Strangetown extras: Grunt Family Portrait

[strangetomato]

So, I finally decided to try my hand at making a custom painting with SimPE, and the process was super easy. I'll definitely be making more of these to customize the artwork in my story. More specifically, I'm going to decorate homes with photos of the characters in my story whenever appropriate. This will include family portraits, wedding portraits, and so on. I'd really like to recolour that cluster of smaller frames with random snapshots (but I don't recall seeing that template in SimPE. I'll have to look into how I'd go about doing that.)

My first first project was, predictably, a Grunt family portrait. I wanted to have the boys discover this stashed away with the General's belongings. It would be something he put away after Lyla left, since he couldn't bear to be reminded of her. I have no idea when this might turn up in the story, so I decided to just share it right away.

Ripp: Wow. I haven't seen this in forever!

Buck: I found it with Dad's things.

Tank: We're all so happy looking.




I've never made a group of sims view art at the same time before. They have a conversation, just like they do while eating or watching TV. The boys all stood around and discussed having 5 best friends (how appropriate!), and maxing out a skill, while they thought about the portrait.




The general behavior was mostly positive, especially from Ripp, and they made some of those puzzled expressions like the one that Buck has in this shot.

And what was their final reaction?




 

It's enough to just break your heart. They were all really sad about it.




Here's a better look at the source material. I posed them as if they went to a portrait studio. (I guess Buzz must have chosen the background colour.)

The photo is a little blurry when you get really close to it in-game, so I'm going to see if there's a way to improve it, but this might be as good as it gets with a .jpg file from the in-game camera. It will work just fine for story purposes as it is, so I'm not too concerned.

Pretty cool, don't you think?





ETA: I followed this tutorial from MTS2 to make the custom painting.

Comments

[xel-squirgle-ox.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is pretty funny. In my family I'm sort of the oddball because I look not much like my my parents, but like my aunt. I have pictures of her when she was a teenager that are so freaky because she looked almost exactly like me.

Oh, and I love your Lyla! She is the perfect combination of the features that the Grunt boys have that Buzz lacks. It's unfortunate that the one that they had in game just looked like a default face with blonde hair that they pasted into the family tree.

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I'm a clone of my father (well, to quote my SO, I have, "My Dad's head on my Mom's body." *snort*). I seriously look like someone opened him up in CAS and just switched the gender to female. :P I also look much more like my aunt than my mother. Family resemblances are so interesting. I love following the genetics with sims, but I really wish they made the facial features carry on as recessives, so sims could inherit things from their grandparents, like they do with hair and eye colour.

Yeah, the game Lyla is just a default face template yawn-fest. Creating my own Lyla was a good opportunity to tie the family together a little better, and I think she ended up very pretty with Buck and Ripp's genetics. Now I'm looking forward to seeing them pass them on to children of their own (and I can make more family portraits too).