Recently i've been trying to make custom skin to show the specular highlight , which is pretty common used in the Sims3&4.

Here's my miserable journey ：

First,i just changed the txmt parameters for specular highlight (stdMatSpecCoef & stdMatSpecPower) of the skin, but nothing happened in Bodyshop， no matter how i changed the numbers. Then i changed the shader from SimStandardMaterial to StandardMaterial， yet everything still the same.

After that, i realized maybe it was the clothes override the specular highlight of the skin. So i changed a few things in the clothes recolor txmt, including specular parameters and shader. Well, in this time i did got something.

• Specular highlight won't show under the SimSkin & SimStandardMaterial shader.

• Specular highlight will show under the StandardMaterial shader. However, the alpha part (which suppose to show the skin) become transparent, only the clothes texture rendered the highlight.

• Specular highlight won't show unless the grayscale is above 50%.

At last, i did some experiments with showerproof skin, which attach skin texture directly to the mesh. And the specular highlight just showed up.
You can see that shiness (black arrows) changes with lights in the pics below, it's more visual at the tattoo part.
But that's not enough. Highlights only show in nudity mode, it disappear when sim people put his clothes on.

Finally, i want to ask is there any way to make the skin texture like, dominate the txmt for the body part subset? In that way, i can use custom skin to control the body part, and clothes recolor to control the clothes part? If that's possible, it'll be easier to make custom clothes in two subsets.

English is not my native language, so, if there's anything confuses you, feel free to PM me, or replay the thread instead please. I tried my best.Thank you

The skin texture depends on several things. From how you've tested this out, I think you may have to change every single piece of clothing to make it work. Also wouldn't change the shader setting for skins (leave it at SimStandardMaterial if that's the original setting), because you may end up with some issues.

SimSkin is required to show transparent textures over skin. The two other settings don't work as overlay for skin.

SimStandardMaterial is more used for mesh groups that aren't supposed to show skin, like alpha-editable parts or conversions from other games with different UVmapping (3t2/4t2 for instance).

Bodyshop doesn't always show all the changes because I'm pretty sure Bodyshop has limited shaders (bump works). You may want to try out the changes ingame before you decide whether or not they actually work.

Specular in TS2 has a tendency to get a very metallic/shiny look to it no matter the settings, because there aren't specular maps to properly control the shininess like in the two other games, so everything gets the same shine (this may not look good for skins). Personally I tend to dislike a lot of shininess unless I make something metallic or otherwise very shiny, because the specular highlights don't show at all in indoor lighting, but show ultra-shiny outdoors (but I'm not sure if this is a fault of a lighting mod I used to have, or because most CC creators don't seem to edit the TXMT at all).

Hi, simmer22. Thanks for your replay.

I did test a lot of times to see how Bodyshop and ingame respond when change the shader type and txmt specular parameters, it turned out all 3 types work fine with skin and clothes recolor files, and have its own differences in rendering.

Maybe i didn't make myself clear after all. Normally, the clothes texture and the skin texture use the same mesh and have only one group, and the clothes texture works with alpha to decide which part to show the skin, which part to show the clothes, right?
Now, i use a clothes file which have two or more groups, make one of them display only the body part, the other groups display for the actual clothes part, things like high poly mesh maybe. I don't need alpha to seperate the bare skin and the clothing.
What i wondered is that if it's possible to make the skin txmt setting take over the clothes recolor txmt setting(which works on the body group) to show the highlights. And keep the clothes recolor txmt(which works on the actual clothes group) show as well.

The reason why i test on the showerproof skin is that the showerproof skin txmt setting directly works on the body mesh, there's no clothes recolor txmt setting in between. The skin itself is like clothes recolor to the mesh. And it turned out specular setting in the skin txmt can be rendered. Hope now you understand more what i am attempted doing here....

Sims 2 can't use specular map, which is sad. But you don't need to use specular map to show the specular highlight. I believe it will be more realistic with bump map and higher poly counts mesh body. I don't need it to be super shine, i just hope to get some subtle shiness to make skin more realistic.

Here's what i tried with marvel's showerproof skin, on the outside, it is super shine. But when you put a ceiling light at some distance in a dark room, and rotate the camera, it'll show the subtle highlights in the nudity mode. Adult male normal bodyshape only. Hope you can give it a try, thank you for your replay !!

I'm not sure it works that way since clothes all have individual TXMTs.

The alpha/noblend groups are usually separate from the skin groups and usually don't have any skin showing. You can add extra SimSkin groups, though.

The skin does decide a little bit over the clothes, but so far I've only seen it decide the texture size (A while ago I figured the only way to mke higher quality skin-overlay textures for clothes without adding a second group was to size up the actual skin - but I've only tried for infant and to some extent toddler, and I wouldn't recommend doing it for other ages. It doesn't always work properly for toddlers because of bump maps). None of the TXMT settings had any say over which texture the skin used.

Showerproof skins are in essence just naked clothes linked to a skin. The naked bodies are also basically naked clothes. The face and head textures may be more difficult to edit (hairs, makeup... I'm not sure how overlays would react to this)

You may want to check out transparent and invisible skintones, because it's possible they can shed some light to how TXMT settings work and maybe get some ideas to how they've solved similar issues. I think the transparent skins work with most clothes using SimSkin.
https://modthesims.info/d/146824/tr...in-recolor.html
http://modthesims.info/d/161350/tra...n-recolors.html
http://modthesims.info/d/108487/ske...dler-ready.html

For the transparent skin, here's funny thing. The transparent skin changes the blend mode to additive to make skin transparent, and sometime enable the envb to make it more reflective. Changing both blend mode and envb in the skin txmt will affect the clothing part if it's in the same group, yet changing the specular setting in skin txmt won't. It seems that specular setting in clothes recolor txmt is superior than what's in the skin txmt. I guess specular highlight did not really important when Sims 2 was programmed For the skeleton skin, is that the skeleton clothes come with the game? I'm not sure what it is in the "skeleton basic cloth package" file.

The other thing bothers me is that there is some priority principles when different textures work on the same mesh. Things like clothes cover the skin, the tattoo overlay shows in middle, or the bottom texture covers the top texture in casual when they are overlapping. I just don't know what it is. I know there's a "Texture Overlay XML" in blush file, but i don't know what it is or if it's working in skin. I think i should learn SimPE from the beginning.....

Thank you for your patience!!

Keep in mind that the specular has two settings, "stdMatSpecCoef" (visibility) and "stdMatSpecPower" (strength/intensity)

Most clothes, and skin (by default) have
stdMatSpecCoef: 0.099,0.099,0.099
stdMatSpecPower: 2

If the skin has one setting and the clothes have another, it could be one overrides the other. Clothes with faulty bump maps will for instance cause issues for the entire mesh, not just the clothes.