Trying to Make Lipstick - Gone TERRIBLY Wrong. Help??

[piggypeach]

Hey guys,

Has anyone else seen that lipstick making tutorial by Kiara24? I was reading that and I decided to try it. I am great at creative makeup in real life, maybe if I can figure out how I can make some great creative makeup on the sims, right? WRONG. I tried to follow the directions EXACTLY but it was an epic fail every single time. I made three trials so far and I'm waiting for the game to start up right now to see if the fourth one is as bad as the first three. Can you guys help tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to improve these? (brace yourself, they're REALLY bad.)

[Whiterider]

I've moved this to the CAS parts forum, since this is more of a "this is broken, how do I fix it?" question than "I made this, how do you think it could be improved?" question.

Could you attach your textures, or images of them, please?

[piggypeach]

Thanks :) I didn't even know there was a CAS parts forum!! Sure, here is the texture and a snapshot of it:

By the way, this is the texture of the fourth trial which I haven't tested out in game yet, but judging by my previous trials and the fact that I don't really know what I'm doing predicts it won't be much different. I'll post a snapshot of it when I pull it up.

Edit: The new lipstick is still extremely bad, but it's made a remarkable recovery from the last try!!! It's actually sort of... shaped like lips!!
Edit: 5th trial is not bad in my opinion but still needs massive amount of work
Edit: 6th trial also needs work. Any help?

[Whiterider]

Ok, basically the problem is that your lips are the wrong shape. :) A sim's face is a mesh just like clothes or hair, and various points on the mesh are "mapped" to various points on the texture, so that bit of the texture will always show up on that bit of the mesh. The game can't tell that your texture is for lips, so if you put your lips on the map point for the sim's nose, she will end up with lipstick on her nose.

The important bit of the texture in this regard is the alpha. I don't know if you've worked with your alpha yourself, or just let Photoshop make it: the alpha is basically the outline, it tells the game where the edge of your texture is (so the sim doesn't end up with the black background all over her face).
This is your alpha:
http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1292785
And for comparison, this is one of the EA lipstick alphas: http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1292787

Hopefully you can see that they're very different shapes - yours is taller and thinner. The EA lipsticks pretty much cover the whole of the sim's lips and nothing else, so they're a good guide for size and shape. Of course, you might not want exactly the same shape - you may want your lipstick to spill over the sim's lips a bit, or leave the corners of her mouth clean, or whatever; you can do all this, but it's still a good idea to use an EA alpha as a basic starting point to show you what shape/size the lips are normally.

Perhaps this image will help show the difference more clearly:http://thumbs.modthesims.info/getimage.php?file=1292786
The red is your lips, the blue is the EA lips. So, I suspect that when you tried this texture out in-game, you found that it was too high, a little bit too low at the bottom and way too high at the top, and a bit too far over to the right. All you have to do to fix it is move/stretch/squish your texture so it's closer to the size and shape of the EA texture. :)

[piggypeach]

Thank you! That was EXTREMELY helpful!! I'll start working on the next update.

[mrcfreak54]

Hey, Just popping in here, But aren't you not supposed to have download links to things in your threads? Just saying :)

[piggypeach]

Well, I think that you're not supposed to add them if you just have something you can just show a picture of. But whiterider suggested that I add my texture... sooo.... yeah.

[CmarNYC]

People upload files all the time. I've never heard that we're not supposed to. If we weren't supposed to, there presumably wouldn't be a message attachment feature.

[Whiterider]

It's fine. You're not supposed to use the forums as a place to host your stuff for people to download, since finished products go in the Downloads section; but attaching works in progress/broken stuff/etc so people can help you with it is absolutely fine. :)