Electric Dreads for Men and Women (TS3 Conversion)

Before using this hair, be sure your game is patched up to date, as EA fixed the hair-crashing bug in a recent update and if you're not patched up to date you may have problems.

Here's a conversion of the Sims 3 'Electric Dreads' men's hair, from EA's 'Midnight Hollow' world. I loved this weird hair in TS3 (and loved Midnight Hollow), and was pleased to see that it translated well to TS4 with just a few minor alterations.

It's for both male and female, Teen to Elder, and is not enabled for Random, so you won't get townies generating with this hair.

It has 11 colour combinations comprising add-on straps and tendrils layered over base hair, as below:

Five natural colours: 1) Black and silver on black hair, 2) Shades of dark grey/silver on dark brown hair, 3) Shades of blue on platinum hair, 4) Black and silver on blonde hair, 5) Shades of brown and bronze on brown hair for a Steampunk or Old West type of look.

Next, some unnatural colours and two Elder shades: 6) Multicolour on dark purple/aubergine, 7) Black and crimson on dark red hair, 8) Green/brown/yellow on green hair for an alien or Hipster Plantsim look, 9) Purple/silver/blue on dark blue hair, and the two Elder shades of 10) Black and gold on grey hair and 11) Turquoise and silver on white hair (the white hair could also be for alien or fantasy characters).

In-game, we have a colourful group of roomies who all have different dress sense but the same taste in hairstyle:

And below, Goth Girl flirts with Steampunk Guy.

Hat compatibility: It was not possible to make this big hair hat-compatible. As an 'emergency' measure, I gave it the hat chop meshes from my recent Ponytail Braids upload, so as was the case with that hair, you can think of this hair as having all gone up inside the hat. But it doesn't look great, so I don't recommend it - it's just there in case your sim gets inadvertently switched into a hat for their career or similar. I don't recommend it for normal use.

Recolouring: This hair is pretty challenging to recolour but if you want to give it a try, I've attached a couple of templates for you to follow. In the download file "ElectricDreadsRecolourTemplates.zip", there are two files, one a greyscale texture in .bmp form (which includes the alpha channel) and the other one is a recolour mask in jpg form. Open both files in your graphics editor and layer the recolour mask over the greyscale texture file, so that you can see what goes where.

Thanks for looking, hope you'll find this a fun hair.


INSTALLATION:
Download one or both hair zip files depending on whether you want this hair for males, females or both. Unzip the zip file(s) and move the .package file(s) to your Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\Mods folder.

Polygon Counts:
5393 for each hair. This is somewhat higher than default TS4 hair, so use sparingly if you have a very low-spec PC.

Additional Credits:
Made with S4 CASTools, Milkshape, and Sims 4 Studio.
Thanks to the Midnight Hollow team for this nifty hair.