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

[franwi.livejournal.com]

Oh I am SO doing this tutorial. I just lost all my legacy portraits and pics in a neighborhood glitch. :(

I adore that family photo! They do look like a happy bunch. I love how Tank's in the camouflage shirt. Shows how long he's been trying to win his father's approval, even at that age. And he's really the spitting image of Buzz. Ripp's smile makes me smile. His smile definitely outshines the rest. ;) I also love how Lyla's playing with Buck instead of posing like the rest. Really shows how loving she was. What a sweet picture. I can definitely see how it would lead to a melancholy reaction from the brothers.

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I'm so sad to hear that you lost all of your portraits! :( Glitches like that really scare me. I would really hate to lose something like that, and it can happen at any time. That's the beauty of doing it this way with with SimPE. These paintings can't be lost, as long as you keep a back up of the file.

Thanks. That was the idea I was going for with Tank. I thought he'd have to have been seeking the approval of Buzz from a pretty young age.

The secret behind Ripp's smile is that it's actually a different type of smile (I used the black box animation tool to make them smile). I've used the same smile on him a couple of times in other scenes, and it seems like it would be "his smile" to me. I think it suits him.

I couldn't get Lyla to smile while holding Buck unless she was interacting with him, but it worked out perfectly to look like she was distracted by her little baby when the shot was taken. Or maybe she was just trying to get him to laugh for the picture.