based on hers, though from a single straight section of her texture, to simplify the recolouring process. (cont. ...)

I'd say Remi's texture is the only truly flat texture (though on that note, they made a newer texture with more contrast, similar to Maxis, which nobody seems to use), and Simgaroop's Neena edit has quite a bit of added shine (possibly from Pooklet? But toned down). The colours, well... I think that's the part of the Maxis hair that makes it more cartoony. And MM hairs are fairly faithful in that regard. Colour is very subjective, of course. :)

It's similar to comparing the original Maxis skins to most MM skins, which make the make the skin very smooth, while the Maxis skin has a lot of fine details, like forehead wrinkles and so on. (Okay, I'm done now. Sorry, very chatty. :P)

Yeah, I was speaking in more general terms -- for brevity, mostly -- but there is certainly much variation in the different "Maxis-match" hair textures that people have made over the years. That being said, I'm not really familiar with really old ones, since I started playing in 2008, but the "modern" ones do tend to all have a similar theme: Little or at least much more diffuse shine, fine strands, perfectly straight, generally little contrast which translates to not a lot of color variation within the hair in-game. Some of course have more more or less of one or all of these characteristics. On the other side, realistic textures -- outside of say specialty ones like Nymphy's wavy one -- also generally have the very same characteristics, except when it comes to shine. The main difference between "realistic" and "Maxis-match" seems to me to be the amount and intensity of shine that's integrated into the textures. There's a subtle spectrum within the Maxis-match ones and then in realistic ones the shine just goes very intense and, often, very defined rather than the more diffuse shine that Maxis-match textures have, if they have any at all.

For my own purposes, I wanted absolutely ZERO built-in shine. I'd go so far as to say that shine is my make-or-break thing. I want some shine because some shine is realistic and I am at heart a more-realistic player  -- No one has perfectly matte hair -- but I want it diffuse and not stripey (which Pookleted hairs often are). Diffuse shine is realistic, which is a point in MM's favor for me, but for me Maxis-match hairs don't have enough shine intensity. So, I’ve pretty much always used Pookleted hairs. Even though I’ve never been completely happy with them, I like how they look more than I like how MM hairs look. My dissatisfaction with them is mostly shine that sits on the hair in entirely wrong places, in addition to intermittently-intense “stripey” shine which just doesn’t look right. I tried making some of my own retextures with Pooklet swatches to fix it...and then I realized WHY the problem exists. :) The built-in shine makes it pretty hard (and sometimes impossible) to make the shine hit the right places on a given hair. So, it makes sense to me to not have ANY inherent shine in the textures themselves but rather to paint those things separately so that each hair has shine in the right places with the right intensity, without having to fiddle around stretching/shrinking texture swatches to try to make it work. Painting shine separately seems FAR easier to me than doing that -- It's just a stroke or two on a separate layer with a big, soft-edged brush and then Gaussian blurring the stroke(s) a bit and then applying a layer blend and then maybe reducing opacity a bit, depending on the hair color -- but maybe I'm alone in that thinking, I dunno.

Anyway, I wanted zero, zip, zilch, no built-in shine in my hair texture. I also wanted lots of color contrast, thicker strands so that the "patches" of color were more noticeable, especially from a distance, and some side-to-side wave so that the textures blended better on hair meshes that have curls. (Perfectly-straight textures sometimes look jagged on such meshes; some side-to-side wave and lots of detail in the texture in general disguises that.) Of course, I also didn't want a texture that ONLY looked good on curly meshes, so there was balancing to do there.

So, I started with Zeusar's textures (which are MM and perfectly straight and have little shine, but they have a fair amount of contrast and somewhat thicker stranding) and then edited like crazy from there to get what I wanted. It took a lot of experimenting because what looked good in Photoshop often looked terrible on hair in-game. And then some looked good on short hairs but awful on long ones, or vice versa. So it was a lot of back-and-forth, but I am now officially happy. :) Like I said, it's probably not what perhaps anyone else would want, but it's what *I* want, and that's what's important to me.

But yeah, color preference is VERY subjective. I despise Maxis's straw-blond and eye-searing red and, to a lesser extent, its too-gray black, but there are also colors in the various popular palettes out there that I equally despise. (Don't even get me started on Pooklet's "Molotov" *laugh*) But that's just preference, and everyone has different preferences. I'm sure many people hate the colors I adore, and it's all good. :)

And finally: I actually really like the details of Maxis skins, like the forehead wrinkles -- because, again, realistic -- but that's pretty much the ONLY thing I like about them. *laugh* There's a set of custom skins out there that has such details that I've been eyeing for a long time, but changing out skins unless you're starting fresh with all brand-new neighborhoods is SUCH a pain in the ass that...yeah. *laugh*

[dramallamadingdang]

Seeking suggestions!

I have a list of about 20 hairs (so far; there will undoubtedly be more before I'm done with this massive default-retexturing project) for which I need to make new defaults, for various reasons.

So, since I decided that I'm going to share these, if anyone has any hairs, for either gender, that they'd like to see used as a default, please do send suggestions my way. (And please provide a link to the hair, too.) I’m particularly interested in hairs that would be cute for toddlers and children, of both genders, but I need hairs for teens and up, too. Of course, since these defaults are primarily for my own game they'll be done in my textures (Examples here), which may not be to everyone's taste, but at least the defaulting will be done, and that’s the tedious part. They could then very easily be retextured however one prefers.

My only requirement is polycount. Since these are primarily for my own game, and I steadfastly refuse to use hairs with more than 20K polys unless they're super-special and like no other hair out there, hairs to use as defaults need to be less than that (and preferably more around the 15K or less range). I also prefer not to use converted-from-TS3 Maxis hairs, even though they’re nicely low-poly. This is mostly because those tend to have glaring transparency issues that I can't fix and that drive me nuts. I’m also not really fond of Maxis/clay-style TS4 hairs. But other than that...I’m totally open.

Feel free to reply here or send me a message or an ask. Feel free to reblog this, too, if you like.

[dramallamadingdang]

Continuing the quest for Gross, But Not TOO Gross Castaway Hair(TM). :)

Now with shadow/shine to create overall depth and a nice greasy crown. Also a bit of alpha-editing to get rid of flyaway strands on this particular hair that just wouldn’t happen on hair heavy with dirt/grease; still need to work on the ends. Plus there’s a bit of decreased color variation. Can’t dial that back too much more than this or else this particular texture starts to make hairs look like helmets. :)

This is going in a more realistic-looking direction that I’d intended, but I’m kinda liking it.