I had an anon a while ago request a tutorial for how I make default eyes and it kind of ran away from me and became a write-up about making eyes in general.
This tutorial covers the process you go through in Sims4Studio to get your eyes in-game. It goes through how to make default eyes, non-default eyes, and GTW alien eyes.It is not a texture editing tutorial.
Tutorial under the cut >>>
You will need:
- Photoshop or a comparable photo editing program
- Nvidia DDS plugins
- Sims4Studio
I assume a relative level of familiarity with basic CC making terms and will not be explaining them here.
MAKING DEFAULT EYES
1. Open up S4S and choose the “Override” option.
2. Choose the default eye colour that you want to replace, and hit next, follow the prompts etc.
3. Export the EA eye texture as a dds file, open it up in Photoshop/Gimp/wherever, and paste your edited eye texture into that file. This will ensure that you have the correct alpha. If you’re making an HQ eye just resize the EA texture to fit your HQ texture size.
4. When you save your edited texture out make sure that it’s a dds file exported with DXT5 ARGB 8 bit Interpolated alpha, with Generate MipMaps checked on.
5. Import your new eye texture into S4S and see how it looks!
6. OPTIONAL STEPS:
- Change the swatch colour: If you decide to change the swatch colour be absolutely sure that it doesn’t share a hex code with any other eyes in your game, EA made or custom. They will conflict.
- Adjust the flags in the Categories tab: here you can change the ages the eyes appear for and a whole bunch of other stuff. I would recommend not touching these for default eyes.
- Adjust the SecondaryDisplayIndex: This controls the swatch order. It’s a value you’ll find in the Warehouse tab with the CAS part selected (just scroll down until you find it). By default, EA eyes are ordered from 0-85, by increments of 5.
- Remove EA’s specular: If you would like your eyes to show up matte, without a specular, go into the Warehouse tab, select the CAS Part, and scroll down to where it says “SpecularMap” and change the Group, Instance, and Type to 0.
7. Save your eyes and test ingame.
MAKING NON-DEFAULT EYES
For non-default eyes, yougo through the same process as above, except choose“Add CAS Part Swatch” instead of“Override” when you create your file in S4S.
Also, with non-default eyes you have more freedom in the Categories tab - although I would still recommend not touching the Age & Gender, Age Appropriate, and Outfit Type flags, you can change some of the others:
- Occult: Choose whether these eyes show up for humans, aliens, or both. I would leave this alone. If you would like to make an eye for aliens, I’d create another file and clone an alien eye instead.
- Archetype: EA skins all have archetype tags which define the nationality/race they are meant to represent. So this value chooses which skintones these eyes will spawn with. You can select multiple boxes if the eye colour is appropriate for multiple skintones.
- Eye Colour: This is the genetic value your eyes will have. I personally like to flag blue coloured eyes as blue, brown eyes as brown, etc, and file any unnatural colours (ie. pink, red, rainbow) under the genetic value of “amber”
- Part Flags:
Choose whether or not these eyes are valid for random (so, if they will spawn on townies). I’d recommend not touching“restrict opposite gender” or“restrict opposite frame.”Do not touch any of these. Disabling eyes for random seems to cause glitchiness with child sims. However, having eyes enabled for random also means they may spawn on townies, so be aware of what you’re doing unless you want townies showing up with demon/alien eyes etc.
Non-default eyes will have the SecondaryDisplayIndex of the EA eye colour they were cloned from, which means they will appear in the same area of the swatch ingame as that eye. I personally like to keep things organized, so I change the SDI of my non-default eyes to any value above 85. If you want to try and avoid clashing with other non-default eyesets, you could probably set these values pretty high (500+) to be safe.
MAKING GTW ALIEN EYES
Making eyes for aliens is the same process as making eyes for human sims, but I wanted to point out a couple things that initially confused me when I was first trying to make eyes for GTW aliens:
- Clone an alien eye, do not start with a human one. You can adjust the flags to make a human eye eye show up for aliens but from my understanding it’s just easier/safer to clone an alien eye from the get-go.
- The swatch colours of your alien eyes will still conflict with human eyes if the hex codes are the same.
- Leave the flags in the Categories tab alone. Alien eyes don’t appear to have the same kind of genetic values as human eyes do and messing around with the flags might cause issues for you.
This turned into a super long wall of text but I hope it was helpful. If you guys have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask!
