As some of you may have noticed, the skin texture for pre-made young adult Sims makes them appear younger than the skin texture for adult Sims. This is especially apparent on young adult male Sims. However, any young adult Sims created in-game (and probably pre-made Sims who don't start off as young adults) use the same skin texture that adults use.

Are there any existing mods that restore the skin texture for young adult Sims? If not, does anyone know what I have to do to restore the skin texture myself? These images show the difference between the skin texture the pre-made young adult Sims use vs. the skin texture the young adult Sims created in-game use:

Sorry to disappoint, but there don't seem to be any young adult skin resources in the game (at least not in basegame or Uni). The only skin resources that came with Uni were the zombie skins.

It's possible (but I'm not sure) that they're getting the texture from the teen skins instead of the adult skins, as those have a more youthful face.

The changes you're seeing could potentially also be from the face template. If you look closely you can see some changes happening around the glasses, which suggests the facial structure could play a part. Either that, or they're rendered with lower settings in the older pics.

Yeah, I did hear about the young adults using the teenage skin texture instead of the adult skin texture. I just wasn't 100% certain whether or not that was the case.

The face templates are the same. Since they were extracted from the original game files. The glasses just sit slightly differently on certain pre-made Sims than if you create exact replicas of them which is what I did in the second picture of each Sim presented here.

I intended to recreate these young adult Sims so that I could compare how the glasses sit on the recreations of them vs. the originals. Only to discover by accident that the pre-made versions weren't using the adult skin textures as I initially thought.

I was under the impression that young adult Sims stopped using the teenage skin textures in later expansion packs. Apparently not. At least in the case of the default CAS young adult Sims found in Create a Sim. As well as the pre-made young adult Sims.

All of the headshots you're seeing here were generated by me. The default versions of most of the young adult headshots are low poly. Since most of the headshots of the pre-made Sims from University were generated while the developers had the Sim/object detail settings set to 'low'.

Edit:

Turns out the pre-made young adults will use the adult skin texture if their appearances are changed using the mirror. Which makes me question whether I should try and get the teenage skin texture to appear for all young adults. Or if I should force the adult skin texture to appear for all the young adult Sims.

Some of the older info and thumbnails for premades sare probably a bit out of date, at least if you're not using cleaned hoods. There's probably remnants of info left over from when the game was still beng made.

It would be easy to test which skins YA uses. Make a custom skin where you color the teen and adult skins differently (one set red, one set blue, for instance), and see which color the YA sim uses when applied (would test both in Bodyshop and in CAS, as Bodyshop has its quirks).

I don't know where the info for the YA skin is stored. Didn't dig in too deep, but didn't find any TXTR, TXMT, LIFO or PropertySet resources for them in the Basegame or Uni files, unless they're hidden deeper than I looked. I assume they'd be somewhere, or YA won't have anything to draw from, but most likely just some PropertySet or 3DIR files linking to the adult (or teen?) skin textures. The adult files in BG only referenced 08 (adult), and not 48 (adult+YA).
(I have UC, so it is possible the references are somewhere I haven't looked, possibly in some "carryforward" files).

I think only the young adult male pre-mades use the teenage skin texture by default. The young adult female pre-mades appear to use the adult skin texture by default like the young adults created in-game. Also if you null edit the appearance of a pre-made young adult male with the mirror, it will force the adult skin texture to appear, so they'll lose the teenage skin texture if you hit the tick button.

I never noticed this and TBH I can't see a difference lol. Maybe I need new glasses.

I wouldn't be able to tell without a direct comparison with the lined-up pictures, either (fast-clicking between them to spot the difference). This is at a detail level that seems off the top to me.

It's most likely just older graphics that didn't update with the game release (similar to keeping the cache files after fixing CAS items, and finding sims only update when you take them to a mirror. As for older graphics, there are som older items shown in the family tree thumbnails that didn't ship with the game, and also have no resources available).

When doing refreshed thumbnails, I also make sure the correct fitness texture is being displayed. Since most of the pre-made Sims who start off fit have the fitness texture for thin Sims. Some of the pre-made Sims who start off fat have the fitness texture for thin Sims. While a few of the pre-made Sims who start off thin have the fitness texture for fat Sims.

Assigning the 'Fit' flag to thin Sims with SimPE won't update their fitness texture, so they'll still look like thin Sims in-game. The same thing happens with fat Sims, though unlike the Fit flag, the 'Fat' flag will make them overweight.