Have you noticed how trends in creating CC change especially as new Sims games were made? CC is becoming more and more perfect while it had obvious flaws in the past (Sims 2 in the 2000s to be precise).

For example the clothing, before it has basically a flat mesh with slightly rounded feet and people would plaster photos of real clothing and make entire outfits. I found it annoying when looser and textured clothes would be skin tight but it still worked well in the Sims 2. I did it myself too using Avril's Abby Dawn collection and some hipster stuff I loved as a kid. I didn't translate well on Sims 3 tho. It still made the clothes look good in the game because there wasn't clipping and sims weren't distorting the meshes. Meanwhile, high heels usually looked awful . The mesh would usually have bad proportions and looked like a toddler was chewing the foot before. I remember the legs often being extremely thin that even made me hesitant to use it back then. The early hairstyles and makeup were "ugly" and had the 2000s video game look but it still worked somehow. Still, my favorite was XM sims and it meshed It so well with the game's style. I preferred Asian makeup and skins because it had a softer texture and didn't have the Jersey Shore aesthetic.

As for today, everything's "perfect" and the proportions are good. Almost every detail of alpha CC is meshed and the feet and heels are beautifully made. The hairstyles are similar to Peggy and Newsea, but with much more realistic textures, colors and hairstyles. I love it. The downside is that many stuff is for clubbing and modeling which isn't what the sims 2 was made for. IMO, sims 2 is more a small town/suburban game with not so formal "formal" occasions. Also the clipping because the meshes are so complex. I also hate how the majority of CC has a Kardashian body mesh which is okay for some body diversity but it's usually only for Everyday and Formal so I make my sims "fat" to at least resemble that body. It's also kinda boring and off when all of my sims are thick. Their heads are slim made for skinny bodies. It would've been okay if they looked slightly thicker than the original mesh, not 4 sizes thicker. Not to mention that the fat morph and pregnant morph is nonexistent.

I always wonder if it's the technology that made meshing and texturing so complex or the standard is higher and higher. What are your theories and which style do you prefer more? I like something in between - Semi realistic to realistic textures and moderately complex mesh that resembles late Maxis Sims 2.

I think it has more to do with the technology/programs and tutorials being more accessible to people, and I think TS3 and TS4 influenced some of the changes as well. A higher demand for more realism, maybe - and with it often comes the use of more high-poly meshes and textures. This doesn't always go too well with TS2 (older game, different demands).

I've been around the community since 2006, so it's been interesting to see how thngs have changed over the years. I still have a lot of pre-TS3 conversion-era stuff, and I think a lot of it still performs fine and looks decent (I've done a bit of a tidy-up session to clean out the stuff that doesn't look so good), although I've noticed some of it needs a bit of tweaking/fixing, especially older hairs by certain long-gone creators. What I do like about it is that most (if not all) of it has a decent polycount and decent texture sizes. That's not always the case with the more recent stuff. It also tends to lean more towards the style I prefer - not hyper realistic, but somewhere in between MM and semi-realistic. I feel a lot of stuff nowadays is TS4 conversions, and while I download a lot of it, every time I put that CC in my game, the style kind of doesn't work, and I can't put my finger on exactly why. Some of the items kinda work, but the rest just looks... off. TS3 items don't quite have the same issue (except for most clothes and some patterns).

I'm not into all the wrinkles and whatnots, since a lot of those tend to not be too animation friendly. All the wrinkly bits also mean more polys, and I'd rather have functional clothes with less wrinkles that work well with animations. Plus, the extreme smoothness makes clothes look plastic-y, and I've noticed a lot of high-poly meshes (especially if made and textured in Blender) have bad UVmapping, to the point where it wouldn't be possible to make a decent recolor. Not all, but it's a "trend".

And I wish I could go back in time and give the person who started the Decimate trend in Blender a couple (well meaning) shakes, and some tutorials on how to reduce the polycount properly (I know it's easier and faster with Decimate, but the result in mesh view looks like a plane crash - it literally ruins the mesh, hence the name, and you have absolutely no control over what it does). But I guess that ship has sailed a long time ago...

High heels on everything was one of the things I hated back in the early days. Couldn't get any decent clothes without someone slapping the textures on a heeled mesh. I guess it's fine for dress-up clothes, but not everyone wears super-high heels just to go to the corner shop, or even indoors in their own home . I still don't like high heels, even if they sometimes look better. Only times I put high heels on my sims is with formal wear (and I tend to prefer other shoes over heels).

I don't mind photoediting of clothes if it's done well. I've made a lot of outfits from photos. However, if you just find a couple pictures, slap them on a mesh, and call it a day, that's usually a bad job. You have to make sure there's no ugly shadows, no bad overlapping, that all the edges meet where they're supposed to - it's a whole process. A lot of older clothes did look like they had taken 3 minutes in paint, and that's the kind that gives the method a bad rep. There were also a lot of creators who made photoedited clothes that looked like they were edited pretty much to perfection.

As was mentioned, I think a variety of things led the change. Maxis has said they deliberately made creating kind of difficult for Sims 2 because they didn't want CC creators to be turning out the kind of quality that you could get in expansion packs (cutting into EA's profits). Clearly, they learned that this wasn't an issue, because they were more helpful to creators from the later games, which lead to better CC.

These days, we have high quality cheap or free meshing and texturing programs. As for Sims 2 CC, the game is older now, so people are less likely to hoard tips and skills so that they can have the glory of being the best creator. Things like youtube also make tutorials more accesible. Monitors are sharper now too, so things like photoskinning that looked fine on someone's old monitor from 1998 don't pass the quality checks today. There's a saying about standing on the shoulders of giants - a Sims 2 creator from the mid 2000s had to learn a lot of things from scratch. Someone creating in 2022 can build on the foundation established by dozens of creators other over two decades.

I don't agree that "perfection' or "prettiness" are particular features of new CC, and if you can only find "Kardashian" meshes you need to broaden your search. Straight-up recolors of Maxis meshes are still easily found, much of it very new. Plenty of old stuff also still works very well. I love Parsimonious as a site, full of the pretty, the colorful, the weird, the wacky, the tacky, the fantastic, and the WTF, most of it dating from before 2010. And doing a deep dive into old stuff hear at MTS will yield up much that has stood the test of time along with the stuff that hasn't. Plenty of new CC looks terrible to me. I hate Sims 4 textures across the board, all those polys devoted to making things look as if they're modeled from hard plastic! Most of the general changes I've noticed can be put down either to fashion, to technology, or to experience levels in the fandom.

Fashion we have always with us and it skews the perception amazingly. There is a steady and predictable progression in response to a fashion trend: first it is cutting edge, then it is stylish, then it is tired, then it is out-dated, then it is dowdy, then it is ugly, then it is silly, then it is retro, then it is vintage, then it is romantic and ripe to come around again on the fashion wheel. I'm old enough to have seen it happen with clothes and hairstyles and to a certain extent with technology and furniture and various artistic media. During the out-dated/dowdy/ugly/silly phase people notice and refer to the worst exemplars of the style - the cheap knock-offs, the tasteless extremes, the poorly executed - and during the upswing at the end they notice and refer to the best. CC is clothes, and technology, and hair, and furniture, and artistic media; it has the same cycle in spades. I guarantee you, if the hobby is still viable in 2032, much of what you consider "perfect" now will seem "ugly."

Technological changes have both benefited and hindered custom content. Computers with powerful graphics allow people to notice details that used to not matter at all. One reason floodfilled textures like those on early CC and base game Maxis clothing alike used to be acceptable was that it was the best most machines could render - we knew it couldn't get any better and we didn't mind. Now people are making defaults of "ugly" textures involving details so tiny that older graphic cards couldn't even display them. (I still can't see most of them and certainly don't mind them.) We're getting improved lot imposters with no gameplay effect at all, purely to improve the views; we're getting major mods like story progression that make the game use more processing power than entire dedicated gaming rigs had in 2000. Meshing and coloring tools are more sophisticated and more readily accessible than ever before and people use them. Sometimes to excess. Alas, since it's impossible to update Sims 2 source code to work better with more modern graphics, people who are running the game on post-Windows 7 operating and graphic systems have to spend a lot of time balancing their urge to look good with the machine's capacity to work with the game to handle all those polycounts and effects without collapsing into the dreaded pink soup or simply crashing. As usual, everything's a trade-off.

But the biggest difference is just that this is a mature fandom and those creating for it have either been doing it for a long time and have a lot of experience-based expertise, or they stand on the shoulders of giants. We know more about the way the code works, the way the creation tools work, the way the mechanics work, and how to both put what we want into the game, and how to get what we want out of it. New creators have lots of examples to study; old creators write tutorials recording their own experience, tricks, and techniques; computers are not a specialized interest but a mainstream staple of life that everyone is comfortable with. I remember working with people who were afraid to use word processors and spreadsheets for fear of causing irreparable damage with a simple mistake; now people who can't even type can do a certain amount of basic coding and everyone handles interfaces with aplomb. Things the first modders had to teach themselves from scratch, new modders can do without ever consciously learning. That has its downside, too, as it can make people careless, and lead to unexamined assumptions. As a whole, though, the world of CC making simply has more expertise to draw on now than it used to.

Thank you guys for the feedback. I may sounded judgy but I wasn't, I was just comparing the trends in making CC. It makes complete sense what you said, I thought that since high poly CAS content works nicely on my computer and can be converted, why did no one make it back then? Then I remembered that my first 2003 PC ran Sims 2 pixelated that I couldn't see patterns and fingers correctlya and it ran laggy. I thought that was normal until I played on my cousins PC and was shocked at the crisp textures.

I actually remember how I thought that default meshes and textures were so detailed. I was also frustrated by the lack of new clothing in every EP and the lack of bimbo, trashy and alternative stuff. If Maxis put more effort into CAS they wouldn't be threatened by CC creators.

Btw, I wasn't shitting on old trends nor I think that everything's gorgeous now. I'm not a fan how the majority of most popular CC is what reality TV stars and influences wear for clubbing and the about of designer clothes. So tacky. At least old CC had mom and dad clothing. My Sims won't be going to Cafe Petite dressed like Paris Hilton on her 21st birthday carrying a LV purse. My CC catalog is quite diverse, default replacements are usually classic or basic low poly stuff, usually a little conservative, because not everyone is a young free spirit, that kinda resemble the original while the custom stuff is trendy and often flashy. I love how CC creators slap chucks on 80% pieces of clothing because I do be like that irl . I'm aware how fashion cycle works, Aikea Guinea's type of clothes is literally trendy among teenagers on Tiktok. I'm also not a huge fan of wrinkled stuff, Gorilla 3x kinda does that with taste but the oversized stuff is a bit too oversized for Sims 2 standards, although it's cute I avoid it.

Also, I recently noticed that some top only jackets can be used as outwear which made me so happy. I hated how everything except everyday was an entire outfit and many creators were neglecting gym clothes and outwear.

I still have a lot of early CC in my game- I have a really soft spot for all of the photoskinned and bumpmapped stuff from sites like Peggysims and MySimsWorld. It's still 2006 in my game!

^ I refuse to get rid of whatever still looks alright - a lot of my hairs are Peggy, Rose, Helga, XM... the old bunch!

Sometimes, CC is created based on what the player/creator wants in their own game. A lot of what I've made is purely based on my own interests and/or needs for storytelling. If I needed certain items for some scenes and couldn't find them, and figured it was easier to make it than wait for someone to make the things for me. I've also sat there with some options I didn't like, and decided to make new ones I liked better.

I don't care about trends in real life when I play with my sims. They live in a 1990 --> 2020+ bubble that encompasses various kinds of trends and styles. I stopped caring about trends at some point in my early 20s, and so did they.



I recategorize clothes if they aren't already categorized the way I want them to be, especially separates. You can set them as everyday + whichever other categories you want, and buy them as everyday (they'll be available as the other categories in the drawer) - or use Lazyduchess' separates mod that lets you buy them as separates for the other categories too (I think? I've yet to try it out).

I never really thought about it too much, not sure I have a preference exactly except I don't like the stuff that looks like it's Sims 4 clay/plastic hair and whatnot.

I love most of my CC though there was one hacke d fridge that often annyoed me because of the price and it's being limited to only residential lots though I have a tool and was able to fix those issues with it fairly recently.The link for the original version is HERE and all I changed on it was the price which was lowered to 150$ and flagged to to show up in community lot buy mode under appliances.

I love how cc for the sims 2 game has cycled through all these trends! And how there have always been different camps among players and creators - while my game was going through a neon-and-grunge phase and there was a whole bunch of neon-and-grunge creator I looked up to, my friend was into this black-white-beige trend held up by creators like Trapping - looking at our sims and their surroundings you might think we were playing two different games. It's amazing to me how little time it took between the game being brand new and players mostly okay with what Maxis offered us, and the day when people started talking about their "aesthetic"! You know a game has made it in the world when the cc is so abundant and so diverse in style that the players can have their own aesthetic .

I like having a mix of things in my game too, like simmer22, with old and new at the same time. I picture the sims 2 universe as having its own fashion trends as well, so Parsimonious stuff doesn't look entirely out of place when I put it in and a medieval robe or retro-futuristic space suit here and there won't raise an eyebrow.

I have to say, though, there are some trends I'm happy to leave in the past! Those old meshes that looked like they had no thighs and the female sims would get snapped at the waist if they were poked too hard, for example.

I've got a wide mix of buy mode CC from fancy high end luxury items to the grungiest and most rased out junk like poor sims would have that it makes the game much more realistic to have that range of choices and even to have that range in build mode means not all homes are nice and a few looks totally trashed and like they're decaying or ruined.

Yeah. You often see people try themselves at tutorials, following them A through Z, but while they have a result at the end, they haven't really learned anything, and struggle with the same things the next time, too. They often think narrowly, and go looking for a very spesific tutorial to make a very spesific thing, instad of being able to use the knowledge from a basic tutorial for similar projects, or even use what you can learn from several tutorials broadly. Some also tend to bite over more than they can chew with their first projects, which can be discouraging. But most of the time they manage to figure things out, even if they need a bit of help to do so.

TS2 has been one of the more creation-friendly games, at least in some aspects. There's Bodyshop and Homecrafter right out of the box (so people could create stuff for the game even if they barely had a clue what they were doing), and SimPE isn't the worst to work with once you get familiar with it (but probably was/is intimidating for a lot of people in the beginning). There are also some decent starter tutorials you don't have to look all over the internet for. After all the EPs were out, creating was pretty much a breeze, because no need to worry about updates or EPs breaking anything (in the early days it wasn't nearly as bad with TS2 as TS4's "let's break every piece of CC with each update" nightmare, but you usually had to update half your mods and the occasional EP-related CC piece).

I think TS2 has the least annoying files to work with, but that could be how the programs and such are set up, too. S4Studio has some neat functions with 3D view and all, so simple creation is relatively easy - but when it comes to editing all the internal workings and coding of the files, even for something that should be simple, like adjusting the material settings, I'd take SimPE over it any day, because the S4S menus and editing drive me nuts and tutorials are a bit all over the place. I gave up on making TS3 CC long ago, because TSRW is a menace (crashes all the time and has a lot of bugs).

I would really like to use all the 4t2 clothing conversions from deedee and others, but at the moment I still use all the "glued" clothing from Liana and other creators, with a few exceptions. (Pink flashing) Maybe in the future I will keep all that in a folder and dare to use newer things. What I will never download are hairstyles with the sims 4 style for the sims 2. I am one of those who use only one style, so I stick with the alpha, or whatever are called.

About hairstyle meshes... (Peggy, Rose, Helga, XM) All of them are so good that they are still used in all games after more than a decade. (The recolors that are currently there are beautiful, I download them all, and I also love the hairstyles that are sims 2 style)

Scrolling to the first ten pages of some of the download categories for Sims 2 on MTS really does encapsulate a lot of the 2000's emo fashion trends of the time. Lots of interesting hair and makeup that looks a little alien compared to the Maxis-Match style that I play with in my game, and even compared to the game's content as-is. It very much reminds me of all the weird, dark and creepy machinimas on early Sims Youtube that had dialogue breaks between video clips, played "Hey There Delilah," and were usually about things like child abuse or teen pregnancy. It's very "The Urbz" looking in terms of quality (could either be aesthetic or genuinely people still trying to figure out how to make CC and meshes for a new game at the time).

Those are Sims 2 trends? (Apart from the Peggy hair, which I kind of like, I have never used anything of those).
And here I thought you cannot talk about sims 2 clothing without mentioning some creators: Trapping, Amaryll, Bunhead, CatofEvilGenius, Fakepeeps (to name a few).
Not sure I missed out on anything yet!

While that is true there has always been 3 categories of Sims 2 CC.|

Realistic -you have pictured and talked about.
'alpha CC' is not a sims 2 term, it came in with sims 3 or 4 and has been ported back. Sims 2 never had 'alpha cc' but we did and do have alpha meshes which is something else entirely. I say lets keep our terminology as there is no need to port back unless perhaps we are making or talking about cc converted from those game for the sims 2.

Semi Realistic: Always a difficult look to pin down as it meant different things to different people. So this term was often not used at all, but it was a style.

Maxis Match: I don't think you addressed. This style got a bad name for being flood fill but that actually wasn't MM just badly made CC
This style never used entire photos pasted on and when it does use photos it is a very small area. Textures and shading would be used instead and the end result is designed to be more in harmony with the game.
A good example of modern MM (pictured) would be DeeDee Sims clothes, Keoni eyes and Honeywell objects.

Both Realistic and MM still coexist but myself personally I mostly use MM. I find most realistic cc to look fake and stand out in the game as clashing with it. Often far too creased and modelesque looking for my taste. That said I do prefer hairs with some shine but often the pick is between quite dull MM hair and much too shiny Pooklet. Skin for me is always MM as are eyes. Realistic eyes give me uncomfortable uncanny valley vibes.
Now that we also have game items and CC from later games as well there is also Sims 3 conversion (tends to blend in better for some reason) and Sims 4 which often has a 'plastic' look to it and the hair 'clay. Not always though. I have some sims 4 hair, especially ethnic hair that I find blends in not too badly and some objects and clothes. Other things I downloaded like some trees look far too plastic to keep along side Sims 2 plants. If someone only used sims 4 converted CC I think that look could work its more the combination of styles or looks I don't find visually appealing.

A lot of CC got better as people got better at creating, graphic cards got better and as the game itself put out higher quality we in turn wanted and expected higher quality CC.

The only piece of CC I would use that you pictured is the hair in picture 3 as you can see it is neither flat nor highly shiny. (I have a long time ago used some like picture 1 but not since about 2010) I wouldn't use any of the other clothes. Again this is personal taste nothing wrong with whatever anybody happens to like.

^ There's MM (meant to blend with the EAxis style), and there's hyper-realistic, and a whole heap of "somewhere in between" (in various forms - I just call it semi-realistic because it's hard to pin down).

Alpha-CC is a TS4 term. I don't think that term came before TS4 hit the market, since it refers to using alpha-edited meshes/textures for hairs and clothes, as opposed to the "clay" look. The TS4 shaders are a bit wonky when it comes to using alphas, so these have pretty much always been a CC thing in TS4 for CAS items (as far as I know, all the original TS4 CAS items are "clay" or fully meshed, and don't have alpha-editable pieces). It expanded to mean "realistic" or something along that line (even if it's got absolutely nothing to do with whether the item has a realistic look to it), but it's not a good term to use for TS2 and TS3 since both games always had alpha editable meshes/textures in use for clothes and hairs all the way from the BGs without it causing (too much) wonkiness with the shaders.


I do use a bit of this and that, but I'm more in a MM-ish-furniture / semi-realistic-ish sims kind of vibe. It does blend well enough. I'm not too picky, but I find something I like, and if it turns out the thing stands out like a sore thumb, it's out.

I prefer Pooklet textures and most of the colors, but I've realized there are colors I never use, so I've started omitting those from my color picking from time to time. No point in keeping stuff I'm never using anyway. I'm missing some better red colors - a couple of the originals are a bit too bright red, like "screaming" red. I'd love some more redheads in my game, but either end up using the same color for all of them, or picking a different color because the hairs feel a bit too vibrant. A while back I thought I'd make some color actions with some different reds just so I could have some options, but I dislike recoloring hairs, so that's a project that's not gone very far...

I knew that you were going to talk about the terms to refer to the cc. xD Personally I mean alpha with all hairstyles that are not sims 2 or sims 4 style. That is, hairstyles with fine and detailed locks and probably more poly, I guess it has nothing to do with it, but it's my way of saying it . Don't hate me for that! I promise to use the term realistic from now on XD! I don't know where I got that term from, if it was for Sims 4 or earlier.

About s4 clay hairstyles... I think they look good in s4 but they look horrible in s2. Although it is only my opinion. The s2 hairstyles also have that clay touch, but with a more realistic style, I don't know, personally I think they are better than the 4 ones.

I like the photos you put joandsarah77, that's also my favorite style, maybe I should download more clothes with more relief and shape.

I'm not a fan of the TS4 hairs in TS2 either. I don't mind them too much in TS4 since I usually play with minimal CC there, but a lot of the BG hairstyles are a bit meh so it's always difficult to find a good hair (I only have 2 EPs, and it's the old ones).

Most of the original TS2 hairs have alpha-editable parts, and the few that don't have the mesh shaped in a way that makes them not need it, so they don't have the blocky "clay" look of TS4 hairs. They are generally low-poly, so if some have a blocky look that's probably why. Some may not be the best styles, but a lot of them are quite nice, at least if you're playing with low CC.

Samee. My catalog is super diverse because my taste is diverse. I have the least of super modern metallic furniture and the most of retro stuff and worn out junk for poor folks.

I've recently installed the Harrow Creek SC4 terrain and it's looking like a perfect setting for a MCC game set in the early part of the 16th century when that new world colonial settlement started up.The residents there will be fetching water from wells for at least a few centuries until they get the option to fetch it from a pump.