Minstrel Me – Playable Harp and Lute (Medieval Challenge)

Updated for Pets


I love the music aspect of the Sims, it is a skill that makes a lot of sense if, like me, you play medieval or historical worlds. It didn’t take long though before I was bored with an instrument that never really belonged in those worlds anyway. Over the last few months I have been exploring the possibility of changing this, learning how to mod, learning how to mesh, and I am ready to offer my first upload.
I have two new instruments for your bards and mistrels as my entry to the Medieval Challenge, a harp and a flat backed lute. Both are playable and non-default so you can use both in your game if you want to.



Details
The Minstrel Me harp and lute offer an alternative to the guitar already in the game. It is still not possible (as far as I know) to create an instrument with a new mesh, which would have been preferable, so these are made from the guitar mesh, and are rather more basic than I would like, but they do work and hopefully they will keep your minstrels happy until there is more choice.
They behave in every way like the guitar, they will go into your sim’s inventry, which is useful for any wandering minstrel, and sims will use them autonomously if they are left lying around.

Catalog Location: Entertainment/ Hobbies and Skills

Price:
600

3 Recolourable channels (same as the guitar)

Known issues:• When playing either of these instruments for tips, the original guitar case will be used, it is beyond my skill to change this.

• At level 8 guitar and above, the pose for playing changes and some clipping will occur when using the harp and there may also be some clipping at lower levels for very fat sims, this is unavoidable due to the size of this instrument, I have done the best I can to minimise it. Also when the harp is picked up from the stand it looks unatural, this is because of the bowed shape of this instrument.

• Why a flat backed lute? For the reasons stated above, it was made from the guitar mesh and I could not find any way to give that model a rounded back, but also because the depth that would be needed for a traditional lute back would have caused fairly major clipping issues

• I would love to have changed how these new instruments sound but sadly this is also beyond my skill, they sound just like the guitar.

• The harp strings are not visible from behind



These have been tested in a game with WA (patched up to 2.4.7) and have been tried on the base game only, they do not work with the base game alone, but should do on a patched base game

Polygon Counts:
Polygon Counts:
Harp:
High detailed – Vertices 841, triangles 585
Low detailed – Vertices 436, trangles 278
Lute:
High detailed – Vertices 826, triangles 585
Low detailed – Vertices 436, trangles 278

Additional Credits:
Credits:
Thanks to MTS for coming up with this challenge, it helped motivate me into finishing this project.
Thanks to the creators of Milkshape, s3pe, S3OC and Wes Howe for the tools that allowed me to make these objects
And thanks to orangemittens, plasticbox, Ceixari, and EsmeraldaF for answering my questions and for the encouragement
The dress in the screenshots is by vectorlover and can be found here: http://linna.modthesims.info/download.php?t=365587
Hair is by EA
Skintone is by 234jiao and is available here: http://linna.modthesims.info/download.php?t=349827