Hi! I have been playing TS3 for the last few years, and barely on MTS at all.

Recently, I finally got the UC, so am back to Sims2, and MTS apparently comes with that. There have been some exciting advances while I was away - so many clever things people have done. Including this.

I have no experience making skins. I can probably use your templates okay, and have found a set of 16 skins that should be good (I am finally considering moving on from HP's Idolatry). I really want freckles on some skins, though, which are not part of the set I like. How hard is it to add things like that? Can I snitch them from another texture?

No doubt I can test that theory. I am having great fun sorting everything out for my 'new' game.

Convincing freckles are difficult, but a number of creators have taken my templates and made skins with them. I included a table in my post of the ones I know about. You can pick and choose from there, or use most of your 16 and just use a few of others for the freckles, the mix and match ability of this is great.

Indeed. I may have to mix and match a bit more.
I have your textrefs in-game now, and the teen female faces in CAS have gone black. Did anyone find out why this is happening? I am happy to test some options, but no point testing what is already known - if there is anything.

Update...custom skins look fine on the model in CAS, and fine in-game. The CAS thumbnails go black when refreshed.

Default skins - teens have white face on CAS model, white face with text in-game. CAS thumbnails turn black once refreshed. Other ages have mismatched tones - facial skin is darker than body skin. My current defaults are HP's Idolatry, in case that might be any clue.

Using the mirror in-game to change appearance has no effect.

I should try different faces, maybe? Didn't check what face was generated.
And perhaps it is something to do with the texture packages being 'empty'...I can load someone's correlated set and see if that helps.
And I can take out the HP skins and try with Maxis default skins.

Update Taking out my usual skin defaults fixed the mismatched tones, but not the black faces on teen girls.

Taking out your TextRef files, and substituting Vermster's correlated set, worked! Teen girls have faces again, and I can see the skin colour changing when I alter hair colour while maintaining the hair style. Hurrah! In-game, the teen's face is normal again, but the wrong colour for her body. Changing her hairstyle in the mirror did not help, but adding a freckle facemask did make her face and body match again.

So it seems there is something in the Textref files that is wonky for the teens. Maybe the info will be useful.

The mismatch between the body and the face is a common problem with these, and it corrects itself after a skin refresh, so either get her fat or age her up, or use a custom skin refresher object - I think ChrisHatch has one.

That being said, I think there are 2 different problems here, and I don't yet have a solution for the teen girl face being blank problem.

I made my new S4Black, and created a family using default skins S1-4 Black. Vermster's set is still loaded, apart from the one new file. My package is in the quarantine folder, while Vermsters' are in my defaults folder, in case it has anything to do with load order.

Both the dark sims have paler bodies than they should. One is using Vermster S3Black, the other my new S4Black. Aging them and changing fit/fat states had no effect. The S1/S2 sims look okay, but it could be that I can't see the mismatch on the paler skins.

UPDATE : Found the issue - your male body hair files seem to be conflicting with the skins, which explains why the female sims were unaffected. The S4 body hair causes the S4 sim to have paler body than face. S3 body hair same for S3 male sim. Presumably S1 and S2 sims would be affected too, but those are females in my test family just now.

Without the body hair mod, my new S4Black works just fine!

Welp, I'm back. My buhair seems to not be showing up, and I've noticed it's not downloadable from here anymore. Is there something I've missed?

Boosterbear, the infant hair is in the first comments post.

It must load after your default skins. Mine is working now.

Phaenoh, having located the issue with the body hair, I realise that you built those files on the EA default skins - hence the colour mismatch! I want the body hair for my men, though, so I'll head over to the tutorial thread and ask how to achieve that.

aelfaed, the body hair isn't a mod, it's just another set of skins like all the others, that's why they 'conflict'. I do think I included a png overlay of the hair in my tutorial thread so you can add that to your skins.

Thanks guys, I don't know what I was thinking. <3

I finished my set! Only remade most of them two or three times.
However, they now have decent teeth and body hair, and there are only two adult-elder swaps which cause obvious colour-changes.

The skins are Aquilegia's You Are What You Eat, with LovestainedHeart's addons to fill out the number, so everything is the same apart from skin colour and some differences in body hair. I am already wondering whether I want to make another lot, using skins from multiple creators, for even more variety!

Thanks for discovering and sharing this, I think it will be fabulous.

If the skin creator allows it, please consider uploading them here at MTS! With how this skins work, the more variety available, the more we all win!

Can't upload here, the skins are anatomically correct.
I believe all the TOUs from the various creators are fine, so maybe I will share them elsewhere.

I have uploaded my set. The upload post is here: http://gardenofshadows.org.uk/garde...31757#msg731757

In case something happens to that post, the files (including images and readme) are on SimfileShare here: http://simfileshare.net/download/387446/

I'm new to the sims 2 and just happened across your old MTS post! Love it

I have pondered this download for a long time. It was extremely appealing, but I wanted a range from dark roast espresso to milk and I knew having elders lose their proper skin tone would drive me crazy. Today I had a new idea, and I wonder if there is any reason why it wouldn't work: can I have two sets of the same skins, one correlated, the other custom, and just assign the custom version of the proper skin in SimPE when my sim becomes an elder?

Hi Phaenoh, I tried to make an alien skinset with your templates, but only the skin assigned to the black hair works.

If I switch hair colors in CAS/Bodyshop, the skintone stays the same as the black one, even though I'm using different skins for each hair color. And if I remove only the black hair skintone package from my DL folder (keeping all the others from the set I made), all my aliens (regardless of hair color) revert back to Maxis' skintone.

It's as if the game is seeing the black hair skin package as a regular alien default, not part of a correlated set, even though I used your templates.

Do you know what it could be? I've made correlated skinsets for my own use before (granted, it was the natural set) and I never had this issue. Thanks in advance for your attention.

Hey! I wanted to let you know, that I have encountered the same problem as @Dune there. Used these skins just fine for weeks, till one day I tried to change Bottom Summerdream's (from Veronaville) appearance using a mirror. She was already two days into being a teenager. As Dune already mentioned, her face now is just plain white, with some sort of error text written all over. No other lifestate sims are affected. Went to CAS and male teenagers were fine, but as soon as you switch too female teenager, the face turns white. I have no CC clothing or hair, my mods mostly consist of gameplay hacks and fixes. I do have a make up replacement by Dreadpirate on Tumblr and ''Defuglified Maxis faces 27 CAS face replacements for all ages'' by Selzi on MTS.

Nideila, probably the female teen facial texture is missing from the S3/Red Hair package.

Oh, I see.. Any idea how I could solve this issue or perhaps work around it?

Nidella, there are some options:
If you can use SimPE, you need to put the correct image into the file. If you find the skinset that was used, you can extract the image yourself, following the creation process Phaenoh outlines.

Or you could put in any face image you like, instead, which probably won't match properly but would give the teen a face.

Or, if using SimPE is no good, you could remove that particular file altogether, and put in one from a different set that has all the images.

Hope one of those options works for you.

Does this prevent brown sims from being blonde or ginger? I like the wider variety of skin tone because the four are so basic and there's four, but it looks like you're restricting hair colour.

It honestly makes no sense to link skin colour to hair colour.

Just a quick question will the skintone/haircolor link be genetics only or a permanent correlation? IE: If I make a sim in CAS with blonde hair at the darkest skintone (which I was thinking of making as a mild tan tone) then later in my gameplay have her "Dye" her hair to Black (the darkest tone being akin to Maxis default Dark one) will she go from the mild tan skintone to the Maxis dark skintone as well?

@Phaenoh

The problem with teen faces was mentioned again in a help topic here. Looks like it's because the teen skins include a missing reference to teen face skins that don't exist, because maxis teen skins use the adult face textures and there are no TXTRs for TF. Maxis teen females have teen TXMTs but use adult TXTRs (I recently pulled some creature skins and it seems to be true for alien skins as well). Pretty sure male teenagers have separate faces from adults so those should be fine, it's just a problem with teen female.

Fix below that (hopefully) should fix sims' faces once the skins are fixed - if they're not fixed, try taking the sim to a mirror, and/or delete cache files:

The best default skins ever! I tried so many MM defaults but this is the best one I could find so far

I know Sims 2 is not relevant anymore, but I have a simple question, maybe someone will answer.
Although I really enjoy the idea of 16 different skintones and removing the unrealistic light-hair dark-skin combo, there is one thing bothering me:
An S1 Black-haired (pale skintone) Sim and an S4 Red-haired (medium skintone) Sim have a big probability of producing an S4 Black-haired offspring, who has dark skintone... Daddy's gonna think someone else is involved in the picture, and we don't want that.
Any suggestion, besides reloading and hoping for a different skintone outcome, or manually altering the baby's skintone?
Thank you! =)