Either you've found my Correlated Skins thread in Bodyshop > Genetic Sets, or you cruise through Bodyshop Modding for fun. Either way, I'm glad you are here. I've discovered a way to link the skin tones to a hair color, effectively giving us 16 default skins for our game instead of 4.

Now, there isn't much reason for me to go through and tell you how to create your own package, all Correlated skin packages will be the same, and I've already created the templates for you. The secret is the line in the skins that says "hairtone: 00000s". I noticed it one day and tried putting a hairtone number in it, and wouldn't you know, something unexpected happened. It actually responded to the number being there. Most of the time, stuff just doesn't work. This time it did. Now, its not just as easy as changing that number, because it doesn't work if you don't have all 4 hair colors, and a default mod that will change the normal one. Then you have to make sure that every single property set is changed as well, and the skins need to be familified and labeled as S1-S4. That's why you shouldn't bother making the package yourself. I've gone and done it and made everything as user-friendly as possible, such as changing texture names from things like suf8923b58og_txtr to afface_txtr. You know what image you are supposed to put there when it has a good descriptive name. Go download my template from this thread: Correlated Skins the template you need is in the comments, under Templates.

Ok, you have your template sets? Next, you need a copy of the skintone you want to make into a Correlated Skin. If it isn't a skin you've created, ask permission before uploading. (You can do anything you want for your personal game, but please consider sharing if you can!)

I'm going to be using ganchi's Idolatry of Freckles Pale skin.


Next, decide which of the 16 Correlated Skins this will be. I'm trying to create a very freckled ginger skin, so I should use S1Red.


Open it up if you are not making an all-ages skintone. You will need to delete out all the resources pertaining to the ages you aren't going to create for. Lets say you don't want to add toddler skins. You will need to delete the 'pubodynormal' and 'puface' and if there is one, 'puhair', for Property Sets, Texture Images, Material Definitions, and 3D ID. All except the 3IDR will be easy enough to spot. For the 3IDR, you will need to click 'All Res' and find the 3IDR by its Instance number. It is paired with a Property Set. If you haven't clicked save yet, you will see your crossed out property set and just make sure you delete it's pair. Otherwise, find the ones that don't have matches anymore. There is a single 3IDR with a low instance number that doesn't have a match. Don't delete that one by mistake.


Then, open up the skin you want to use in SimPE. Export every single texture. It would be helpful to name them as you export them, so you can build the new skin faster.


After you have all the skin images, open up my template and start replacing all the placeholder graphics with the ones you exported. Use 'Build DXT'.


Navigate to your graphics and use Format: 'DXT3' and Sharpen: 'None'. Then click 'Build'.


Then click 'Commit'. Click 'OK'. Do this for the rest of all the textures. When you are finished 'Save' and test it out in game.


Remember you need to have the other 15 skins in your game or they won't display in CAS correctly. You can use my Texture Referencing set until you have more of your own skins. The TextureReferencing skins will just pull your normal default skins, whether they are the Maxis ones or some pretty creator ones you have.

If your sims show up in Bodyshop with very bright and fuzzy outfits, that means you missed one of my placeholder graphics. Make sure that's the only one that's missing and then exit the game and pull up your skin in SimPE again and find the one that didn't get changed. Remember to 'Commit'. Remember to 'Save'.

Try it out in the game again. If it works and you'd like to share it, we'd love to have it here at MTS. Send me a link and I'll add it to my list of Correlated Skins! It would also be nice if we could keep the same naming convention going, so it's easier for people to find them in their downloads folder to make sure they have all 16. Name yours 'CorrelatedSkin_S#Color_YourName-SkinName.package'. Like a skin I make that is for red hair and pale skin with freckles all over would be 'CorrelatedSkin_S1Red_Phaenoh-Ginger.package'.

Well, I'm obviously in over my head, but hey, I can navigate the IRS' paperwork, so I'll figure this out eventually. Thanks for your patience.
My problems, as usual, are in using SimPE. So, I've got the txtr files extracted and I'm working on the which-is-which problem. There are thirteen txtr images, compared to twenty-four in the template. I think that different ages are sharing the same face. Is that possible? I have two faces (one has teeth one does not) and one face-and-body, which I think might be the baby. Four male bodies, four female bodies, and two texture-less rectangles. Has Hysterical Paroxysm done something especially brilliant to make these skins? http://www.modthesims.info/download...5#startcomments I'm trying to use Adoration for S4Black.
I thought the way to see what I was doing would be to try putting them in and seeing what happened. (Question to self, worst that could possibly happen? Answer: reinstall windows. Okay, then, that I can do.)
Now I find I'm short Nvidia DDS. Gah. And Nvidia's down . . . wonder if cnet has it.

HP has doubled up on some of her textures, maxis does it too (zombies all have the same face). The face without teeth is the baby, and you can use the other face for all the others. The face and body is the baby. I'm not sure what she did to get four female bodies. Usually each age has 3 (fit, normal, and fat) and the three ages look different in the chest area. Elders are saggy and teens are smaller. Child and toddler usually have a shorter torso and longer legs. That might be one of the male skins. What you should do is open up the Material Definitions for the different ages and see which number they are referencing. That's how to figure out what goes where.

You can go about it the simple way and just put each texture into the spots I've created, or (the better way) is to include the image once and change the matdef references for the rest of them. I wrote a tutorial about making a TextRef outfit, the idea is the same. It's also possible to go the other way and add extra skin images. I tried to make sure that I included all that most people would use, but the hair is shared between ages, and kids bodies are shared between genders. To add another texture, clone one of the textures, rename it using the standard naming conventions, hit Fix TGI, use Build DXT to place your new image, Commit, and Save.

Okay, thanks. I think I've got the first part. HP has all males, TF through EM, using the same texture for fit and normal, and another for fat. The other two I thought were male are the child and toddler. The TF and AF share textures the same way, EF has their own two. One of the rectangles is all the hairs except TM, which is the other one. (Hair means top of the head?) One face for all but baby, baby face, baby body. Everything's accounted for. Thank you very much for helping me figure this out.
I'm going to have to reread the texture referencing tutorial when I'm more awake. It almost makes sense . . . I'm going to sleep on it. I love the idea of smaller files since I'm going to have more of them.

How do you apply infant clothing for the 16 different skins?

julie, if you are just doing infant skins, download my infant hairs package and use that as your template. You won't need all the other ages, so it would be a waste of space to start with them. All you do is paint 16 different infant clothes straight onto their skins and follow the tutorial using those images instead. If you are asking about clothes that aren't on the skintones, I don't have that ready for you yet.

Thank you.

When I've changed the material references in SimPE, then do I delete the extraneous texture templates or just leave them alone?

Hi, this might be something I've missed or done wrong because I am such a noob at SimPE, but I noticed that in the template for S1 blonde the texture for the baby's body misses out the 'bu' in its name but in the Material Definition it references it as bubodynaked. Is this a problem? Although this is not so relevant to me personally because I am planning to use your baby skintones with the hair so as I understand it I am deleting the three baby textures from these templates anyway
Thank you for your amazing mod and helpful tutorial!

EDIT:
Another question - am I right in thinking in your templates all the ages share the same hair texture? I could only find one (uuhair). This makes sense to me because they wouldn't need to look different but I am converting skins from Starsims which has different textures for the elder hairs to the other ages, which share. The elder ones are a slightly lighter colour (and male and female are also different shades!) so I'm guessing this might look strange in game if they just use the texture for the other ages because it might not match their body. Maybe the idea is that their complexion pales slightly as they get older?

2nd EDIT:
Just noticed there are options for different elder hair textures in the S1 brown template.

Sunbee, what you change the matdef, delete the texture.

hodsh, yikes that sounds like a bad problem with the baby body. I'll have to check that and fix it asap if there is a problem. As for the hair templates, I thought they had separate uf and um hair, but maybe not. It's easy enough to add in another texture though. Clone the hair texture, and then change its name to be something like euhair (elder unisex hair), hit Fix TGI, and then in the matdef files, change the elder hair files to point to your new image.

Edit: Fixed! Let me know if you notice any others.

In line with hodsh1's observation, in S4Black, afbodynormal and afbodycut have the same matbaseTextureName: ##0x5f879c45!afbodynaked-nude-s4 Which was, with the particular skins I'm looking at, more of an, oh, put that texture over there not over here thing.
S4Black looks nifty in game. Moving on to S3Black, and thank you so much for all your help with this.

In some of my skintones, I prefer them to be bald since that's what their species is. Will this force me to put hair on them?

I just went to download the DDS utilities and cannot find the download. Instead, there is a page saying they've been suspended due to hacking. Where can I get the dds to download? This is the page I get, http://www.nvidia.com/content/devzone/index.html and it doesn't allow me to search the site and find them.

Yeah, I found that last night, but then eventually did turn them up: I'd put them in a weird place on my hard drive. There are other sites which claim to have them if you search with google but I don't know if any are trustworthy. You might just have to wait for Nvidia to get their site back up.

My newest where did I go wrong: I'm not sure when exactly this occurred, but in testing S2Black, with the S3Black and S4black in the game (I'm checking the baby skins are right), plus the texture referencing files, I found that the other hair colors, the teen female face is greyish-white in bodyshop and has letters on it in game. Newspaper girl here is a brunette, I think.

Crap. Ok, its fixed now.

No, you can make them whatever you want. If you want them bald, leave them bald. It's your skin.

Sunbee, if you don't have the brown color in your game, nothing is going to work. That's the file that changes the default ones. If you don't have the other skintones done yet, that's what the template textures look like on a sim! Keep going, it's not bad yet.

I thought that's what the texture referencing files were supposed to prevent--and do, in every other gender/age. I'm taking the pic down now you've seen it. I've got my four blackhaired choices done.
I'll work on brown tonight--after the calf is fed, the chickens are tended, the hotdogs are served for the 4-H kids, my mom's friends have safely gotten off the plane been fed, and stashed in an hotel, and . . . maybe I'll work on brown tomorrow, after all.

I'm not entirely sure that the TextRef ones have the tfface issue fix in them or not. If you still have weirdness after the brown ones are done, then I'll need to look at stuff again for you. Maxis was dumb and linked teen female faces to the adult ones. I fixed that in my project, for the most part.

So does anyone know where I can download the DDS files, since the main site is only giving that hacked message?

Argh. All four Browns have only two material definitions: buhairbald and tfface. This is downloaded today, the 21st, because you said above that you'd fixed something in one. What did I do? Is there a tutorial for adding the others somewhere that I can follow?

Sunbee, you don't need the other matdefs for the brown files. Just put your textures on top of the ones in the template. We are using the game's normal matdefs for the browns. Let me know if that doesn't work. So far, I think you are doing fine.

Mornin' Phaenoh,
Since I was replacing the matdefs, there's no textures there on most of them for the game to use. I mean, I have between twelve and sixteen textures, depending on which of these skins I'm using, so how do I tell all the faces except baby to look at the afface texture if there's no matdefs? Is there a way I can do that? Or do I just need to copy the textures in multiple times on the browns?

Well, I think the thing to do there is open up the original game files and grab the matdefs you are missing. They are in Sim3D > Sim02.package in the main game files. Look for things that say afbodynaked, that's what you might need. You only need to pull the ones that will be sharing textures though. Let me know if you need more help. Are you saying that HP's skins don't have easy names? I thought we figured that one out already. Maybe post up your packages and I'll see what you are talking about.

I googled it and there was a download on the first site that came up. I was a little nervous at first, but checked it out and it seemed ok. I downloaded it and it is now working for me. Hope this helps!

Nope, you got it. I really haven't done anything like this before--followed Marja's default replacement tutorial, but nothing nearly this complicated.
So I can just copy the matdefs from the game files to the template I'm working on, and now I know where to look for them. I'll be back when I screw up something else or get confused again. I appreciate your patience. Edit: Oh, I see what you were saying. Some of HP's skins have more textures than others, so while Adoration has twelve, Innuendo has sixteen. I can figure out which texture goes to which matdef now, though, so that's all right. I'm learning.

Okay, one more quick question: base game or M&G Sim02.package, or something in-between?

Basegame one should be fine. I don't really know why they kept doubling them up and including all the old stuff, but I've always used the basegame ones.

Ok, so, here's a question: Is it possible to do this with custom skins? That is, to create a package of one custom skin that actually contains four different skins (one linked to each hair color)?

The reason I'm asking is, yet again, my danged anthro Sims. I plan to try out your template for them this weekend, and originally I had planned to use mostly solid furry skins with some patterned (tabby etc) skins mixed into them. But today I realized it might be even more awesome to make a set of 16 solid or near-solid skins as my eugenics defaults and then make hair-color-coordinated bunches for the patterned skins. That way I could still have a chance of kids taking after both parents even with custom skins (for example, black cat + red tabby cat = black tabby cat) but without risking a patterned skin being produced by two solid-furred parents. I *think* I would prefer that system to having some patterns mixed in and some used as regular, non-hair-linked customs (even if it does leave me with the issue of whether and how I should geneticize said custom bunches).


So anyway... is this possible? If so, how? Thanks in advance!


Edit: You know, now that I think about it, it might be an option (provided that eugenic custom skins are possible) to use *only* custom skins even for the solids. That way I don't need to worry about, for example, a very light solid furred Sim and a lightish patterened skin producing a dark solid offspring... I don't use townies and only minimum NPCs in that particular hood so that wouldn't be an issue, so the only downside to that would be that a dark solid plus a light solid couldn't produce a medium solid which would be a bummer. Hmm... tough choice. I need to stop brainstorming about this until I know whether eugenic custom skins are even possible (with my limited coding skills, hah).