Vampire Replacement (with veins)

**IMPORTANT!: This package will be packed with any houses you upload to the exchange that have Vampires on them, please remove this file before you upload (to avoid people suddenly having different looking Vampires when they download your lot, and to respect my wish for this not to be uploaded anywhere besides here on ModTheSims2.)**

**Update 10/10/05: A little known fact, the only layer that is above the vampire skin tone is the eyebrows. Facial hair, makeup, full face paint, teeth, and "contacts" can be added to a set of custom eyebrows to make them look normal. You can then use this to change the appearance of one Sim rather than all the Sims at once and avoid the blue facial hair etc. Just be sure to adjust the alpha channel so all the sections you added are white/gray (tip for Adobe Photoshop: you can combine several alpha channels into one by pasting each alpha into the image and using the lighten blending mode on the higher layers)**

Ok, before everyone starts complaining about the skin being "blue", let me explain:

The blue I used on this skin is not like the default Maxis Vampire skin, in fact I didn't use ANY of the original textures from the vampire skin, it's more muted with a slight tint of purple (not noticeable). There is a very good reason for using the color blue, blue is the contrasting color to flesh tones (that's why a blue screen is better for human subjects when editing movies) and so you'll be able to achieve a more realistic paleness effect (magenta/red + cyan/blue = gray in the areas that were once magenta/red). In fact the reason a person gets more pale when they die is because the blood in their body turns blue (for those who don't know, the reason blood is red is because it is exposed to oxygen, without oxygen blood is blue).

For this reason, using a strictly gray vampire texture won't look as good; you're de-saturating the entire texture, rather than isolating one area to make it "pale". As for aliens, I haven’t tested this with the alien skin tone, but since the blue in this texture is closer to gray than the original… I assume it will look better than the Maxis default anyway.

The Good Stuff:
Using this your Vampires will have veins on their face, I borrowed wycked’s Vampire Full-Face makeup for this, and I made the area around their eyes a little purple (simply used a Maxis alpha for this); other than that this is all Maxis original stuff (well, I re-colored it). Unfortunately, as is the case with the Vampire skin and replacements, the Vampire texture will still be on top of the facial hair layer (as Don demonstrates in the screenshot). It’s not something I know how to fix, but red and blond work pretty well; I didn’t get a chance to test brown yet. Also the skin is the same transparency as the original, so you’ll be able to see any custom skins beneath just as well. And finally, unlike the Maxis original... Elder Vampires should now have matching yellow teeth to go with their yellow fangs! (someone at Maxis was lazy and just applied the same texture for every face)

The Bad Stuff:
I really wanted to add the fang marks on the neck, but it wasn't possible due to the way the face texture is mapped (you'd have at least two places where the Sim was "bitten").

Note about files:
There are two versions, one with and one without the red eyes. (Because I know some of you don’t like having red eyes on your vampires)

Update 09/28/05: I added a copy of the skin that uses my own re-color of one of Helaene's eyes. It's kind of a dark red with a light violet tint to make it a little more realistic (deep dark red would just look too flat).