What are non-default faces? They're face templates that don't replace one of the original Maxis 27 faces in your game. Will they spawn on NPCs? Absolutely. Is there a limit to how many you can have? Unknown. There really aren't that many non-defaults out there right now, so, while I'm inclined to believe that the only limit is what your computer can handle. I know that all of them showed up at the same time in BodyShop on my computer. I know that all of them work in all ages and that they don't cause crashes, at least in my game. As for why anyone would want 48 non-default face templates...I play a game with a 55 skintone set, a 92 eye color set (not counting the 7 alien eyes), and a few hundred Pookleted hairs (as in a few hundred meshes...), all in 16 naturals and 4 grays. Does that explain it? As for which sets these match, the set I started with is
Pooklet's We've Got Obsessions (no picture available, but they can still be downloaded from Pooklet's archive), though they should also match
Trapping's Permanent Features. As for why the previews are BodyShop, Dominiquex set the precedent there.
There are a few things I can't promise, though... When they do spawn on NPCs, they won't spawn at an accurate height, of course. In other words, if you want your Pigmys to actually be Pigmys, you'll have to use the stretchskeleton cheat. They also won't necessarily spawn with accurate skin, hair, and eye colors. In other words, you might end up with freckled, red-haired, green-eyed African types spawning in your game. I also can't promise that they'll breed well. When Sims have a baby, they don't go halfway between mommy's features and daddy's features. They get one Sim's forehead, another Sim's nose, etc. Drastically different cheekbones, especially, tend to cause odd-looking children, and this group of templates has very, very different features across the range, cheekbones included. That's just a limitation on the game itself. The other thing non-defaults fail to do is catalog their individual features, so I'm terribly sorry if you want to put the nose from "Central African" and the lips from "Melanesian" on the same Sim. Again, this is the game itself.
There are two extra notes of policy for these:1. If you're going to do something explicitly racist or derogatory, I'd prefer that you didn't use them or, at least, don't link me to whatever you're doing. I do not support racist use of these. (Historically accurate or educational? Sure. Defamatory? Absolutely not.)
2. If you want to turn these non-defaults into defaults, be my guest. I will not be making any default faces of these or any others, so you're free to take these non-defaults (or any Sim I share for download, really) and turn them into a default face template, but please do give credit.
Disclaimer: I based these off of types listed in a book on drawing and tweaked them using photographs of people from those regions. They're not necessarily "pretty" and certainly aren't perfect. They're meant to be archetypes, not chariactures, and I've gone out of my way to try to make them accurate and not offensive. That said, I'm terribly sorry if you're offended by something (including my lack of visual arts skills) or if the [insert type here] doesn't look like your [insert relative here] from [insert place here]. All humans exist on a range of features, skintones, eye colors, hair colors, etc. Face templates are a starting point, not a be-all and end-all of a particular group of people, and I'm not trying to imply that all people from a particular area look exactly alike. (An example of this would be that my maternal grandfather's family, my husband's father's family, and the family of the violin teacher I had as a child all came from the same ethnic group...in fact, from the same small area of one country, yet none of these individuals not related by blood look remotely alike, despite all of them having features that are present in the archetype.)
As for why a certain group is not present, the groups not covered, such as "white American" and "black American" tend to have ancestry that's mixed between types that are listed and tend to have features that are virtually impossible to pin down as anything other than broad generalizations, such as "the average of all of the types present in the countries of origin common to that area." In other words, your defaults should cover them, as they're generalized. If you're curious as to why there's a historic type included alongside the modern type from the same area, I play a medieval game. The historic type is accurate to the period I play.
Yes, I know the term "Pigmy" isn't politically correct, but the trouble is that there's no other term that encompasses all of the groups of that type. The same goes for "Mongoloid," except, in that case, the other possible term, Asian, includes several other types as well. I've mostly used the terms that the drawing book I referenced used. (I swapped "Irano-Afghani" for "Persian" because it was close in meaning, not horribly offensive, and didn't include a hyphen, which could have messed things up in BodyShop...I wasn't sure.) And yes, I did have to lighten the skin tones of a couple of the types that tend toward the very darkest skintones so that you could see the features clearly. That's BodyShop lighting and a need to actually know what you're downloading, not me trying to impose a western beauty ideal or something. I also realize that some countries don't recognize certain areas as countries (Israel, Palestine, Tibet, and Kosovo, for example), while others do. That said, they're part of geography.
I've also tried to be as culturally sensitive as possible when taking preview pictures while still allowing you to see the entire face of the Sim in question. In other words, the types that are native to majority-Muslim countries have men with beards, but not meshed beards, so you can see the chin shape clearly, and the women of the same archetypes are wearing the clubkitty hijab and non-revealing clothing. On the other hand, there are some groups (in particular, the Ainu, the Inuit up until very recently, and some Polynesians) that practice facial tattooing, and some African types have ritual scarification traditions. I haven't tried to represent those because either accurate CC doesn't exist or they would obscure the features too much to get an accurate preview. In the case of the teeth filing done by Pygmies, the previews are mouth-closed, though I did make a toothmask version of Trapping's pointy teeth that can be used for the purpose. The Asian types are shown without eyelid masks. This is mostly to show the actual shape that those hide, but if you're intending to use them, you'll likely want to find a set that matches your skinset of choice. Maxis eyebrows were used for much the same reason.I'm sorry that was so long. It was just too important to put behind a cut.
And yes, I really will laugh at complaints about racism or sexism, and I'll probably fall off my chair laughing if you try to claim homophobia from these simply because I included a group that tends to have a religion that doesn't approve of homosexuality or something. I've gone out of my way to be as accurate and as sensitive as I could be when making these, and I've included a disclaimer for a reason. If people can't be mature about them, I will not hesitate take them down, though I'll likely continue to share them by request.
If you're wondering how long it took to make these... I got the idea for the project in the summer of 2011. I had to completely fail twice, once in the 2011 and once in 2012, before I was able to actually make these work. I started work on them in June 2013, and I finished in early March 2014, a week shy of nine months later. As for how long it took to make each template, once I got the hang of it, the SimPE work took under an hour, but actually making each face took a lot longer. Some types seemed to fly by, but others, especially the first few African types, gave me no end of trouble. (I'm just monumentally bad at making accurate African noses.)
Design Credits:
Pooklet, for the templates that provided a springboard.
Dominiquex, for the
tutorial I used for the SimPE work.
Joumana Medlej, for her "Drawing People" ebook that provided the research necessary to make these.
Preview Credits:
Hair - Almighty Hat (and one by me, on female AustroAboriginal)
Eyes - CuriousB
Skin - Pooklet
All clothing shown in the previews is Maxis.
( African types... )( American types... )( Asian types... )( European types... )( Indian types... )( Middle Eastern and North African types... )( Pacific Island types... )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
