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About a year ago I suppose, I decided that I wanted some clothes to bridge the gap between the child and teen years for my girls. Sims grow up in huge spurts, but for my story (and ultimately my game), this isn’t what I wanted. It could very easily throw things out in the future if my girls go from 10 to 16 in one go, and so I realised the easiest way to get round this, is to dress my younger teens in clothing that is very similar to the clothes they wore as a child. It was this that spurred me on to make my first pinafore mesh, using a mash up of a teen mesh and a child dress from Celebration Stuff. I never finished it to a standard where I felt I could share: there were animation problems, textures looked a bit odd in places, shadows on the mesh caused by normal problems I could not get rid of no matter what I tried etc. I ultimately became too frustrated with it to want to continue working on it, so I put it in my game as something which was ok for my game, but wouldn’t get shared.
I was making some new clothes for Leonora, using that mesh, when the limitations of it (especially the shoes and the fact all the pinafores on that mesh had to be the same shape) finally made me snap, and I opened Milkshape with the intention of making a much more flexible mesh.
Teen:
Dress based on Aquilegia’s androgyny top with alpha-editable pinafore.
I’m rather pleased at the idea to use the androgyny body shape to imply a young teen and might use it again, but the thing that really makes this mesh in my mind, is the fully alpha-editable pinafore over the dress. Nearly any shape and length of pinafore you want, you can now have.
The dress uses Bedwyr’s edit of an AAS texture, with my own boot textures and a petticoat using a Sherahbim’s texture edited by Almighty Hat and myself. It comes in Bedwyr’s original green and a selection of colours from Aeliaa and Curiousb’s palettes. Why only a selection, why not all? That’s down to my personal preference I’m afraid. I hate having the same dress in 10 or more colours cluttering up my catalogue. Not only am I unlikely to use all the colours, but it’s not period appropriate to have lots of sims wearing the same dress. (The concept of off the peg fashion was very new, and was seen mainly for male fashion at the time my game is set. Even if a piece of women’s clothing was said to be off the peg, it’s more likely this was referring to the garment being already cut and provided with a pattern, meaning someone still had to sew it, fit it and finish it, than being a complete piece of clothing.) So what I’ve done is choose the colours I liked the most and because I know there are people out there who might like some of the colours I’ve not made, I’m providing links to my texture file in both pspimage and psd format for each set of actions. Each file contains the layers for the boots, stockings, lace collar and petticoat as well as the dress texture already recoloured in the different actions and a base texture if anyone wants to run any more actions over it. Some colours look better than others, and you might need to adjust them more to get them to look how you want.
Over each dress is a different pinafore (or none at all) which uses a texture by Giasims. I’ve made each to basically show how versatile this mesh is, and again I’m providing a copy of my file for the different alphas I’ve made for this. Click the image below for a larger version of the swatch.
But that’s not all. If I had this mesh for my teens, I wanted a version of it for my children.
Child:
The shape is more childlike, and the heel on the boots is lower, but it’s essentially the same mesh and is mapped exactly the same way as the teen mesh to make things easier for retexturing. Comes in exactly the same textures as the teen mesh above.
Known issues:
I have worked very, very hard to get these two meshes as perfect as I can, but in the spirit if full disclosure, there are a few minor issues that I’m aware of.
Sleeves:
I’ve kept the original animation on the sleeves from the child Celebration Stuff dress, and as a consequence there is major clipping when sims move their arms in certain ways. Now, on my first mesh I did try to minimise this and it was one of the things that drove me to distraction and I don’t fancy going through that again, so I’m leaving it for now. I might look at it again in the future, I might not and if it bothers me that much, I can always edit the alpha to get rid of the sleeves now.
Bottom of teen skirt:
When the teens sit, the pinny pulls towards the floor. This is because of how I’ve had to animate the pinafore in order to stop the dress and minimise the boots clipping through when the sim walks. I think it’s the lesser of two evils: if I stop this minor pulling, the clipping on walking drives me mad.
Bleed through when sitting:
There is a little bit of bleed through when the sims sit or bend this way when they bend down. It’s minimal and is only really noticeable from certain odd and hard to get to angles behind the sim. There is also sometimes a little bleed through along the same line when sims twist. It’s very slight, only happens on some animations and something I will look at once I get my meshing energy back.
Tiny bit of clipping on the teen mesh when walking:
I’ve worked hard to minimise this, but there’s still a little clipping of the boots through the skirt at times when the sim walks. It’s not all the time (in fact it took me several tries to capture this for the picture), and I think it’s to do with the female walk animation because it doesn’t happen on the child mesh at all.
These are the four things I’m aware of, and I’ve tested out other animations and things seem fine. However, I will say that I’ve not tested every animation and there still might be some bleed through with more extreme animations. (I noticed when testing the fat morphs for example, there was some bleed through when the torsos bounced during the “OMG I’m fit/H’oh shit I’m fat” transitions. Since this is a very extreme animation which makes the entire body bounce in an unnatural way, there’s no way I’m even going to attempt fixing this). If you do notice any significant bleed through or clipping, especially on common or normal animations, let me know and I’ll take a look at it.
Right, well done for reading all that, now for the bit you’ve been waiting for, the downloads.
Alpha-editable pinafore dress for teens and children.
Textures:
Some of these files are rather large, even though I've put them in a rar archive.
Bedwyr/AAS texture in Curiousb’s Any Colour You Like pspimage psd.
Bedwyr/AAS texture in Aeliaa’s Autumn colours pspimage psd.
Bedwyr/AAS texture in Aeliaa’s Jewel colours pspimage psd.
Pinafore alphas pspimage psd.
Credits:
Bedwyr/AAS for the dress texture.
Giasims for the pinafore texture.
Aquilegia for the original androgyny top.
Sherahbim/AlmightyHat for the original petticoat texture I’ve manipulated.
Curiousb for the colour actions.
Aeliaa for the colour actions.
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Well, I try to cover all bases with my uploads, hence all the extra bits such as the texture files. I'm just a people pleaser. Plus I know how annoying it is to have to sort out textures etc in order to get something to look how I want it. :D
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But now where to begin? You've gone and done it again, making me have to redo my list of pretty things to tear apart and mash back together! And you provided PSDs with TEN possible variations?! I'd suspect you of hating me if it wasn't for how GENIUS these are! Di, you're too incredible. It's intimidating!
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Hehehe. No hate I promise, I just know what it's like to want to tweak a piece of cc to my tastes, only to find that I have to do a ton of work I wouldn't have to, if I just had the original creator's .psds. (Also, as you've probably seen by now, there are more than 10 alphas, because of how I made the files, using layers for maximum mixing and matching. I like to give options.)
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pinafore dresses
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Re: pinafore dresses