Whenever I browse hairs, I'm always stunned by all the nice pictures people take of their sims. Especially since my own game never has anything near that good-looking! What do they do to make them look that way? Pose packs? High definition texture/skeleton replacements? Photoshop? All of the above? (I'm not really asking for mods, I just want to know how they do it.)

1). Custom sliders & custom skin, eyes, lips, etc.
2). Realistic detailed skin replacement.
3). Use the best lighting in-game from buydebug mode.
4). HD Mod.
6). Modeling pose packs.
5). Take super close up picture of Sim's face, which makes the viewers focus on the Sim's face.

Without photoshop, the Sim can be look good as it is in-game. Some creators have tendency to make their Sim creation picture looks "artsy", "cool", "dramatic" or more attractive with effect, especially on their personal blog or Tumblr, they use photoshop.

I definitely agree with you on that and too much makeup! There's something vexing in downloading a sim and ending up with something completely different from what was in the pictures. I frankly think creators should also show a picture of their sims without makeup.
@BlueLeafeon To have good looking sims:

• A good graphic card

• Sliders, lots of it. OneEuroMutt has a great collection.

• Default eyes and skins because EA's default is something that needs to be erased

• Other defaults like eyebrows, beards and teeth

• And a collection of good CC

I don't use HD mod and my sims are good looking enough.

That seems like a loooooooooooot of work...


XD



Again, seems like a lot of work. lol. I don't really see the problem with eyes since, well, once you get out of the CAS screen you don't get to see their detail, but I have wished for better facial structures for my sims. Having everyone babyfaced is meh, and I have one character I actually can't make because she's supposed to look ambiguous and female sims are feminine by default.

Well yes, there is definitely a lot of photoshop involved but also those people only take photos so they use a lot of tricks and settings that aren't really sustainable for long-term active gameplay like these insanely cluttered rooms that look oh so cute but would crash my game on a hot summer day in 5 minutes.

Yes, creating good-looking Sims needs a lot of effort. There is no such thing as "good result in instant" in this world. If you want to create anything with very good result, you have to thrown effort to make it.

No need to photoshop. Photoshop is used to enhance the effect, not creating Sim from ugly to beauty in instant. The most important is how you sculpt the Sims to achieve the good-looking you desired first, then you can think about detail skin replacement, highest graphics setting, HD mod, lighting later.
As an experienced Sim creator (my style is realistic one, not pretty dollish looking), there's some tips from me to make the Sims look good. My definition of good looking Sims is far from default EA's pudding faced syndrome.
- Make your Sim having realistic proportion of human facial features. To have realistic proportion, install NRAAS Master Controller to adjust the slider range setting, set the multiplier for example 3 or 4 or so on, and custom sliders. EA intentionally gave limited sliders to make the Sims look cartoon. Do not give up by EA standard.
- To know better measure of realistic human facial features, you can create Sims based on real life people, for example, celebs or random people on Google images.
- Practice creating Sims. More practice, the more experience you are to create Sims far from default EA's pudding-faced look, the better your Sims look are.
- Release your imagination. Imagine your mini imaginary people, with physical features you desired, filled with personality, just like creating imaginary characters based on novel you read.
- Make the Sims look closer to real life human. Determine their race, nationality, and unique part of their facial features. Google images can provide a lot of human variety in this world.
- Do not follow generic beauty looking Sims with unnatural facial proportion. Typical female Sims in Sims community is like this: Big barbie eyes, super small nose, default EA's fishy lips, super V-Shaped jaw, pointy chin, super feminine / anime face line. Do not fall with the typical 'sameness'. Different, unique Sims, realistic looking Sims will look stand out and 'wow' from those unnatural/plastic surgery generic beauty looking Sims crowd
- Experiment with CC skin, hair, eyes, lips, makeup and pose packs.

If you want to avoid a typical baby face you can try a technique I learned from here.
Move sliders all the way to one side and slowly move them the other way. you'll get more unique Sims instead of keeping everything to the middle. It's a fun thing to try.

k I'm just gonna be honest and say that post felt a bit demeaning. But that was generally good art advice to people who aren't actually artists, and there's no way for you to know that I am one, so eh.

No, there is no such things as a good result in an instant in THIS world, which is why we like to look to video games for that alternative. Unfortunately this is where games like Skyrim and Sims fail us with their...stylistic choices. Then we are forced to install mods just so that we can look at them without cringing. However, I haven't exactly found a singular mod for sims 3 that fixes everything I felt was wrong with it, unlike Skyrim. And I'm kind of afraid of utterly breaking things, as it is, despite having installed a number of mods to "fix" some things that were really driving me nuts. (and I really need to go through and delete some stuff.)

I don't really want "realistic" sims. I want a character I can look at and go "Wow, he looks nice." Unfortunately, between the fact that sims has a very limited hair selection by default, the fact that I usually cannot find any good-looking hair that works, and the fact that EA's defaults are just...well, as you put it, "doll-like," I usually just go "this is as good as it gets" and continue with the game. Because the alternative to baby-faced in EA's defaults are thin and bony. And that's just gross. D:

Then I go looking for hairs for certain characters, and since the modders use custom stuff to make their sims look good, the hairs usually look awful in my game, haha.

As far as I can tell, to really make a great sim, real or not, you need next:

NEEDED:
- Custom sliders (both body and face). I have almost all of the custom sliders in my game. Both for sims and pets.
- CC eyebrows
- CC skins

OPTIONAL:
- CC eyes
- CC makeup (wich can also include a wide variety of face masks)
- CC Hair
- CC clothes and accessories

I've been helping a creator to make a sim some time ago (mostly facial structure and custom sliders), and she couldn't have done it woithout CC eyebrows, nosemask, eyes, certain custom sliders and hairs. But she did not photoshop. As she wanted to upload the sim here, it's not allowed to photoshop the sim overview and comparison pictures. It's, however, required to get a great lighting so that your sim's facial structure is properly visible on pictures.

BTW, the sim is an awesome replica of Tatiana Maslany, made by bellakenobi, here on MTS.

@Wojtek I actually I wanted to say from long time ago, that I like your Sim creation a lot. I've observed your Sims in Pictures thread, I saw your Sim creations have "type" that makes your Sims look stand out, memorable, screaming "These are Wojtek's Sims". The type of realism (you put attention to aging details and cheek jowls that others don't) you put in your Sims is what differs your creations from others, unique, not boring, and reminds viewers that being old and not pretty are normal part of real life. Unique with no beauty standard does not equal to ugly. Better to create Sims with uniqueness than with generic beauty standard because in reality people are not all pretty with beauty standard. So do not let other people discourage you.

I had feedback from Sims community that my female Sims look manly or look trans because of square jaws issues, while actually in reality women do have natural square jaws that still make people look those square jaws women as women. Probably the mindset of Sims community is unnatural super V-shaped jaws automatically regarded as feminine, while realistic square jaws automatically regarded as masculine.

Kind of disappointed that Sims community adores plastic surgery/barbie/unnatural generic looking Sims closer to EA's default pudding face with beauty standard more than non-beauty standard unique, different, realistic looking Sims.

Tastes vary. Here are examples of what I like.

I usually Photoshop things to punch up the brightness because a lot of times, the in-game camera only uses about half of the available range.

However, these two that I'm attaching did not need that customary up-punching. They are straight off the game camera. I run the game in a big (1920x1600) window and I have a graphics card that's OK with that. (When I'm doing a photo shoot, I go for high settings that I might not do if I were "just" Simming.) The only processing that I did on these two was to reduce them to a size that's reasonable for attaching to this MTS post.

The lighting, skins, clothing ... all base-game. Janet doesn't like make-up, so she says you'll just have to like freckles, that's all. I really do not think about "making her look good", but rather, "getting a good photo of her."

One of these screenshots -- the one with the pond, reeds, pampas-grass and all -- is a custom world, done with much attention and love and that is why it's so very beautiful. But the other is Sunset Valley, and you know, it's not so bad either, is it?

My advice: try thinking of what you're doing not as tweaking a game, but as photography, and see what insights come to you that way. (For example: these screenshots are numbered 4848 and 6916, and they're not even very recent. So you can tell that I take a lot of photos. Lighting, pose, makeup, setting etc. all matter... but you really make everything come together at the moment you click the shutter, so, click it really a lot.)

Must say, Nvidia has some great options when it comes to gaming! I'm not sure with AMD but Intel seriously sucks XD But I must admit, it's not just photoshop that these modders uses, it's also having a HQ mod, which seems to make people think it got all realistic. Unless you would tweak a lot in the skin like Golyhawhaw does (http://golyhawhaw.tumblr.com/) But that... well basically makes your sims a bit more realistic but without editing your pics in PS it's... well the scenery doesn't always get that realistic touch.
Also, lighting seems to have to do a lot whenever your scenery would look a bit more realistic. But I agree with @r_deNoube! It takes a lot of pics to be like 'yas this is looks great!' as in photography ^-^

That setting does make your bricks pretty realistic though! I guess if EA would have edited that glow effect, things might have been looking a bit more realistic and if they made their wall and floor bump maps a bit more sharper.

I found out very recently that too many of those cheap plants actually produce more lag than meshed plants. I have a very large house (placed on a 64x64 lot) with a very large and luscious garden and I notice that there was a lag of 5 seconds when going into Buy/Build mode. I deleted most "EA" plants and replaced them with meshed conversions from Sims 2/4 and the lag went away. I tried the same in a test save on an empty lot. When you place around one hundred Sims 3 EA plants, the game starts to lag really bad. If I place one hundred meshed plants, there's no lag whatsoever.

It may be due to the fact that 2D particle plants are animated and have the wind factor tied to them (seasons). CC meshed plants have no animation whatsoever, and probably have less polys when outside of LOD range, so it reduces the lag significantlly.

Speaking of graphics cards, it seems to be the recommended thing to get FPS limiters? I've been monitoring mine using 'fps on' but they never go above 70, so...

Those houses look nice, but my sims game taxes the system enough as it is, haha. I do wish I could make my sims have better faces, though. I'll have to look into face mods or something.

Also, if you want to use Sliders, I would recommend using Nraas MC (also the CAS version) because if you would go into CAS and try to use the game's sliders or even the custom ones, they don't slide due the limits the sims has (I think it was 100). If you only use Nraas MC you can expand that Limit too. In CAS you can click on the option button with right click and there you'll have a menu with all these possibilities, then go to CAS > max sliders in CAS (which is 100 in default, but you can set it to like 300 if you like). For in-game you could do it this way: City Hall or an in-game computer, NRaas > MC > Settings > CAS > Max sliders.

@Wojtek That aging detail... what a realistic appearance, because the wrinkles & white hair appearance adding more sense for aging SIms. I made some mid-adults to older adults (who have teen children) in game with subtle & realistic looking wrinkles to add more realistic "older" appearance in the game, although I don't publish my older adult Sims in community. I never like the unrealistic appearance of Sims who are suppose to be in the end of adult age and having teenage children with fresh 20's looking with no wrinkles,. Default EA skintone is indeed shitty quality with bad cartoon looking effect on Sims, especially on the color of Sims lips, and no further detail. that made the default EA TS3 Sims look Barbie and cartoony in the first place. The default EA wrinkles effect on default EA skintone? Bah, bad combination, looks too painted.
If players get rid of that default EA skintone, changed with detailed CC skintone, Sims appearance will look so much better. Also sculpt the Sims face with addition of custom sliders + more slider range mod, TS3 Sims can be look more human without the usage of photoshopped face mask.
Sims Medieval has better looking default skintone with subtle freckles and detail, that made the default Medieval Sims look "human" in the first place, which is unfair, to TS3 that is suppose to be life simulator in modern age.

Ignore the Sims community (which the majority is female preteens-teens) who obsesses with eternal young-Barbie-glamour looking Sims and throwing jerk comments on your Sims and disagreeing your Sims pictures, just make the Sims whatever you like to publish. Your Sims are different in Sims community, and be proud of it, not just some kind of typical generic looking Sims in community.

It's very hard to get skintones that look good. The ones I use now are by Navetsea but some have too much definition, and not a single one has a realistic tone for darker Sims. It's just about impossible to make black Sims with these.
Here's a few things I don't like:


Default dark skin tone is too light (I made the head darker but half-arsed it)

Skin looks too smooth

Too much definition on the arms

Thankfully, most of my Sims look just fine.


President Of The U.S.N, Sarah Jo Fletcher

Film legend, Matthew Hamming

Writer, actress and overall hottie Holly Bridge

I know. My main two Sims (Holly & Amber) have slightly modified skintones for this reason. Holly's is a blend of two skintones since it looks better on her body shape. Amber's is also different but I can't remember how. I think I toned down the facial detailing a bit.

I really should go fix those dark skin textures sometime - I'm too lazy to do it but it bothers the hell out of me everytime I see it in-game.

If you know how to mod a replacement mesh, this issue can actually be fixed with some effort.

The game essentially uses four meshes (normal, fit, thin, fat) and extrapolates between them on the sliders. I was able to tweak these to make something a bit more realistic, but problems with the base mesh meant I had to stop.

If you talk to Venus-princess-sims on tumblr, she can point you in the right directions.

i used to have a simstagram and what we use on that is slider mostly for head lips and nose some people used body ones but i didnt. A lot of makeup and skins. Poses are not optional you need to use them. Eyes and freckles were my personal favourite. I used a lot of buy de bug lighting andalways had my lighting and sim graphics on high. My profile picture is probably my best example of all these things