Magpie's Stash

April Fool's Day generally kind of irritates me with the number of dumb and tedious pranks sites like to pull, so I thought I'd do my part to alleviate that somewhat by offering up a few old styles I've made a successful attempt to salvage by retexturing -- XM Sims 051, Peggy/Juice 0021, and Sunair 0036 & 0037. XM 0051 is for teens through elders, I believe, while the others are all ages.



All styles come in (from left to right) Dynamite (black), Depth Charge (brown), Volatile (blond), Pyrotechnic (red), and Mail Bomb (gray), and have been retextured in various combinations of Pooklet's v. 2 and 3 textures (with some additional textures from elsewhere mixed in where noted). Gray is the elder only file, so don't delete it or elders won't have that hairstyle! However, I've included base Volatile textures in each archive so you can make any other colors you need.

Juice 0021 and Sunair 0036 also come in four streaked recolors.



From left to right:
Cupcake - Primer base, streaked with PowderCake and Pentolite
Marmelade - Firework base, streaked with Torpedo and C-3
Blue Raspberry - HMX base, streaked with Fluorophore and Blasting Agent
Licorice - FlashPowder base, streaked with Fulminant and Semtex

( More previews with side shots, and download links )

This is an ENORMOUS project that started as noodling around to see if I could salvage a few Maxis meshes and grew into an absolute monster. These replacements cover 56 non-hat Basegame hairstyles; the additional 6 hiders hide the styles I loathe too much to touch. Some styles are completely retextured, others only softened a bit and recolored.

Allow me to crow: some of these styles were absolute bitches. Maxis failmapping was in full force in the basegame, with continuous parts of meshes often mapped in completely different places, making it difficult to avoid big, ugly seams with retextures (and in the case of the Short style, even Maxis couldn't avoid such).

Through careful blending, lots of cursing, and the blessing that is previewing via Milkshape, I managed to retexture these styles in a way that minimizes the weird mapping. They aren't perfect; I had to do some blending magic with the Maxis textures to get this to work, and as a result the textures a little funky along those seams. They're good enough for my game; you'll have to choose whether or not they're good enough for yours.

I also made the mullet style workable through a mesh edit as well as a retexture. The mesh is a part of the package, as the texture really doesn't work with the original mesh.

All files have been compressorized.

Preview 1 | Preview 2 | Preview 3 | Preview 4 | Preview 5 | Preview 6 | Preview 7


TEXTURE DEFAULTS

All custom 'mirror' colors have been replaced as well as the binned styles.

I've edited some styles to texture reference the opposite gender's textures, where the styles used the same mapping. This saves considerably on file size, but PLEASE BE AWARE: this means certain age conversions (AM mohawk and AM Longdreads) will end up using Maxis textures unless you fix them.

Some files may look particularly large; this is because they had many custom colors, required large texture sizes for quality, or both.

Remember, these are DEFAULT REPLACEMENTS: You can have only one of any given replacement.

DOWNLOAD Default Texture Replacements (Acorntuck through Meg)
DOWNLOAD Default Texture Replacements (Messy through Will)



BONUS! Conversions, mesh edits, addons, and texture resources


( GENDER AND AGE CONVERSIONS )


( MAXIS MESH EDITS ONLY )


( HIDERS )


( TEXTURE RESOURCES )


Credits:
Pooklet's colors (Dynamite, Depth Charge, Volatile, Pyrotechnic, and TimeBomb)
Pooklet's v.2 and v.3 textures
Nouk's Waves, Afro, and Dreads textures
Nymphy's curls edit of Nouk's Waves
AlfredAskew for the Shortsimple retexture I tweaked, softened, and blended with the Maxis texture
Almighty Hat for the braidsup, halo, lowbun, meg, poofs, rocker, and sixty textures
Alkaloid via Almight Hat for the shortmop textures
Monoblue for the PG Skater alpha
Ja, Almighty Hat, Nymphy, and Lunar Eclipse for pilfered alphas
Biobong on MTS for the Punkflip edit idea
Melodie9's many, many age conversions
Layana's texture referencing, Maxis-blending files for the conversions

I apologize for any missing credits in the text files included with the archive.

Please feel free to use my packages to build your own replacements.

*falls over*

Policy.

I can't remember if it was originally just my idea or if I was first encouraged along by AlfredAskew, but I do know her textures are what got me wanting make a gender conversion at all. Then people on GoS made pleading noises and hat_plays_sims waved an appropriate bribe, so I heaved a great sigh and converted the mesh for kids and teens as well.



Original AM mesh is by HystericalParoxysm, textures are Alfred's, colours are Pooklet's naturals binned a la Hat, Time Bomb as elder only for family 4, includes my sandy red colour as either binned in place of Molotov or in its own family.

Caveat Emptor: These files are fucking huge at 3-4mb each, even compressed. This is because the textures are high-res and there's 12 of them per file (six for the colour, six for the gray). I wasn't about to resize them and make Alfred's textures go crunchy. You'll have to decide for yourself if they're worth your while.

To make downloading easier, I split the files into groups by gender and family. Each rar contains the necessary mesh.

Download Children of the Earth F (Families 1&2)
Download Children of the Earth F (Families 3&4)
Download Children of the Earth M (Families 1&2)
Download Children of the Earth M (Families 3&4)


P.S. If you notice any of the pictures on my earlier entries/GoS posts going poof, that is because Tinypic decided to be a bunch of dicks. I'm currently testing new hosting accounts to prepare for the day Tinypic pulls the plug for good.

This is an addon set to the original All Askew hair set for women and men, and includes all of Pooklet's new naturals, including grays. It's binned the same way as the original set -- Corumbent and Landmine are familied with Grenade and Fission, elders keep their colour, the new grays are in the custom bin. Also included is hat_plays_sims's Smoke Bomb gray.

On that note, in the future I'll be using Hat's binning system, with elders turning gray, one gray per family.

Alllso included is my own homebrew colour, Fire Bottle. Molotov is too 'holy shit, RED' for my taste in naturals, and after seeing a boy with a light-but-not-pale sandy red haircolour, I realized that was what was missing for me.

Compare:


You'll notice two folders in with the extended colours: 'Molotov Custom' and 'Molotov Binned'. In the 'custom' folder, Fire Bottle is binned in Molotov's place, and Molotov is in the custom bin. In the 'binned' folder, both Nolotov and Fire Bottle are binned, but Fire Bottle has its own, lonely family of one. You can only have one, so chuck the folder you don't want.

[For the curious, under the hood Fire Bottle is composed of a bg layer of Molotov, a layer of Molotov set to Screen at 50%, and a layer of Grenade set to Saturation at 50%.]

Download.

---

In other news, I'm considering another homebrew colour, a rather bluish gray, specifically for use with short fluffy styles and updos, for those little old ladies who like to overdo the blue rinse. XD

I also need to do the last tweaks on the Gaius conversion and spend a few eternities making all of the colours for it. If I figure out just how to remove ages from a package so that Bodyshop doesn't grab defaults for the non-used ages, it'll make my life tons easier, as the mesh will only be for YAF-EF (I'm not size converting that little bastard).

Policy.

Truly short hairstyles for women are hard to come by. I'd been playing with the idea of gender converting some more, but it wasn't until Alfred Askew offered her retextures of Nouk's Sport It Short mesh was I finally moved to make a conversion of it.

And Pooklet it, natch.

So. I Pooklet'd the textures and applied them to both the Nouk mesh and my MtF conversion. The new mesh is for teen through elder women, but the textures work for all ages if you have/keep the original Nouk male mesh. If you don't want the male version, download and the All Ages mesh and delete the one that comes with the rar.

These are natural + Time Bomb (white) only. I have the textures made for the neons but I have little inclination and even less time right now to sit through all of the clicky-buttoning, so if you feel kind enough to do it for me (and not leave any out), let me know and I'll throw you the bmps.

Credits:
Nouk for the original mesh
AlfredAskew for the awesome textures and the enthusiasm for a mesh conversion
Pooklet's actions, as always

Download All Askew for Women
Download All Askew for Men
Download alternate female All Ages mesh

All Askew Extended Colours Addon is here.