Yay, Sparklies! (Animated Accessory)

So I was laying in bed going to sleep one night about a week ago and I was struck by this really awesome idea: SPARKLIES! A sparkle field, like an aura, for ethereal and supernatural sims. I'd seen Boblishman's animated accessories, and had been pondering other applications of the effect. Bob was nice enough to tell me how to make it work, and, well... I'm actually flabbergasted how EASY it was! It's really sad that with this stuff, I consider a 3-day project a tiny, easy, simple project. Hehehe.

Please click the screenshots to view larger versions... It's a very subtle effect, so it may not be obvious from a thumbnail. The animation shows it pretty well, but you'll have to see it in the game to fully understand my brilliance.



It is available for teen, young adult, adult, and elder, and for both genders. The poly count's pretty low, 453 polys, 907 vertices. It shouldn't have any major issues... a sim wearing the accessory, or another sim interacting with one wearing it, may end up colliding with some of the sparklies in animating, but they should stay put around the top of the sim's body (the sparklies concentrate around the head and face, fewer and fewer toward the waist, none on the lower body). I used the same mesh for teens, so it'll be a little higher above their heads than adults, but should still look okay.

This is waterproof (stays on with all clothing) and should be multi-wearable with all other accessories (I used one of my own GUIDs for the bin setting, so it shouldn't conflict).



The animation rate looks very nice in my game: the sparklies gently fade in and out in different areas around the head and shoulders. The animation rate will vary depending on the rest of the game's performance, frames skipping, and your computer's power, etc., but at a regular frame rate in my game, it looks lovely. The sparklies may not be obvious at much of a distance - they're most interesting close up, where they're just sort of subtle and shimmery. Most of my screenshots are nighttime shots because I think the sparklies are prettiest at night, though they're still quite lovely during the day, as seen above.



I'm REALLY intrigued by animated textures, and I have a lot of ideas planned, including some recolours for this mesh. If anyone would like to try to recolour it, it's not as easy as a regular recolour, but it's really surprisingly easy all things considered: if you would like to recolour this mesh, please PM me so I can tell you how.



Some ideas I had for recolours (some of which I'm already working on): Flies and bees buzzing around a sim's head. Snowflakes. Musical notes. Butterflies. Little flappy-winged bats. More colours of sparklies.



Known Issues:

• Because the actual shape of the mesh resembles a field of post-it notes floating around a sim, and allows for all sorts of different shapes through alpha edits, shadows cast from a sim on the ground or the loading screen will reflect this, and look a bit odd. See attachments for pics. It's a small thing, not that big a deal.
• Animated textures understandably are a greater strain on your computer to render. If you have a slower computer or experience slowdown using this (or any) animated accessories, try to moderate your use of it to a single sim wearing only one animated accessory.

Please don't comment if you're just going to request something; I don't take requests unless otherwise noted.

Model Credits: (if anyone cares)

Male:
Skintone: Louis @ SimCribbling
Hair: Mine (Cherub, available here at MTS2)
Eyes: Mine (unreleased)
Brows: Mine (unreleased)
Clothes: Plicka (here at MTS2)
Model: Mine (Corvus, the most beautiful male sim in the world)

Female:
Skintone: Louis @ SimCribbling
Hair: Sharona @ Simmetrical
Ears: Louis @ Simcribbling
Blush and Lips: Helaene
Lashes, Eyeshadow, and Eyes: Barcelonista (here at MTS2)
Clothes: Parsimonious
Model: Mine, heavily modified and gender-switched from a sim LyricLee worked on for me (Morrigan, my new favourite sim)

Thanks to:

• Boblishman, for his wonderful (and very easy to follow!) instructions on how to animate accessories.
• Jwoods, for the disturbingly easy instructions on animating textures.
• Tiggerypum, for continuing and wonderful help with meshing in general, and help maintaining my sanity when things go wrong.
• Wes_h, for the Unimesh plugins for Milkshape, used in the creation of this mesh.
• Dr Pixel, for various critical bits of meshing info.
• Digital Scrapbook Place, for a wonderful tutorial on creating sparkle brushes, which are way too much fun to play with in Photoshop with a pressure-sensitive tablet.
• Nurrah, for playtesting it for me to check the animation.
• Everyone who has contributed to the creation and development of SimPE and Milkshape.
• MTS2, the rest of the staff, and Delphy, for creating a such a fantastic place to learn and share information, so I could figure out how to do cool stuff like this.