we are restless things

 

after MUCH trial and error, we FINALLY have 3D cat whiskers that are wearable with collars for ts2! this wouldn't have been possible without kitteninthewindow guiding me the entire time and looking in the packages when they weren't working!!! and because she shared the very easy tutorial with some resources after we got the adults/ elders working, they work for kittens too! these use subtype-bin BxE from kitw's chart in her tutorial, so they are compatible with everything on there.

these whiskers are repositoried to the base coat color, so they will be whatever color your cat base coat is. the mesh is from lazyduchess' ts3 edits. jacky93 made a collar version of these whiskers previously, which is where i got the idea. i reconverted ld's whiskers with the brows as well, remapped them to kitw's accfurcards2018 file (included, make sure you keep this file in your DL or the whiskers won't show up!), and here we are! they move with the face (this was our big hurdle after getting everything else working, lol) and can be worn by any cat preset. they will warp slightly on some (the smushy kitties will get slightly messy whiskers) but it isn't too bad from what i've seen! the black cat in the previews uses a smush face preset. these are with the other fur accessories in the top option of tab 4 (i think that's where the fur acc are lol).

kittens will be born with them if their parents had them!

maxis breed default replacements with added whiskers are linked below, so strays can generate with them! these must be placed in the Documents > EA Games > The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection (or whichever version you have) > PetBreeds (NOT the downloads folder) and let them OVERWRITE. Make a backup of this folder first in case you want to remove the whisker accessory. you can open up the package for any custom breed you have and add the whiskers to the AGE DATA as explained below if you want to!

 

 3. after that i'm going to switch over to the texture image, and go to channels.
 

4. at the bottom of channels, i'm going to select create new channel, and it's going to create an alpha channel.



5. i'm going to make sure the alpha channel is selected, then i'm going to paste the alpha that i copied from the alpha image into the alpha channel that i created on the texture image.




6. after that, i'm going to select the rgb channel and go back into layers so i can do whatever i want to the texture and the only parts that will show up when i save it are the white parts of the alpha, just like when you import via bodyshop.







7. at this point, i usually save this as my psd if it's my base image that i'm going to run color actions over. that way i can do the following steps for each recolor, instead of editing and recompressing a .dds (each time you save a .dds, you are compressing it, so if possible, you want to export your textures from something that hasn't been reimported too many times because the game and simpe are compressing the files too if you import via bodyshop/ build dxt. example: if i wanted to edit a dress that had been shoeswapped, the best thing to do would get the textures from the original dress. if the textures don't look degraded, you don't have to go through all that effort, but for darker textures that have a lot of funkiness, it can help).

8. once i'm ready to save a recolor as a dds, i go to file / save as or use the keyboard shortcut, and select dds as my file format. make sure alpha channels is checked, or you will lose your alpha info and have to paste it in again. 

 
9. then something like this will pop up (this also requires the dds utilities i linked), and you will select dxt5 and save. i don't change any of the other settings. you can do any recolors (objects too for example) this way. then back in simpe, you will just click import dds instead of build dxt (because you've already "built" it in photoshop). i prefer this because it's less clicking than build dxt and goes faster lol. and either way is better than bodyshop, because you have control over the way your image is imported. 


if your mesh has a normal map (this is the grey texture called a bump map in ts2 tutorials and the texture file has the word normal in the name in simpe), make sure in plugin view in simpe, you change the type to raw8bit after importing it, and click commit. otherwise, it's going to make your whole thing look wrong. 

i know skell's tutorial on normal maps says to just delete them, but i leave them if there already is one and i didn't edit the texture. if you did edit the texture (example: you alpha edited the shirt to change the neckline or something like that) you need to make sure the normal map reflects those changes too, because otherwise it's going to put shadows/ 3d effects where they don't belong on your mesh. if you just want to delete them, skell's tutorial tells you how (it's easy). also, make sure you put the edited normal map in your base recolor after you edited it and linked it to your mesh, before you load back up bodyshop to do your recolors. that way, when you're recoloring the one mesh, the fixed normal map is already in it, and you don't have to import it again (bodyshop can import those fine lol). if you're going to delete it, also do it before you reload up bodyshop to recolor it, because the recolors won't have a normal map and you don't have to do the deletion process again.