Hi,

I've just spent a good 45 mins (real time) creating a family of four sims. A set of brothers, one with a wife and the other with a toddler whom the mother is unknown. I had to give some back story in their blurbs, and some traits (only 2 out of CAS, the next 2 traits I learn in game -all together my Sims get 4 traits) and think of a 2nd LTW. Hence the reason it took me so long.

So my question to you all today is:

How long does it take for you to create a family?
Do you give them traits straight from CAS?
Do you give them detailed back stories?
Don't you wish that blurb had more space so you could write more?
Do you create your Sims in a certain way? (I personally have to do the backstory before giving a name to a Sim - yes you read that right)
When actually creating them, do you spent a long time moving the sliders to get certain features? (My longest process when creating Sims - took me a good 10 mins on each Sim)
Does it take you a good 3 to 4 mins deciding on which hair to give them? (This was the 2nd longest thing I do when creating Sims)

Let me know your Create A Sim process or you're step by step guide.

EDIT: This topic is in regards to Sims 2 Jo.

I've never timed it or taken notice.
I don't normally give sims traits. Is this meant for the Sims 2 board or Sims 3? Sometimes I give sims a written trait later once I get to know them.
Not really. I have an idea in mind but it's fairly vague. Like traits I tend to jot things down as I see them. I know why the sim is there but I don't know them until I see what they choose to do or say.
There is plenty of room for what I put down. There is also the family picture area for longer stories.
I roll the dice and tweak. Sometimes I can't work with what I got/what I did to the sim and start again. 10 minutes sounds about right. People who 'make sims' in body shop can take an hours. I don't consider myself to be a 'sim maker' that to me is someone who can make a celebrity or other sim from a face sculpt for upload.
It takes me that long just to click through all my hair, choosing would take quite a bit longer.
I pick clothes that I feel that sim would wear that also suit the climate. My modern beach hood has no winter and everyone wears summery casual clothes even the banker wears a pair of nice pants rolled with no shoes. Well except the Mayor he wears something a bit more formal.

I usually only create 1 sim families, so I don't spend more than 10-15 minutes creating them, I think the part I spend most time is modifying the sim facial features, which I love doing.
About their personality I tend to make 2 or 3 extremes in their qualities, don't really care what zodiac sign they are assigned though. Also really like dressing them in clothes that reflect their personalities.
My CAS sims have no backstory other than they are new in the town and just moved! (perks of creating 1 sim families) It works great for me because I don't really know my sims until I start playing them, and when giving them backstories I feel kinda stuck and can't completely be free in what I want to do with their future, so their story is made during the play sessions, with choices based on their LTW, wishes, fears, personality, interests, and sometimes just me interrupting their lives to make things happen.

I'm probably weird, but I start with clothes sometimes. A certain outfit suggests a character to me, giving me an idea of personality, tastes, even aspirations. When I download a particularly interesting outfit, I make a sim for it.

Don't really watch the clock when playing sims, so not sure how long.
Me current favourite sim, I had an idea when I made her. I needed a Bohemian artist type, who would paint and open up a grungy downtown warehouse gallery. So I made her very pretty and Italian, and was gonna dress her in gypsy clothes. Unfortunately, me pretty sim wasn't having none of that. The clothes I choose she hated. Right from CAS she had a style of her own, she likes red, and she likes torn up urban stuff. So to make her happy, I dressed her in what she wanted, but still hadn't given up on me free-spirited artist dream, so I made her romance.

Sigh, now me artist is dressed in grungy red, she don't like painting, she's actually decided to be a mechanic. She don't do art, and it don't look like she has any intention of moving out of the downtown slum I put her in. Instead of being free-spirited and independent in romance, she's a vulture, who uses men and drops them, just to get her 20 loves aspiration points as quickly as possible.

i find it more entertaining when I let the sims show me who they are and what they want.... I'm still looking for that perfect artist though amongst the sims currently in my neighborhood.

I (almost) always only create in CAS when I want a sim for a specific purpose, so the look, clothes, personality all have to go with that. I never write stuff in CAS. I often change LTW, personality, and interests in-game. And I have a mod that adds the sliders found in body shop; LOVE IT!

An entire evening, sometimes. Recently I wanted a family to test a challenge I'm designing, so, I first created a male and female adults. They got names like Gram and Gramps. From them I used the pacifier to create three adult daughters. Then I deleted them. Created another pair of adults, used them with the pacifier to create adult son and daughter, counted up my planned sims decided I'd keep grandma and gave her a real name, grandpa got deleted. The adult male I had left and one of the adult females I used with the pacifier to create a child and a toddler, both girls. Got clothes assigned to grandma, mom, dad, child, and toddler, put them into the game, moved them into their lot, and used the sim blender to age down mom and dad's sisters to teens and adjust their ages so they weren't all the same, considered adjusting their clothes but decided I could live with what the game had put them in.

They took hours. I have the bodyshop sliders mods for CAS, so I sculpted the four grandparents, then rolled the pacifier repeatedly until I had the genetics I wanted particularly in their kids: okay, I want one with her nose and eyes and his ears and mouth, and half the hairstyles hide the ears.

Generally it depends on who the sim is.
Creating a Sim takes 5-10 mins usually.
(I don't generally fuss over clothing or facial features) half of them probably have face template 1.

I blame it on Sims 2 Castaway PSP having only 20ish face templates of which I only liked face template 1, so it seems that has never vanished when Sim creating.
Attack of the Clones... with different hairstyles.

I'm playing a rotational legacy in a (by now) modified version of Elsewhere. Right now, I'm just adding families every now and then to make the town seem alive and to make sure my teens are not dating the same sims as their parents once did. I'm trying to have a nice mix between culturally diverse families and fitting into the theme of a Scandinavian harbor town. While I give my simmies make-up and accessories and stuff, I don't go out of my way to make their faces unique using sliders. I just click some random templates. Generally, a sim takes between 2 and 15 minutes.

I spend anything from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on what I'm planning to use the family for. I have spent 2-3 hours in CAS for a single family on several occasions.
If you mean personality, then yes. Not so easy to get out of CAS without clicking the boxes.
Depending on what you mean by detailed. I often use sims for storytelling, so those get a backstory. With the rest of the sims, it depends on their use. I never use the blurb-box.
I often have a plan, but the sims tend to end up differently than what I had in mind. Sometimes I just pick a face and go with that, or mess about a little with two faces and the pacifier button. Other times I spend a lot of time playing with the sliders.
Choosing hairs and clothes is often what takes the longest, as I often have to go through the entire collection before I manage to decide.

Sorry, I know this is off-topic for this thread, but where could I find this mod? I googled around and found a site but it contained no link to download so I'm a bit helpless haha.

I create mine in Bodyshop, usually takes 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Then a further 10-15 minutes in CAS to get them just how I want them. Normally I use dice rolls to speed up the process.

@TuxxedoCat


It could be this one; Bodyshop Sliders Added To CAS http://simmanipulator.forumotion.co...rs-added-to-cas

@ marka93 ... That post has no download link. And this is what I've been serching for, for my SimCity project...

It can take me hours. Sometimes I'll create up to 3 generations of a family in CAS with all the appropriate genetics and everything. I've got a pretty decent collection of saved sims at this point. So I usually pick anywhere from 2-4 and give them different hair, eyes and skin colors and start making babies. Then I pick the babies I like best and go from there. It probably takes me anywhere from one to three hours depending on how many sims I want and whether or not I want them to come out of CAS with recessives or plan to assign them later with SimPE.

You have to register to download from the Sim Manipulator site.

If you register and log in, that underlined "here" turns into a link to a MediaFire download.



[EDIT] I've just downloaded the mod (so I know the link does work!). I'd like to try it out.

Diovanlestat, if you want that perfect artist, you need to study the mechanics of personality. Unless you hack OTH, it's based on certain key personality points, much as star sign is. So you can start by looking that up (it should be on the wiki) and then think about what other traits you consider essential to a perfect artist, and how those are best modeled with the personality point spread. Bear in mind which specific actions are tied to the extremes - with fewer than 8 outgoing points you will not get a naked hot-tubber; with more than three nice points you won't get an evil snowman builder, etc. When you come to aspiration, consider how each one functions in practice. Perhaps Pleasure is better suited to the lifestyle you have in mind - for one thing, the dearth of large-point wants in their panels will tend to make her roll more hobby wants, so she'll be constantly thinking about art - with a side of dating, because that's where a Pleasure sim's large-point wants are concentrated. Perhaps Romance would work more the way you wanted it to with a Knowledge or Popularity secondary.

I don't keep track of how long I take in CAS. It takes as long as it takes. I don't build in bodyshop because subtlety is wasted on me and because I need to work back and forth between the appearance and the personality, backstory, etc. I keep the bio succinct and open-ended, basically a high concept. The degree of care with which I choose a template, and the specific choices I make in altering it (no straight templates for me - I want to be able to recognize them from orbit) depend on what I'm doing. It took quite awhile to build each Widespot sim because they needed to touch on certain tropes, and violate certain ones. Rich Mann absolutely needed a beetling brow, and beady little steel-gray eyes. The Harts needed to be reasonably attractive in comparison to the other families (if only because their genes were going to be so prominently featured), but they also needed to be distinctive - Face 1 and Face 2 were absolutely out of the question! And while I was at it I gave more "masculine" features to Angel and more "feminine" ones to Valentine - she's the one with the square chin and he's the one with the cupid's bow mouth. I wanted all the base game skin, eyes, and hair to be available and for the recessive genes to have a chance of popping up, so I took a lot of time over those.

When I'm creating for myself I have a tendency to do things like roll dice to get templates and to push the sliders around wildly, or graft five or six different templates together, just to see what will happen. This is a fun game by itself and it's easy for time to get away from you.

I'll spend a lot of time getting the personality just right. I prefer extremes and want all the zodiac signs and aspirations to be represented in any given neighborhood, so I have to create them with reference to the sims already in play. This generation has a lot of Aries sims so let's make a Taurus. I never get born Leos so let's have one. now. The Romance ratio is out of whack, let's deal with that. And so on.

In relation to this thread -

When creating Sims for certain purposes in your hood, do you take the time to create that sim's parents or other relatives/friends?

For example, I eventually want a sim to owe an Art shop in Tumbleton but see I don't know whether to just create her or whether to create her parents as well, or maybe a sibling? I'll like to create different types of families, and not everyone is a lone single Sim moving to your hood.

I registered, but I cannot log in until an administrator approves my request, but the site doesn't seem very active, so I'm afraid it might take a while for my account to be approved...

@TuxxedoCat
Aaroneous is very active on his site and Simbology and will get to your request in due time.

For this, few days waiting is no great deal at all. Thanks.

I have not kept track of how long I make households/families.
personality and aspiration; most males I create are Active+Serious+Nice with Knowledge and most females Neat+Nice with Family. traits I take to be a Sims3 thing; and maybe Sims4.
body; I generally press the randomize button and do not do much changing beyond that
do not give my sims a bio/back-story.
most names are generally short

though those families/households generally temporary; generally put them in a newly created neighborhood and afterward delete the neighborhood.

permanent ones, it generally depends on my purposes for the family/household.
those also do not have a bio/back-story.

I start with the sim randomizer (here). I then make rolls for my sims (my onedrive doc is here). These rolls are recorded in the bio section.

Then I...
... choose a hairstyle based on personality.
... roll for a face template and tweak none/several/all sliders a bit/a lot.
... choose facial hair, make up, glasses, and clothing based on a favourite colour (sometimes random, sometimes what I feel like, sometimes based on what they pop up in CAS wearing) and personality/aspiration
... Double check everything (especially skin and eye colour, and if the sim starts as fat or normal... since I forget those frequently)
... Name the sim if I haven't already (sometimes random, sometimes based on a name I want)

Unless I want to create a specific character, the whole process usually takes me minutes. If I take longer, I start to fiddle and I can get caught up on the smallest details on a sim that there's a great chance I'll get frustrated with and scrap... So speed is the name of the game for me.

In game sims get most of the same treatment (obviously not with stuff that's determined at birth). I tend to note any details I notice while they're growing up in their bio as well. I usually have a general life-plan for them shortly after they roll their LTW.