Hiya!

I decided that I want to put photos above the graves whenever anybody in my megahood dies. That won't be for a long time but since I'll more than likely forget I want to have this all planned out and added to my rules spreadsheet now while it's on my mind.

I'm considering a few methods - extracting their portrait from simpe, having someone paint them, that camera from the artist career that I've genuinely never used til just now...

Just using Faith Goodie as a test subject in a test hood that I'll delete but since I'd never used the artist camera I wanted to try it out. Here's a comparison between a painting and the photograph and I'm having a hard time deciding which would look nicer over graves. The painting is quite a bit larger than the photo. Both are equally as hard for me to get a decent shot.



Which do you think would look nicer?

I'm biased towards paintings.

In my cemetery, I have two paintings over each gravestone - one as an elder and one as an adult. I've done this for years and in several different hoods. I also try to put spouses next to each other with ground markers separating the pairs. One of the things I do after each age-up is have a Sim in the household paint a picture of the Sim at that new age via "Paint Still Life". The paintings hang in the house (usually in the bedroom so I can remember from rotation to rotation whose bed is whose) until the Sim dies and then they are moved along with the urn/headstone to the cemetery.

I also keep the paintings backed up as jpg files in a folder on my desktop (extracted from the lot file via SimPE) in case they are lost. I know with paintings, they can sometimes get reset to the default painting after changing lots so having them backed up lets them be repainted (via Paint Custom Painting) and replaced. I don't know if the same thing would happen to pictures.

The picture I have here is after rotation 19 of my hood. I'm in rotation 24 now and the cemetery has started it's third row.

I'd never heard of paintings getting reset.

I also considered trying to learn how to make objects/object recolors and putting them on to actual buyable paintings but that's probably more work than I want to do.

I had a brief discussion about the painting resets a while back here. My workaround for the issue is a couple posts further down.

I've made custom pictures using the Photo Studio in SimPE but that takes longer and you have to be out of the game to add the newly created picture package into the game. Everything I do with paintings can be done with the game running.

I like the ease of doing the paintings since you can use the keyboard shortcuts to move the camera around and zoom in to each Sim's face. And even fixing the reset paintings can be done in game by copying the "lost" paintings into the Paintings folder while the game is up and then choosing Paint Custom Painting to find the lost paintings to paint again.

The reason I'd been considering just making a cc buyable painting is because then I could batch do any current elders at the time, so I wouldn't have to worry about forgetting to paint them at some point or having them know a sim with high painting skill.

But I've never made cc objects, and the last time I did any cc anything was extremely amateur clothing recolors well over a decade ago because child me thought I was gonna be this amazing cc creator pulling fabric swatches and prints off random websites and just slapping them on top then realizing they were so bad that I didn't even want to use them in my own game

You may be able to extract all if your elders' Sim's pictures from their character files, convert them to jpg and move them into the Paintings folder. But you'd still need to have them painted with Paint Custom Painting. (Using a fast easel mod would help and using sethour to frequently reset the time back so days didn't elapse while having the painting done.)

However, the character photos are 256x256 and easel paintings are 600x450 so they may not convert well to being a custom painting even using the Fill or Crop options on the Paint a Custom Painting selection.

Making a CC object for every Sim might also become unwieldy over time as you have more and more Sims die. You'd have to keep the package files in your downloads folder for the picture to show.

Now someone has created a picture frame that allows you to select a Sim to show in the picture when you click on it but I can't remember who or where it is and I don't know whether the Sim has to be on the lot or not. I tried it some years ago and it didn't fit what I wanted at the time. Maybe someone else will remember what/where it is.

@HobbesED:


How do you do that? By having someone drop in and take both to the cemetery? (mostly because I'm intrigued by the idea..)

@FranH Absolutely. My cemetery is residential. So when someone dies on their home lot, I have one of the remaining family members on the lot place the urn/gravestone and pictures into their inventory. I save the lot. Then I enter my residential cemetery lot. I then bring that family member to the lot. I make them selectable, open their inventory, take out the items from their inventory and place them. Then make the family member unselectable again and clear them off the lot. Then save the cemetery lot.

I happen to use the teleporter shrub and InSimenator which I have placed on the cemetery lot but any method of transporting and making Sims selectable/unselectable should work.

DeeDee has some here that I do have in my game, because I have just about everything of theirs, but I'm not sure if they'd work on community lots or if the picture would stay after the sim died or stuff like that. Suppose I could just ask. Using those would be a very quick, very easy method. I don't know why I didn't just think of using those in the first place and had to complicate it.

The ones I have are the ones from Lucas that she mentioned in her summary. If they work on community lots, let me know!

So far they don't seem to. If I put it my my sim's inventory I can't take it out. And if I put one on the community lot, send the sim there and do it, it doesn't save because the community lot doesn't save.
I even downloaded a mod to let me access the inventory on a community lot but because it doesn't save I ended up losing it all together.

I wonder, if I downloaded Lucas's versions so that I can do any sim that isn't on the lot and then have a sim own the community lot if that'd work because then it could save.

EDIT: If somebody owns the community lot the portrait sticks. I imagine it still needs to be the sim that owns the lot doing it, not somebody visiting. Now, who's a particularly gloomy premade sim who would actually want to own a cemetery...

My cemetery owners are SimBots. The gloom and ghosts don't affect them.

I would reckon that a imitation "Grim Reaper" (not the game's) would do as a owner, too. Just download the one on this site, and install him as the owner of the cemetery. He can be immortal, too-by turning off aging. But make him comfortable, too. You don't want to insult him by making him suffer!

I thought about having John Mole do it
He's kinda spooky, likes watching living people so he may as well like watching dead people too. And that way he's someone already in my megahood and I don't have to create any random sim that doesn't belong.

Chris Hatch made memorial paintings that do all this automatically. You just hang one over the grave and when you take the game off pause, the painting automatically displays a portrait of the sim belonging to the nearest grave.
https://simfileshare.net/folder/22472/



If the paintings show up with a flashing blue frame in your game, you can get Simmer22's fixed version (with shadow removed) from the second post in the following link.
https://modthesims.info/t/604729

See this post for a screenshot that I took in one of my Veronavilles.
https://modthesims.info/showthread....379#post5312379

What hasn't Chris Hatch done a mod for? Seems to be the fix all for any of my mod needs lately.

I'll check those out too!

Not to double post, but I ended up just sticking with the ones from DeeDee. I tried Chris's but decided against them for the same reason as Lucas's that I don't like the frames.
Had John Mole purchase the cemetery and used sim blender to just get all the elders in the whole megahood (at least I think I got everybody) 'round so I could get their photos ready so now any time anybody brings their grave here I can just put their photo above it once I decide which plot to give them.

These walls are just off on the sides, sort of makes it look like the cemetery advertises "these are whos gonna die soon!!"


eek..I should've took those screenshots from the same direction but there was a lamppost in the way that I was too lazy to move.

Glad you found something to work with that wasn't too time consuming!

Just a quick comment on Chris's picture of the dead-if you place it on a community graveyard, or other place, the picture will activate when someone views it, and it even gives a quick recap of who it is and in what stage of decomposition they're in! I thought that was hysterical, because the people I used it with were in urns!