Fixing Eyebrow Colors

If you recolored your hair and realize that the eyebrow color that appears with your new hair is not correct for your new hair color - or if you created a new mesh and thus all your new recolors have the same eyebrow color - this is how you can change your hair file so that it links to the correct eyebrow.

You must use one of the 4 base hair colors for the default eyebrow color that your hair will point to. You can also always make your sim using user-created eyebrows of any color, but it is still good form to pick an eyebrow color that looks appropriate with the hair color.

Use SimPE to open your recolor file (from your Saved Sims folder - you have to have imported your recolor into the game).

Verify the hair color:

This is a good time for you to double check that you know what hair color is in the file - click on the 'Texture Image' and click on an individual texture and view it in Plugin View to see the color of your hair. (one will be the elderly gray color, others will be the hair color)

Changing the Eyebrow Color:

The four default eyebrow colors are

1 Black
2 Brown
3 Blonde
4 Red

You will need to view the Hair Tone XML

The Hair Tone XML will include the color of the original cloned hair. This does not matter, you can leave it named whatever color it states.

Click on

1) The Hair Tone XML

You should see the Plugin View (if not click the Plugin View Tab)

Then click on

2) proxy

That will display the value over at the spot marked 3

3) Change the single digit in that value to the appropriate number.

For instance, this sample started out red with a value of
00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

and I want it to be black, so I'm going to change it to
00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

4) Hit COMMIT

5) Save (not shown)

Btw, this is a good time to make sure the recolor file is appropriately named - you can freely rename the files in your saved sims folder, so add your initials and the haircolor to the filename, and feel free to delete the numbers if you wish, they are not needed.

Where is the Hair Color file located do you mean like in the projects folder like texturenames?

Not in your projects folder, in your saved sims folder - it has to be a finished project that you modify. (I updated the tutorial to reflect this)

My recolor IS in Saved Sims and I don't have the Hair Tone XML option either. And yes, I am looking in the right place, I know SimPE very well (and have the latest version), but it's not there....

!!?? Strange. I have no immediate answer to that one. Will have to research this later, but really it was there on mine.

I doubt it, but maybe we have different versions of SimPe?

Wait, I see it now. Are you looking at a BROWS package? This tutorial isn't about eyebrows - it's about making the correct eyebrow color show up for your HAIR recolor, and the changes have to be made in the HAIR RECOLOR.

Ohhh ok, because the way I read it, it was to fix the Eyebrow COLORS to match the Haircolor, by editing the eyebrow package.

Well, nevermind then.

In that case it should be named "Fixing Hair Colors to Match Eyebrows" then. Since you're "fixing" the haircolor and not the eyebrows. That would make more sense.

Yay now it can match the hair! Can you use this tutorial on hair you downloaded? You see i downloaded this new black haistyle but the eyebrows does not fit. So can I use it for my problem?

Bleachfreak @[email protected]

Yes Bleachfreak, you can fix a downloaded hair recolor the same way.

Is there a way to do all this without using SimPE? Or do I really just have to get SimPE if I want...say...my platinum blonde customs to have matching platinum blonde brows?

And PS now I realise why my custom hair colours seem to always have black brows (*cough*I started with the black hairs to make the customizing easier--lazy girl...) <.< So, thanks for that.

rosebearer you can only set them to the 4 maxis defaults, but your blondes can at least start with blonde eyebrows as default. The answer is to offer custom eyebrows that people can then further change if you want more colors (although people's eyebrows are sometimes darker than hair color). I always start with 1 hair color when making the recolors, I think that's fairly common practice - which is why this quick little fix is so handy.

Oh. Boo for that then, LOL. Good point on the eyebrow colour sometimes being darker though--I test ran some platinum brows and while they look okay on real people, on the Sims they just look...non-existent, even creepy.

Thanks much! ^_^

~*~ Edit ~*~
I forgot to ask--I remembered that I began modifying from the black hair colours because whenever I go to modify the facial hair, it always starts out as black and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get the other colours as a base. I've tried getting the closest match that I could with the hair starting at (for example) blonde and the facial hair with black but it just never looked right. I tried desaturating first as well but that didn't work out too well either.

Help?

Thank you greatly for this.
There are many times where the default eyebrows look better on a sim then custom ones and alot of hair I have downloaded recently are all linked to blond even when they should be black or red.

Dragarr, send the creators over here, they should fix it before they post. It's not hard.

It's been a while since anyone has posted here, but a quick question. What is the easiest/most efficient way to get the hair packages into SimPE? I know you can use Clean Installer to seperate out your hair recolors and can upload them into SimPE that way, so is that the easiest way? Reading the file names in the downloads folder is nearly impossible. Curiously, does it provide thumbnails as well? I have a lot of trouble recognizing which hair files are what. (though I can probably just look at the color of the hair file and make sure that the eyebrow color is correct anyway.)

mianatw - if I'm making the packages I rename them once I'm done to have proper names (the files in the saved sims folder). I'd rather fiddle around with them and sort them at that point than have to look at a folder of confusing messy names forever.

You can always rename those files btw, so if you got some files from someplace that are named messy, you can change them, it won't affect the game.

I wrote this primarily with the idea that the creator would be doing a set of hair colors and then immediately changing them, although I could see one might have many to fix. I have no idea if we have a method that makes it easier.

I used this tutorial, and it worked except if you choose a santa claus beard or another beard that doesn't look exactly the same colour as the default maxis hair colours (e.g Bob Newbie's beard) they won't show up on the Sim at all.

Does anyone know how to solve this problem?

Thanks -- now I can fix my albino sim's flaming red eyebrows. XD