Celebrity Sim features that are incredibly hard to Sim perfectly

[beauty_in_a_dream]

I'm sure a lot of people have this experience. You find a picture of a celebrity that looks pretty interesting, so you decide to Sim them. You spend a month trying to tweak and adjust, and perhaps call on a little advice from the lovely guys on CF, but no matter what you do, there's ONE niggly feature that never looks quite right, and it's ruining the whole thing. Eventually it just seems like the slider to sort it doesn't even exist, and you just wait and hope that a new EP or brilliant modder will add it.

This is the number 1 reason why ALL the 'Celebrity Sim' projects I undertake end up falling by the wayside, it's perfection or nothing with me, so it usually ends up nothing. This evening for me, it's been David Thewlis' nose. I've seen several sims of him about, usually in his HP guise, and his nose never seems quite perfect, (I think because an extra slider or two for nose tip is required).

So what/who have been your toughest 'Celebrity/Character' projects and what made them so hard to complete?

[Robodl95]

It's really hard to make pretty celeb sims (face it, most celebs are pretty). A lot of the time you can't get a smooth face effect which makes the sim look 20+ years older then they really should.

[dutch]

Anne Hathaway has definitely been a bitch to me >:S Bad, bad girl.

What makes her so hard to sim... hmmm. She's Anne Hathaway, basically. Her face is like a strange mixture between a barbie doll, an anime character and a beautiful woman at the same time.

[beauty_in_a_dream]

@dutch: She's looking excellent now though :)

[Pax]

I found young Tim Curry, who I'm still working on getting just right, infuriatingly difficult without extra facial sliders. Something about the eyes and chin, I just couldn't seem to get them to get into the right shape. He always ended up looking too doughy.

[el_flel]

It's really weird. You can get some sims where the features are absolutely spot on but they just don't look like the person they are supposed to. Making celeb sims is hard. I tried a couple of times but it was really difficult so I gave up lol

[TheLB]

Uggghhh, I definitely had this problem when creating a man recently. I wanted him to be Japanese- but it wasn't enough for him to have a Japanese name, you had to be able to look at his face and know that he was undeniably Japanese, so I was working on tweaking his face for half a day, and ended up using Kamenashi Kazuya as a guide.

I remember getting the eyes and cheekbones just right were a pain in the ass...I know exactly what I needed to do for the eyes, but there didn't seem to be a slider for it, or when I tried to tweak the cheeks they ended up being too pudgy, too muscular, or too skeletal, and there was no good middle ground, so I decided "screw it, he looks close enough".

[HystericalParoxysm]

"So what/who have been your toughest 'Celebrity/Character' projects and what made them so hard to complete?"

Every damn one of them has had their own unique challenges. I really like interesting, strange faces, it seems. I don't tend to go for the classically pretty people, so I find myself always simming people with weird beaky noses or strange eyes or odd lips or -something-. Each one seems to have at least one feature that drives me utterly batty.

Noses seem to be the worst though, and foreheads. I'd kick a nun holding a puppy down a flight of stairs into a pack of crippled orphans for a septum width/height slider, nostril flareyness slider, and something to control the flatness/pointyness of the nose tip. And something to control forehead slopeyness, concave/convexity (is that a word?) and brow ridge prominence.

[hotaru801]

I tried to make Yoko Kanno... I quickly gave up. It is like there is no way to capture her just right. I mean anyone can make an Asian looking sim (Especially with WA) but to make it look like a specific person... That is hard.

[RoseCity]

I made a Penelope Cruz sim - I showed my husband and he was like wow, I can really tell that's her. And then I put her in the game and there was something I didn't like about her. Her Penelope Cruzness was missing. Because all the sims act basically the same and that's part of a celebrity - their voice, personality, etc. So I'm not even trying to do that anymore.
But sometimes I can't resist trying to make some cute guy from the Urban Outfitters catalog. HP, I agree - the foreheads are impossible; I thought maybe it was because I don't have special sliders.

[el_flel]

Makes me so grateful for all the custom sliders and mods that increase the limits, because can you imagine trying to make a 'real' person in this game without those things?!

[beauty_in_a_dream]

"So what/who have been your toughest 'Celebrity/Character' projects and what made them so hard to complete?"

Every damn one of them has had their own unique challenges. I really like interesting, strange faces, it seems. I don't tend to go for the classically pretty people, so I find myself always simming people with weird beaky noses or strange eyes or odd lips or -something-. Each one seems to have at least one feature that drives me utterly batty.

Noses seem to be the worst though, and foreheads. I'd kick a nun holding a puppy down a flight of stairs into a pack of crippled orphans for a septum width/height slider, nostril flareyness slider, and something to control the flatness/pointyness of the nose tip. And something to control forehead slopeyness, concave/convexity (is that a word?) and brow ridge prominence.

This. I admire the way you dealt with Sean Bean though because his nose tip looks an utter pain to Sim, and that must make the nose/nostril ratio an epic headache. However, with flawless texturing skills like yours, he looks pretty perfect.

[lewisb40]

I don't use sliders, although I think I should look into it. I really have a hard time with core mods. I am frustrated with creating noses, the range for nostrils and nose shapes are too limited. Eye sliders could be expanded also. EA seems to think it's okay to have limited ranges for the sliders, but I don't think they considered that simmers come in multiple cultures and races. Some players like me, don't want all the sims to have European features.

I guess the Sims Community have to rely on modders, EA always miss the point. Then again, EA might rely on the modders also.

EDIT: Major question to help me understand expanding the slider limits. Do I have to use S3Z's core slider expander mod if I use Master Controller by Twallan?

[el_flel]

The most annoying things with eyes is that it's really hard to get normal, almond shaped eyes. Sim eyes are very round.

[taizhu]

I think making a sim look like any one person is difficult--so far all the celebrities I've tried to sim are Asian--Hyun Bin, Du Juan, Seo Woo.

In general, for the sims I think ethnic faces are the most difficult to make. I've come pretty close but none that I think are "done"--However in trying, I have gotten much better at making realistic looking asian sims. Generally, I think its hard to get an exact match of a person if you can't create your own custom make-up...which I really don't know how to do.

The features I find the hardest for celebrity sims are the eyes, nose and lips*** (because everyone's lips have a particular shape). I also find it difficult to achieve the precise jawline.

@RoseCity--I totally agree with you about having that "special something" for the sim in order for it to feel like the celebrity. Except that i had the opposite reaction. I was inspired to create Seo Woo--a Korean starlet--after watching one of her dramas on the internet. She is rather young and doll-like, so her characters tend to be cute, bubbly and not-so-smart. Somehow in creating her sim, I managed to capture that quality in the sim personality and now I feel like I captured "Seo Woo"--even though I could still do a bit more work to get her face exactly right.

[saeda]

Asian sims are the worst, there are no eyebags built into the game so they all must be mods, and there are a hundred different ways their eyebags could look, too.

Skins can be hard to get the right color, so many I find are too peach/pinky.

There also aren't very many clothes that fit into their styles, very few of the cute layered and casual looks for teens, and almost none of the sleek higher fashion for young women.

Forget about making any ulzzang, making them look Asian and Western at the same time is a big headache.

[TheLB]

Asian sims are the worst, there are no eyebags built into the game so they all must be mods, and there are a hundred different ways their eyebags could look, too. My problem is particular is making the corners of the eyes just right, but it seems that the sliders are all working in tandem just to screw me over. You can't lower the inner eye corner without making the whole eye look cat-like. You can't give them a flat chin without making their jaw huge. You can't make them look boyish without looking like manly women, etc etc.

[beauty_in_a_dream]

The problem with slider hacks is they often make your lovely, unique sims give birth to a Sim who looks like a mutant pig that's been run over by a steamroller, especially if they go out with certain Townies. This means although you've sorted the features of your first generation, you've just thrown your hopes of a successful dynasty out of the window, because all future Sims are going to have genetic defects.

With Celebrity Sims that you upload, this can be even more of a problem, because there's an expectation certain people will produce beautiful babies, and as a creator, you kind of want them to, to make you proud of the full result, especially if this is someone you're attracted to in real life. Also, it might have really undesirable consequences on your storyline, for example, imagine your favourite Harry Potter couple, and now imagine how much it might ruin things for them if all their offspring looked like the love child of Voldemort and Pettigrew, if your character is in the main three, a member of the Order, or a Marauder, that is wrong on every possible level, and plastic surgery doesn't come as easy as it did on TS2.

That's a long example, but I think you've got my drift. There's a photo example as well for pure fun (if I wanted to make Mo from 'The Simpsons' a daughter I've done well.)

After that disaster, I deleted the family and remade them without hacks.

[kiwi_tea]

Dame Judi Dench's nose. Impossible. Literally impossible.

[TheGuySim]

Celebritys are such a pain to freaking make!!

I'm currently trying to make Chris Evans from the movie Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, but there is always something missing from him and it bugs me to hell! I mean, if custom sliders and the Creator Feedback forum did not exist, I would be dead!!

(And I would love if I had all the sliders HP mention!)

[beauty_in_a_dream]

On the plus side, Meryl Streep got slightly easier with TS3 though, and Jennifer Ehle :)

[MrDeftino]

James Franco...because he's not fat. The Sims 3 has a REAL issue with making people's faces look chubby. Even with slider hacks they still look chubby. Spent a lot of time on this guy and it's irritating me!