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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 24th Feb 2021 at 8:37 PM
Default Hood on cropped hoodie disappears and combines with skin and pants when zoomed out too much
I noticed this the other day and its been really annoying me since. I have my sim currently wearing a cropped hoodie, but whenever i zoom out or the sim moves too far from the camera, the hoodie glitches out, the hood disappears and the bottom of the hoodie sorta combines with the skin and my sim's pants. I was running the game on pretty low settings so i tried upping them to medium and then high but it still happens. I have no clue what is causing it, is it an issue with the item or my game? Nay help would be appreciated, I included a screenshot that shows what im talking about.
Screenshots
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Instructor
#2 Old 26th Feb 2021 at 8:39 PM
Unless it is happening with all items, it would be an issue with the LODs of the that item's mesh. (LOD stands for level of detail.)

To put it in layperson's terms, 3d models for objects are made up of polygons -- little flat shapes that fit together to form the 3d shape on your screen. More complex shapes and curved shapes use more polygons then simpler shapes without curves. Many Sims players already know that rendering an object with more polygons is more taxing to your computer and its video card than one with fewer polygons. It's also not just single objects -- rendering a lot of polygons at once is hard work no matter whether it's one very high poly object or a large number of low or mid poly objects.

So, where LODs come in is here: when you zoom out in the game, you can see more stuff, e.g. more of the Sims and objects on the lot (or even off lot nearby) are on your screen at once, so the game is rendering a lot more objects' worth of polygons at once. So the game has a built in mechanism to make zooming out less resource-intensive. Unless it is already incredibly low-poly, just about all EA content has at least one additional mesh which is simpler and lower-poly than the main one. (You can even look at them in Sims4Studio if you have it installed.) As you zoom out to certain distances, the game automatically switches to using a lower LOD mesh as long as the item still has a lower one to switch to, so as the number of 3d models on your screen goes up, the number of polygons per 3d model goes down.

Most CC has LODs too, unless the creator is inexperienced, lazy, etc. But even experienced creators who care about making quality content can make mistakes on individual items, like forgetting to replace the lower LODs of an item with the lower poly versions of their own mesh (so the lower LODs use the ones from the EA mesh they cloned to make their content, which might look real funny depending on how different their mesh is), or making a mistake in the mesh and not checking the item carefully enough to spot it.

One thing you could do would be to see if the creator of the item has updated it with fixed LODs. If they haven't, you could politely tell them that you think their mesh has a issue with the lower LODs and ask them to look into it. You could also find your Sim a different cropped hoodie.

On the other hand, you could also do nothing. The odds are that nothing else is wrong besides your Sim looking funny zoomed out, and your game won't be affected in any other way, so if you don't need him to look good at that distance in screenshots or video for something you're planning to publish, you might just decide that you like the item well enough that you're willing to live with the fact that it looks bad at a distance. (And if you want me or someone else to take a look at the item just to be sure there isn't some other issue, you could reply with a link to the download page.)
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