EA's default TS3 skin is hideous. Really awful. I also loathe the look of TS4 sims... I can't stand that kind of art style, and all the sims look like bobble heads to me. Round wide heads on these skinny stalk necks. Eurgh.
Anyhow, as for TS3, replacement skins make a huge difference. I don't put a lot of makeup on my sims, but I like default skins,, eyebrows, and some decent hair that doesn't look like EA textured straw.

I've been on The Sims subreddit for a month and this is SO true. People claim they have POWERFUL PCs but when asked about them it turns out that they don't know their own PC specs, they don't understand the difference between integrated and dedicated GPUs, they don't know what an SSD is (and it more often than not this so called "powerful" PCs have 5400 RPM hard drives, so no wonder The Sims 3 lags for them), they don't understand anything when it comes to CPU architecture (it has 4 cores, and that's it, don't know clock speed, whether it has hyper threading, caches), etc.

And the part of taking pictures with their phones instead of screnshots got me laughing so hard. It's so true and it's hilarious.

In addition to hair and skin, I think that custom/default replacement eyes make a HUGE difference.

There's always room for improvement though EA doesn't care about that anymore. But I don't see anything hideous or ugly about TS3 Sims at all. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.


CC does help in getting a more refined look or an entirely different one depending on what looks attractive to the individual.

The default skin and eyes always looked fine to me. I never understood why people complain about them.

I personally don't like the default skin, but I agree that the default eyes are fine. CC eyes to me just make sims look so much more diverse because not every humans eyes/pupils size and gradient are the same. Changing just the eyeball itself can make a sim look completely different. I use both the default and CC eyes for this reason.

WARNING THIS REDDIT POST MAY TEST YOUR PATIENCE. PROCEED WITH CAUTION: https://www.reddit.com/r/thesims/co...you_say_origin/

Is that EA's way of trying to deter people from buying TS3?

It goes against what Grant has to say about TS3 recently.



https://twitter.com/SimGuruGrant/st...667481914474497

Whether he believes the statement on Origin is true or not, that's a whole other conversation. Regardless, the same warning should be attached to TS4 soon because as we've already discussed, potatoes don't run games well.

I'm so glad I don't have to be bothered by Origin. Discs or bust, baby!

Steam's version is really good too. You can run the game directly from the executable without running Steam or the Launcher first. Discs can fail (and my disc drive is in fact broken and I didn't bother replacing it), that's why I decided to buy everything again on Steam. It's also pretty cheap if you buy them on sale, $5 each expansion pack, and 7.99% the base game + Generations + Pets + Seasons.

I've always found that the main issue in TS3 is that the lighting in general can be fairly flat and even harsh, which can make sims look uglier than they really are. Compare to TS4, which has far more gentle shading on sims and objects, which makes sims look softer and more detailed.

In fact, the geometry of TS3 sims is usually more or less comparable to that of TS4 sims, IMO- it's just that a lot of detail gets flattened out by the lighting. On top of that, the default skin textures don't have as many painted-on details as those in TS4. As such, I feel like the worst you can do with TS4 is creating a 'plain' sim, whereas in TS3, you could make truly grotesque creaturas (which is why the game is also inherently funnier than TS4, just watch Robbaz's Sims 3 series ).



TS3 basically is the second from the left (with worse normal & shine maps, as well as fewer painted-on features), it really makes me wish they had ported over the sub-skin scattering from The Sims Medieval. That being said, if you rely on textures for shading and detailing, you can achieve some great results.

The other thing is that the animations are a bit stiffer than those in TS2 or TS4, IMO- so your creatura will always feel a bit extra on top of that.

You can see clearly in that image how each set of shaders affects the character. The diffuse only character is strongly reminiscent of games from the early-mid 00s, while the one with the bump, spec and point lighting looks a lot like something you'd see in titles from 2005ish onwards. The subsurf and reflection mapping greatly enhance the otherwise identical character.

Now, I've talked about this at length before....how come we have no idea how to port effects from TSM to TS3, and how come we have no understanding of TS3's shaders?

I think it's because the shaders are packed up in the engine itself, with no way to access them. Maybe one day, but not now.

The current best way of getting closer to that leftmost image is via detailing via the skin diffuses and improving the shine and bump maps, IMO.

There was a tutorial on this here:
https://web.archive.org/web/2018050...0/skintutorial1

Shaders_Win32.precomp is the file that contains all shaders in The Sims 3, The Sims Medieval and The Sims 4. All we need to know is what will read it. It's Autodesk Something Something Something. My knowledge of these things is very finite, but this I know.

I completely agree about the lighting in TS3, but I'm not sure if lighting is better in TS4. When I look at unedited pictures from TS4, it isn't so much the lighting is different, it's all the frickin' bloom that makes the lighting look softer. Then there is the lighting issue for lots. Maxis made lots are like dark caves even when there are lights all over the place.

There are people that love bloom so it is a matter of personal taste and opinion, I just happen not to be a fan of it. If a person has to 'overexpose' something to make it look better, there's a problem.

3DS Max and Maya will both compile precomps, and they're plaintext files from the looks of it, but fuck if I know what'll decompile it.
Anyway, we've been here before.
And things work the same on the TS4 side of things.
In fact, mashing up TSM and TS3 seems to come up nearly every month these days.

I wonder what would happen if you copied the shader file from TSM directly over to TS3. The game probably wouldn't run/nothing would happen, but it's worth dreaming about it.

Some interesting discussion on editing TS4's shaders:
https://forums.thesims.com/en_US/di...32-precomp-info

It might be worth sending those people in the thread a PM asking what tools they used.

Yeah, I linked that thread just now. They're consistent in how their shader data works. I've PMed a few people in the TS2 community before, there are a number of proper shader mods available for TS2. I'll see what I can find out.

It might also be worth asking those people in the thread as well since it looks like they've managed to open (?) the files as well.