Today I fiddled with Delphys CTU with the goal to create a face overlay (cosmetics) with the appearance of Darth Maul (most underestimated Star Wars villain).

The face overlay part was not too difficult, I took the cat face and resized a Darth Maul makeup over it, this worked at first try.

Then, however I wanted to cover more of the face in black and removed to alpha mask from the DDS file to accomplish this.

In short: It worked like a charm, but after I changed the whole alphamask to white, and I tried the mask in the CAS I saw, that the sims EYES were also black. So it was clear: You can override the eye texture by placing your own eye graphic on a face overlay.

What came was some hours of fiddling end experimenting to get the exact location of the eye texture in the face overlay DDS. There is clearly room for optimization here, but for now I'm very pleased with the outcome.

The eye texture cannot be seen, if the eye color you choose ingame is to dark, a pure white works best, but this also means, that you are able to modify a custom eye created this way with the ingame color tools to some extend.

To make only an eye (and not a face mask) you have to set the whole DDS transparent via the alphachannel save the part in the lower left corner where you place your custom eye. The eyes will then be found in the CAS under Makeup - Costume Makeup.

Here are some images, have a deep look at his eyes...:


Complete image of Darth Maul in the CAS

Closeup of his head, notice the eyes!

I have also attached a scaled down image of the overlay DDS texture with the position of the eye graphic.

The face mask is far from perfect, as you can see the sims skin shimmering through at some small places. This problem is minor, however, and will be gone once we are able to change skintones.

And another one:

I noticed that the ingame makeup texture looked different from the one I imported as DDS.

I just found out that you can still modify the colors of the original cat mask to change the appearance of the imported makeup.

As a proof I attached another picture, this one with all parts of the original makeup invisble and only my new overlay shown.

Edit: No, I have not yet any idea how to create his horns...

Edit2: Yes, I think you can use this technique to overlay modified photos of real persons to create more realistic looking sims!

I know why the cat mask was still appearing on the first pics : you forget to edit the RGB file to make it match with you texture.

IE :
- Red : the global face
- Green : the "red" mask of your texture
- Blue : the black part (which are in fact empty space, but what ever)

By doing that you can create a psychedelic Darth Maul : yellow face with with mask and blue part
XD



But the way you did it is great, a big and nice open door for creator ^^

Wow this is EXCELLENT!! I love U(just kidding) Would you pleeeeeasee make a tutorial in few basic steps , how can we make new masks with new eyes :D

That is awesome, I await contact lenses with a passion!

Awesome. Multicolored, customizable eyes, here we come.

That is true for patterns but the face makeup seems to work a little different. You have a face overlay AND a face MASK in the package. The latter holds a DDS with the different layers for recoloring in the CAS the first one holds a "normal" RGB-DDS with the actual makeup. I just replaced the first one.

But, yes, it should be possible to include a layered mask file to allow more fine grained ingame-recoloring.

Edit: Attached a picture. But maybe I'm still wrong about the setup of the mask... I'll research further...

Wow, this is a lot easier than what I was trying to figure out how to do--the eye overlay actually moves with the eyes in-game? I couldn't figure out how to do that, but apparently the game can already do it XP

Cool, awesome job on the makeup and for figuring this out!

Yes, the eye texture moves with the eye ingame.

I also request a tutorial, I'm trying to make a Dr. Manhattan sim.

No-no, the costume makeup work quite the same ^^
1 - The full texture mask
=> in pale black and white colors but I don't know why, maybe for a better IG result ?? I should experiment that a little bit more
2 - The RGB file which allows you to change the mask colors


You can read in that post how I did to have a complete working mask.

There is just one difference : now with the last update by Delphy the "D tint" doesn't need to be enabled anymore ^^
=> while I was testing -with a previous version of CTU-, without the "D" enabled, I can't recolor my mask at all, strange



But the way you did it is just great, the photoskinning will be easier for TS3 creators \o/

There is one drawback, as I discovered: The pupil seems to be hardcoded in the game somewhere and cannot be changed (yet). I tried to do slitted reptile eyes, but always had the original pupil shown.

So you can only change the iris and eyeball textures this way.

I'm experimenting further ATM.

Edit: Addition: The pupil is done in the Mask resource.

I did set the mask resource to all black and the pupil was gone. :D

See:



Additional info:

The area of the DDS to place the eye texture seems to need a size of 192x192 pixels (128 pixels + 64 pixels I would think, as textures usually come in multiples of 2)

Additional info 2:

Thinking about all this and the experiments I just did, it means we should be able to do multi-layered custom eyes.

Patience, my young padawan, this is still in an experimental phase...

Is not possible to have different irises?
I mean, like David Bowie.

Nope that is not possible since the game pulls the look of both eyes from one texture.

Oh thanks. I'll mess around the textures and see what i can make. Maybe dilated pupils :D

Or maybe something like this: http://www.9mmsfx.com/lenses.html

Sorry for the double posting, but i've played around and made some textures, i'll try in the game and post screenies.

Nice, especially the blood vessels, but I think you should remove the highlights, since the game creates it's own.

I'm more than likely being stupi here as I haven't worked any of this out yet, I have limited time to sit with it. The horns, couldn't you use the baseball cap mesh? I haven't used any of the hats in game so not sure which would be best but I would think a hat would be a good base.

Don't laugh at me too loudly, I'm a beginner

Ugh, I'm still trying to figure out how to add makeup. I keep failing.

EDIT:Woot, figured the makeup part out.

I tried to use a layered image for the mask resource.

R layer for the eyeball
G layer for the iris and
B layer for the pupil

Did not work as expected: I WAS able to change the color of "my" pupil ingame but not eyeball and iris.

ATM this means: It seems that you can use a pre-colored iris that is NOT changeable ingame combined with a pupil that CAN be changed to different colors.

Another version is to remove the mask DDS from the package. That way you get your eye as defined in the face_overlay plus somewhat changeable colors even in the eyeball if you play with the sliders.

Where is the mask resource file?

Seek and thou shalt find...

I tried changing the eyes but they turned all black.

I tried changing the eyes, over the feline makeup, but all turned out dark green, and the eyes didn't show up.