Date Posted: 16th Sep 2021 at 9:39 PM
Views: 82
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Just figured I'd give an update on where I'm at with the new eyes! I am currently back in school (finally!) but have still been able to work on them here and there, and I've reached a big 'milestone'. (Link to preview comparing Starlet vs new eyes at the bottom)
I had gotten maybe 50-60 done or so, before deciding the irises felt too big and starting from scratch. I then finished all 131 of the colors (a lot, I know, more on that later), stuck the pngs into a SAI file each on their own layer so I could compare them, and then ended up re-doing somewhere between 40-50 of them for quality control. Having done all that, I am now finally finished creating the human eyes. Now it's down to the occult states, which I plan on releasing at the same time as the human eyes. I don't know how busy I'm going to be with school, so I don't know how long it will take me to get all of the occult eyes done. I don't really want to just release the human eyes and then have everyone waiting for the rest.
131 human eye swatches though. Yeah, this is how many I want to have in my game. I like having the variety, and as I've said before, if I'm making something for myself, I might as well share it. It would feel weird to make all these 'extra' swatches and then just keep them to myself. Like last time, I'll be offering multiple packages with different options for just default-replacing the base game eyes, including only 'natural' add-ons, or the whole banana (+ options for contacts).
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So what is different about these new eyes? Other than having an absurd number of swatches?
Improved Scleras:
I was not able to figure out the pixelation/crunching issue, but I have been able to mitigate it. It seems the game doesn't like small, sharp gradients/high-contrast textures, and isn't very good at averaging out the colors when compressing the png into rle2/lrle. Between that and wanting the eyes to look a little more natural, I lightened up the shadow/red coloring in the scleras and made it much more subtle. You can hardly tell there's pixelation/crunching there anymore.
Improved Irises:
Now that I have Sai2, I was able to utilize the rulers to get a proper shape instead of eyeballing it with an airbrush tool. Yes, I really did hand-draw the circle for the iris and pupil for the Starlet eyes. It's not bad considering, but they do look a little off. I also made the iris in the new eyes very slightly ovular (horizontally), and it looks cuter in my opinion. I also completely redid the shading/texture portion so that it is more subtle than the Starlet eyes to help with the pixelation/crunching. The result is that they look a little more maxis-match than the Starlet eyes. There's still enough 'texture' that there is visible variation in the iris (it doesn't look flat), so I would still call it maxis-mix, definitely leaning more towards mm than alpha.
Improved Pupils:
I made the pupils a little smaller so I could have more 'real estate' in the irises for the texture and for eyes with central heterochromia. They aren't tiny, but right in a happy medium. I think it makes them look a little more 'alert'.
Improved Highlight:
I got rid of the 'lowlight' reflect on the bottom of the iris, as it just looked washed-out most of the time. I also simplified the highlight and made it slightly larger.
Improved Colors:
There were some swatches in the Starlet eyes that I wasn't happy with even when I first posted them, but I couldn't really put my finger on what was off about them for a long time. This time around, I haven't settled for 'not really liking' some of the swatches, hence the quality control I did.
I was also really unhappy with how the albino eyes looked, especially the pink/red one. They looked half-assed and unrealistic compared to the rest. I put in a lot more attention making them this time, and also made five variations instead of two.
As for the rest of the colors, there's a lot more swatches all around. There's plenty of 'standard' or average eye colors, and lots of 'unique' or rare ones too. I may add a few more in, but no more than 4, as it would add in another row for those not using the more columns in cas mod, and the swatches already take up a lot of space. If I do (and if I'm being honest I probably will) they will likely all be greys, as I don't have that many compared to browns, hazels, greens, and blues and I feel kinda bad about it.
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I am geneticizing these the same way I did the Starlet eyes. After finally getting each one into a brand new package, I realized that anyone who is using the Starlet eyes (with additional swatches) who wants to 'upgrade' to the new ones will have to 'fix' the eye color on all of their sims who had non-default add-ons, because it being a new package and all will have completely different instance IDs. At best, they'll just have a different variation of eye in the same color (if the game properly keeps track of the eye color tag and doesn't just randomly select a new one). So, I will be fixing that before moving onto the occult eyes. I'll make sure that the colors in the new set that most closely resemble the add-ons in the Starlet eyes have the same instance IDs, so that no one has to worry about their sims' eyes changing dramatically.
Finally, here is the preview comparing a swatch from the Starlet eyes to the new ones:
https://imgur.com/a/6pk7pmb
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