Quick Tech Break

Jenn the Simmer Girl (click here to see her site) left me a comment asking about my family trees. At first I was just going to answer in the comment field too, but decided that it was way too long for a comment.

Basically when you're looking at my family trees what your seeing is a combination of simPE and PhotoShop at work. Jenn, I'm not sure exactly what part of my family trees you thought looked better than it should so bear with me and just scroll around to whatever it was you liked.

The first step is exporting the nice headshot photos of your sims from simPE. There are a number of how-tos about this out there, but I'll be nice and tell you right here. Once you've opened simPE you need to open the neighborhood browser, and once that's open the sim browser. Find all of you sims whose pictures you want and write down their file names. The name is always something like N006_User00441 (I think this is Loretta's file, lol). Once you know all the files you have simPE open each file. In the resource tree (upper left hand corner) scroll down until you find jpg/tga/png Image and select that and then in the resource list highlight one. You'll end up with one of each of the headshots that your sim has had in game. Select the one you want and then click on the export button to save it somewhere. Once you've finished exported all the headshots you want you can close simPE.

After that I've created a Sim Template in Photoshop which using layers allows me to select the sim's aspiration, zodiac, ltw, impossible wants, careers, life state, accomplishments, etc. Once I've got everything showing that I want to see on the final shot I save a copy of that as a jpg. If you're planning on updating your shots with each life stage it might be a good idea to save the file as the simsname_age.jpg.

Once I've got all my sims shots up to par it gets a little trickier. I've got a standard background that I'm using for now (it's a psp background that I found online and resized and fiddled with) but each family has different connections so the lines are all drawn in, and need to be moved deleted or invisible each time you update it. Anyone who wants one of my templates is welcome to them, I'd even be willing to make family trees for those of you who don't have photoshop or find it scary. I refuse to leave my email address laying around in the open and I'm new to blogger, so I don't know all the ins and outs. If you want to contact me, you can pm me over at thesimsresource.com. I'm NightRowan over there too, so it's simple, and TSR has free memberships. You could always check out my downloads while you're there too (shameless plug *grin*).

Jenn, great site by the way, yours is the reason I decided to blog my story this time around. Maybe if I'm actually writing for other people I won't get bored when all my sims are rich!