To be more specific, skin tones that involve tattoo-like prints.

I'm trying to create a skin tone for a set of Sims who need to (genetically) have tiger stripes on their skin. I apologise in advance if I'm just being either ridiculously dense or blind but I honestly couldn't find the right tutorial. x.x I know I can prolly just send in a request for someone to make the skin tone for me but I enjoy plowing through the whole torturous process of custom item creation (or refinishing as the case may be) to make it. ^^;

Um...speaking of genetically--if I make a skin like that it will be passed on right? Because the hair and eyes I made were... <.<

Thanks muchly.

Yes, it will. Custom skintones do get passed on to children, and generally custom content is dominant over default content, so more than likely, any children of sims wearing that skin will also have tiger stripes. You would, of course, need to make sure you recoloured the baby/toddler/child skintones in the project folder along with the adult ones if you want them to also have markings, but you can do some fun stuff like make the stripes fade in as they get older, or once they get to be teens, have females with pink stripes and males with blue or whatever.

If you look through the Downloads section under skintones, there are several not too terribly far back that look pretty much like Maxis, but are custom, and have special settings so they work more like Maxis skintones - rather than genetic dominance of custom skintones, they can "blend" so a dark sim and a light sim could have a medium baby... if that's something you'd want to somehow incorporate, go hunt 'em down and take a look.

Rocking. ^_^ That special settings thing though...is that a SimPE adjustment or is there something I can do without using SimPE?

Slightly off-tangent: I believe it was your tutorial that I followed to make the custom eyes...it's very addicting. Oo

That would be a SimPE setting, yes. Relatively easy to do, just one little number to change, and I believe there's instructions/links to instructions on that download page (yes, I'm lazy and not looking right now). I can find it for you if looking through the skintones doesn't bring it up, but it should be relatively easy to find... there's not THAT many skintone pages. Looks like Maxis, says something about genetic custom in the title. Lemme know if you need any help with it beyond my halfassed info.

(Probably not my eye tutorial since I haven't written one on that though I have linked to one I really liked in the Photoshop Hints & Tricks thread and offered a couple pointers on another tutorial on doing 'em in Photoshop. Either way, glad you're having fun with making 'em. They are addictive, aren't they?)

I'll see if I ever get up enough energy to try and comprehend fiddling with SimPE. Knowing me, I'll completely screw up the game or something like that. Oo But then that's what tutorials are for, hehe.

I'm kind of trying to study the custom skins people have made, particularly the ones with the body tattoos since the print I'm pondering would be similar to a full-body tattoo. Thanks for the tip! ^_^

(Oops, my bad. But yes, they are. Very, very addictive.)

If you change the SimPE settings, then your skins will potentially choose from other skins (including maxis). If you're trying to do fur and such, I'm not sure that is what you want. If you leave the skin settings as bodyshop creates them, then I believe they will simply pass to the offspring as the overriding genetic - if both parents have custom skin tones, then the children will get one of the two skintones. (that is if my ancient memory of the system works right).

I find the 'make it genetic' settings appropriate for skins that are all of the same kind (like human, lol) but I don't think I'd want to try and categorize how a furry skin would fit in the mix.

*giggles* No, no. No fur. Just the stripey pattern (in a sort of tattoo-y manner)--which has, so far, been a pain to seamlessly piece together. OO I might have to try and actually find maybe a bit of gift-wrapping paper or fabric that I can scan. The images I've Googled aren't really working out.

Or I could just lack the mad skillz to make it work. ^^;

Doesn't matter if it's fur or not. If you want it passed on genetically (in that ALL the offspring has the skin) do not make any changes with SimPE to your bodyshop file. Then it will be in the usual 'override' setting, and will, if both parents have the skin, make more little stripey ones. If you want it to act as a normal light, med, dark skin, then the code changing stuff would apply. But then your normal sims might also have a baby of this coloration.

Vewy, vewy intwesting... But yeah, I want to keep it as more of a genetic thing. It's a good thing, then, that the custom genetics just keep getting passed on down the line--SimPE still scares me. *shifty eyes*

Thanks!