Yes, you've read it right! While most people seek the way to lower a polygon count, I'm looking for the info on how to increase it.

Please, look at this. I know, I know - it is a Sims 1 head mesh, but I would've ask Administrators not to move it to Sims 1 section, please! In current Sims 1 community (not just here, but as a whole), no people left with knowledge about actual meshing. That's exactly why I’m asking here - mesh is a mesh, in whichever version of the game, right? And concluding from my observations, Sims 2 creators are most knowledgeable people on this behalf.



As you can see, it is extremely low poly, crude and angular. Of course, most of details are added in-game by texture, but I would like to make a more detailed face and more smoothed out skull. I don't mind some manual sculpting, but there are too little polygons to my taste to work with. Any tips? Thank you in advance!

Hey! Cool to see people working on Sims 1 CC.

You can use the various "Subdivide" options under the "Face" menu. They'll split the selected faces into smaller triangles the indicated number of times. Disclaimer, I've not used MilkShape for modeling in like a decade, so there may be better ways to do it. The geometry this give isn't super clean/workable.

(Tbh my advice as a Sims 2 person who meshes is to learn to use Blender. You can easily make your model there, then import it into MilkShape afterwards.)

I was going to poke my head in if there wasn't a response (Sims 3 person, getting even further diluted from the source! ) but I will second that, while it has huge utility in supporting older games formats, Milkshape is quite a deprecated program. Where possible, it would open a lot of options up for you to export the mesh out (usually in Wavefront Object format) and you're then able to work on it in any modern 3D software. Then you can bring the finished product back and use Milkshape purely as the middle-man.

In Blender, you can manually add cuts to faces, subdivide, as well as separate parts and add new edges between them (either manually or with automated features like Bridge Edge Loops). All depending on how precise or manual you want it to be.
If you're more comfortable with Milkshape, you can look up those terms and see if there are tutorials on the equivalents for that program