Sims 3 Poses

This is probably the hardest one to quantify, but it's something that is obvious whenever upload moderators look at an upload: have you really expended some serious time and effort on a creation? You can't just crank out a bunch of stuff in a short amount of time and expect it to be good. Nor can you spend a while just fiddling with something but not really trying and expect a good result either.

Always try to alter every or at least almost every joint a little bit. Altering just a few joints doesn't make a natural pose. Also avoid perfect symmetry. Even if you make a standing pose, you should alter the legs and feet and rotate the torso a bit to create a natural pose. Begin with the big changes and work your way down to the details. Don't forget to pose the hands and fingers as they count a great deal to the final quality of your pose. It's difficult, but try to alter the face as well to create some facial expression.

So, yeah, you can move all these joints in each direction without restrictions. But that doesn't mean you should. What you should do, is always keep in mind what the human body would be capable of when you move a joint. Don't go beyond the anatomically possible. Never bend joints in impossible directions or to impossible angles.

Of course it makes sense in some cases to go a bit beyond what a regular human would be able to do, but such poses need to fit a certain theme or context. E.g. you're free to make acrobatic poses that only a double-jointed circus artist can do. Contorted talking on the phone or walking the dog poses just don't make sense.

Tip: When you alter a joint for the first time or whenever you're unsure, check what's possible on your own body. Maybe work from pictures of real people. Make the poses yourself or let someone pose for you.

Tip: Range of motion of the major human joints

Keep in mind that a pose that is anatomically possible for the human body, isn't necessarily doable for sims without looking really bad. It doesn't make a useful pose if you alter a joint in a way that the sim mesh gets badly distorted even if it would be possible for a human. If the mesh gets badly distorted, try to work around it or go for something else.

This is best explained by an example: Stand straight on both feet and then lift one foot from the ground. Notice how you automatically shift your torso to the leg you're standing on? That is what what this is basically about. The center of weight of the sim should always be within the footprint. It's easy of course if the sim is lying on the torso or anything like that. However, if you make a seemingly simple pose like a sim who shifted the weight to one leg, you know, the standing leg vs. play leg thing, then you need to shift the torso to be right above the standing leg to make a natural pose.

Of course this doesn't apply to poses that are supposed to show sims in full movement.

Whether the sim is standing on their feet or sitting on their butt or whatever you can think of, always make sure that whatever the sim is resting on actually touches the ground. Touch as in not visibly float above it or sink into it. If you use an OMSP to make a sim sit on a stool or lie on a bed, make sure that the height of the OMSP perfectly matches the height of the surface.

Of course this doesn't apply to poses that are supposed to show sims in full movement. In most cases, e.g. jumping or running, you should pose the sim with one foot on the ground, like in the process of jumping off or landing. Showing a sim floating in the air will almost always look weird.

So, you altered joints on that pose all day and now that foot is floating above the ground a bit? Don't give in to the temptation to just stretch the leg! Always keep all the bones at their regular length. Stretched or compressed skeletons never look realistic, and can completely ruin an otherwise good pose.

Tip: Never move a joint! Just rotate them.

Always triple-check that there is little to no clipping, i.e. as little clipping as possible. On the other hand, if parts of the body are supposed to make contact, e.g. hand on hip, they should actually make contact and not miss each other by a foot. If a sim is supposed to have their hand resting on their knee, make sure the hand is actually resting on the knee and not going right through the knee joint or hovering way above the knee.

• Minimum Size: 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall is a good size for the smallest pic you would want to upload. You may have smaller pics for thumbnails and the like, but for your required screenshots, please go as big as you can!

• Maximum Size: MTS allows pictures up to 1280 pixels wide by 1024 pixels tall, and a file size limit of 250 kbs - so you can have nice, big, pretty pics. You may have to resize your pictures or apply compression to get them to fit within that limit.

Please don't just take a small pic and size it up in your graphics program to get bigger pics - this only makes the dimensions larger but doesn't add any detail and just gives you a blurry, pixellated larger pic, not a nice clear one.

At the same time, make sure you don't use too much light: if you put light-coloured item under a bright light, it can wash out and lose a lot of the detail of what you've made.

You CAN use cropped or closer pictures to show detail and/or for your thumbnail shot, but make sure you have at least one pic that shows everything.

This is not an absolute -requirement- and for some things like historical furniture and the like you may do better with a simple basic set that matches your theme - just make sure that what you're doing in the background doesn't detract or distract from what you're actually uploading.

Remember that your upload should showcase what -you- have made, so if you pack a room with decorations, it may not be obvious at a glance what it is you've actually created!

If you think that your poses would go well with some additional effects from your graphics program, feel free to attach related screenshots to your upload. However, these screenshots can only be additional and can't replace the required screenshots!

So this long hair and that dress you downloaded the other day are absolutely stunning? Sorry, but a pose upload is probably not the best place to show them off. It must always be recognizable where under the clothes and hair the sim and the skeleton is.

There are no absolute requirements about hair and clothes, but make sure that they don't hide the actual pose. If you're unsure, just use short hair and tight pants and shirts.

• Inline screenshots are images that appear in the text of the upload that load for the viewer along with the rest of the text. Inline screenshots can either be linked from the attached screenshots, or from an external hosting site like Tinypic, Photobucket, or Flickr.
• Attached screenshots are screenshots that have been attached to the upload using the "manage attachments" feature on MTS. They display as small thumbnails until clicked on.

Please do not post more than 4 inline screenshots. Having a lot of images that have to load on the thread makes browsing downloads very slow and can make the thread jump around as they keep loading.

You may host your inline screenshots elsewhere like Photobucket, Tinypic, or Flickr - however, these screenshots hosted elsewhere must be additional "bonus" screenshots. All of the screenshots we actually require for your upload need to be attached to the thread itself. If your Photobucket account runs out of bandwidth or you delete the pics, people still need to be able to get the required screenshots on your thread.

You can attach up to 12 screenshots to the thread itself, with the 4 additional inline screenshots hosted elsewhere for a total of 16 possible screenshots. This should be plenty to show what you've made, even for fairly large sets. Remember, you can always collage several different images together into one image if you have a bunch of stuff to show off, or want to show multiple angles of an item.

Take some time to just play around with the camera. It can take a while to get used to the camera controls, and even once you are experienced in their use, it may be challenging to get the shot you want with the constraints on the controls.

If you haven't taken many sim pictures before, here is a list of camera controls:

• TAB : Puts the game into Cameraman mode, allowing better and more control of the camera, and removing the blue user interface. Make sure you are in live mode before going into Cameraman mode or you will see grid lines on the ground and floating where floor tiles may be placed. TS3 Note: You will only be able to go into cameraman mode once per load if you are in buy/build mode (without a family moved in). You can either exit to the neighborhood and return to take more pictures, or instead just move a family in for taking your pics.

• W and S : W moves the camera forward. S moves it backward.

• A and D : A moves the camera left. D moves it right.

• Q and E : Q lowers the camera. E raises it.

• + and - : Zooms in and out.

Windowed Mode:

• TS2: In order to take your pictures using the methods described here, you will need your game running in a window, so you can easily switch to other applications without causing major instability and lag. Instructions on setting up Windowed Mode for Sims 2 may be found here: Game Help:Windowed Mode. Windowed mode should be perfectly safe - in fact, some users actually report better game performance when running in a window. Your mileage may vary.

• TS3: In Sims 3, you can use windowed mode by simply choosing it in your game's options. Full instructions can be found in Game Help:TS3 Windowed Mode. Windowed mode will allow you to use Print Screen or FRAPS or whatever screenshotting program you desire, without getting dark pictures. If you choose to NOT use windowed mode for TS3, you must use the C key to take pictures using the in-game camera - taking pictures fullscreened in TS3 without using the C key will result in icky dark screenshots.

C Key vs. Print Screen:

• TS2: In order to take nice big pics, you should not use the game's screenshot system, using the C key or the camera button on the game's controls to take your pictures. Even on the highest picture settings, pictures will still be small, with a very high level of JPEG compression, making them blurry and crunchy. Instead, use Print Screen or a screenshot program.

• TS3: The C key camera is much improved in TS3, making it possible to use to take pictures for upload and still have nice big, pretty pictures. You can still use a screenshot program or print screen if you desire, but you will need to run your game in Windowed Mode (see above) to keep your pictures from getting dark.

Using Print Screen: If you have enough RAM to run Photoshop or another graphics editing program at the same time as TS2/TS3, you may want to take screenshots yourself, without the use of a program to store them for you.

To do that, simply press the Print Screen or PrntScn key on your keyboard - it's usually off toward the right, over the arrow keys, above Insert and Delete. This will copy your current screen to your Windows clipboard, as if you had selected and copied it as an image.

Then open any graphics editing program, create a new document the size of your monitor's resolution, and paste into that document. Your screenshot should appear in the document.

Screenshot Programs:

There are many programs available, free and pay, that will take screenshots for you by using a hotkey, and save them to a folder - just like The Sims 2 with the C key, but with options for much better quality settings.

• Fraps
• Gadwin
• Irfanview

A quick Google search for 'free screenshot program' will also bring up many other options, which may have other features that are of interest to you.

Optimizing, Editing, and Compressing Images:

Many simmers struggle with getting their images to be clear, crisp and under the 250kb file size while keeping the image size larger than 800px by 600px. After getting your images from the in game camera or using a print screen program you will need to resize them and compress them into a jpeg image. Many graphics programs have a built in optimizing feature. Here are a few common ones:

• Photoshop *Pay
• Gimp *Free
• IrfanView *Free
• Paint.net *Free

Also please make sure that your poses are shown in a scenery that is light enough and lit well enough to see shadows. It's important that it can be seen that a pose is neither floating nor sinking. Unless it is meant to, of course.

Sometimes you may even need to show a pose from two angles to fullfill the requirements.

For instructions on compressing your files into an archive, please see: Creator Guidelines: Creating Archive Files.

Please do not include multiple archives with the same contents - that is, please don't put your files in both a .zip as well as a .rar because some people only want .zip files - please just choose one.

Also, please do not double-compress your files... a .rar file inside another .rar file (or any other archive inside another) doesn't compress it anymore, and it makes it so we can't see the contents without downloading, and also just makes an extra step for the people downloading.

Good titles:

• Mission-Style Living-Room Set
• 10 Simmer Way (Large family home)
• Fluffy Party Dresses

Bad titles:

• My First Upload!
• Lipstick

A link and credit means writing something like: "Everyday hair by Anubis360: http://www.modthesims.info/d/402962" - it states the item, the creator's name, and gives a direct link to where it can be found. Just linking to a site is not sufficient!

You may use content from the EA Store on your sims, but again, you need to link and credit it as such, so people can get it.