generally, the answer to both those questions is 'no' -- because it's not part of the code for the game and it's a fairly deeply integrated thing - the sim's faces or their skintones - they only have 1 swimsuit on at a time, and one skintone that they have -all- the time.

Thank you so much for this guide - I have been struggling for weeks to find the perfect skin for a family I want to create, and I have continually ended up with ones that are ALMOST perfect, but have something wrong (a random piercing, a dodgy tattoo etc) and had almost given up, thinking that skinning was too difficult. Finally I found one that I really liked except for the three enormous tattoos on the stomach and back - while I'm not quite at the level of creating my own skins yet, I have at least managed to photoshop out the tatts so I can use the skin in my game!

i did all that. but now i only have textures for the normal body and not the cut or the soft bodies..am i going to have to do the same thing to the others or can i just replace the cut and soft bodies with the normal body?

keepmesafe10120 - You -can- but you really should do some work on the soft bodies at least to make them look, well, softer - it's gonna look mighty weird to have defined abs and the like that normal bodies have showing on a fat belly.

Thanks to you I finally know why the crap my skintones didn't work on every sim :P

Thanks a bunch ^^

is there something like an alpha image for the body, too? because i need to know where exactly the edges of the arms for example are...
thank you

Herzblut - you need the nude uvmap... try looking in the Tools and Templates area for the uvmaps.

I have tried to recolour a skintone, but everytime I do, the top of the head is always black which means I can't use certain hairs with them...

What am I doing wrong?

"jordinary:
is there a way of making the skintone change textures when you get out of the pool or hot tub to look wet?"

"tiggerypum:
generally, the answer to both those questions is 'no' -- because it's not part of the code for the game and it's a fairly deeply integrated thing - the sim's faces or their skintones - they only have 1 swimsuit on at a time, and one skintone that they have -all- the time."


Well, you could make the swim suit look "wet" with the alpha of the swim suit. Than you could color the area white to make it look like it has shine. Unless you wanted all swim suits to have it. That would be a pain. Plus, it would probably not be a good idea to do it to any that were made by someone other than Maxis.

I recently started playing around with recolors for objects and thought I would move on to some of the clothing and body mods. I found your tutorial to be really helpful, but I've run into a bit of a problem!

I wanted to do tattoos on the skintone since it wouldn't change with clothing (or lack thereof!) and I followed all the steps to get it into Photoshop and edit the Maxis skin with a small graphic using custom brushes. Got it back into Body Shop and at first it didn't appear. So I went back to PS and flattened my layers before saving, which solved that problem. I only altered the adult female skin as a test, but for some reason it won't show up in the game after I import it. I've gone back over your tutorial steps several times, went over a few tutorials on similar mods, and can't find any reason why the image won't show up. I have the custom skin swatch, just not the actual skin. Any ideas? It's really starting to frustrate me, so I thought I would turn to the experts here. My thanks in advance!

Okay, I think I got it.. But I just want a plain white skin, should I just overwrite everything or do it individually?

i found it was hard to get the same colour for the rest of body once i've made the face from a source file. is there any way to get the right colour tone as the original photo?

Oh, thank you really much for this tutorial! ^^

true. lol
i left him as is. i'd say you could download him from insimenator.com, but the site is being bought out by someone..

You can reduce size further by looking for duplicate textures. Do any of the ages use the same texture? Get rid of all copies of it but one, and make all TXMTs that use that texture point to it, not copies of it.

does anyone know if there exist a tutorial about makin tattos on an already made skin? Not add on´s but ones that is right on the skin Would appreatiate the help ^^

I have the same problem as Sneebs... who apparantly asked their question a year ago and never got the answer lol

Everytime I color a full skin set everything looks perfect except for that the top of the head is completely black. I don't get it; I edited it like every other file... Anyone know why it's doing that?

I looked it up all over the internet and haven't found an answer anywhere.

I use Paint.Net for editing, just in case that has anything to do with it.

d'oh I didn't mean to delete that, yeah that'll make me look like a genius lol

I was saying that I downloaded GIMP and tried again exactly step-by-step the thing I did before and it worked just fine V_V

So yeah if anyone has that problem, try it on GIMP instead.

man i waould love to do this and like the tutorial but bosy shop won't start up? help? anyone? i click it while sims 2 is not running, and then ctrl+alt+delete, look at applications, and it says its running but theres nothing saying body shop on the taskbar. this happened shortly after a few expansions. does sims 2 website have a patch? someone help, please.

Thanks for much for this tutorial, it really helped! I've now made my own skin tones :D

Hey, are you sure you're running the correct body shop? Like your most recent expansion packs one? If you're not, then that's the problem!

Cool Ive made tattoos to some of my skin tones now.

This doesn't truly help with anything. Just says if I know how to use my photo editor program, which I do.
I just do not know how to make skin tones.

Followed all the directions with this tutorial but for some reason after editing the "soft" teen skin everyone's faces (even the males) turned red while they were wearing the skins! I didn't even alter the male skins at all yet. I tried going back and fixing it by saving the original bmp file for the teen's "soft" and it didn't change anything, all their faces are still red.
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**edit

I should also say that the faces are only red while testing out the "soft" versions of the skin.

What should I do? Any suggestions? (I'll try going back into all of them and undoing the "soft" versions to make sure that isn't it for now) If anyone has an answer can y'all pm me? I don't know when I'll be back at this thread. Thanks so much! ^-^

Okay, I just checked everything and it's not just the one skin tone. Now the WHOLE body shop is doing it, and only in the "soft" skin tones that I try to check out. I even refreshed Body Shop, went to create a sim, and tried it there and it still does it. I was trying to do a recolor of a Maxis skin, I don't have any default replacement skins, and it only started once i tried to edit the tf soft skin bmp file.