Thread:Lucky107/@comment-31129923-20180315053526/@comment-26358727-20180315134157

Hi there!

I want to apologize up front because I don't have much time these days, even to work on updating my own characters. But I don't want to leave you empty-handed; all of the tools that I use to make them are completely free, barring registration, so all you really need is the time to sit down and do it. ( :

All you need is: Sims 4 or Sims 4 Demo (free with an Origin account), Sims 4 Studio (free with site registration) and an image editor (I use GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program, which is also free).

Several years ago SodaCat actually pointed me to the Sims 4 Demo because it's completely free and, for all intents and purposes, it works exactly as you would expect. It's a Create a Sim Demo. However, it's far more limited than the actual base game both in the amount of content that's available and in the modification ('mod') restrictions.

All of the personal touches I made in the Demo were done from hand-designed appearances that are as old as the characters, so I had years of references to fall back on while creating my mods. They aren't perfect to my designs, but I was lucky that most of the Demo models worked out in my favour as it doesn't support new meshes. Even then, of course, there are a handful of personal touches that had to be added by hand to each model after creation because it's simply beyond the means of the Demo.

The Sims 4 Studio allows you to extract individual components from the Demo - a shirt here, a pair of shoes there - so that you can open the image file in an image editor. From there, you make whatever modifications you want: change colours, add a logo to a t-shirt, etc. You do have to be careful to (mostly) follow the patterns laid out by the image file as they form-fit to the object mesh or basic shape, so you can't just, say... grow or shrink sleeves at will. Some things you can get away with, but it's mostly a matter of trial and error.

I won't lie to you: it takes a lot of time, practice and patience.

Maybe it's just the inexperience talking because I taught myself most of this through trial and error as the Demo is outdated now and any tutorials that exist are for the full game, but it took me almost a week just to get the mods fine-tuned. And that was only the back and forth between Sims 4 Studio and GIMP to get the clothing pieces done, not including screenshots and additional editing.

If you do decide to try your hand at it and you make it that far, let me impart a tip: while I use the standard in-game poses for the yearbook photograph, I use poses from TheSimsResources for the full-body shots. I believe TheSimsResources requires registration, but most poses - unless they require an additional mod, which will be stated in the description - work seamlessly between the base game and the Demo.

Unfortunately, I won't be posting my own mods for download because they're full of holes (that I fix manually for each picture) and I've had one too many negative experiences with plagiarism. However, these are the tools and basic process I follow to make them, so if you find yourself with some spare time you might be able to use some of this to help yourself through it. ( :