strangetomato | Custom Content: The quest for the perfect male tee

There's been a lot of cool custom content being created among my friends and cohorts on livejournal lately, and I'm loving it. You've all been making such great stuff.

smjoshsims made these conversions of Phobia's eyes on the Maxis sclera,

xel_squirgle_ox made these recolours of the Eye Candy eyes by icnitos, and

simgaroop made these great Maxis-match male hair retextures (using Neena textures), to name just a few of the most recent offerings. I wanted to say thank you for all of your efforts, and for sharing all this lovely content.

So far, I haven't really had much to share. I've been picking away at some clothing and eye edits for my own use, and a handful of painting recolours, but it's not much to speak of. Lately, though, I'm been working on a little clothing project.

Okay, so here's the deal: for quite some time now, I'm been on the search for what I'd consider to be the perfect tee for male sims. This shirt would be snug, but not skin-tight. Most importantly, it would not be covered in ridiculous (and dated) screenprints.

I'm guessing I'm in the minority here, but I've always found those untuckable tees (by fanseelamb on MTS2, though I'm sure you all know that) to be too tight for the average sim guy. I appreciate them, don't get me wrong, and they're great when used on the right sim, but I just don't see most guys wearing those skin-tight tees. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those basegame tees and jeans combos that are just sloppy and baggy. Also not ideal.

Then came Teen Style Stuff, which had some very nice options in the tee department, and those meshes were converted for adults by cloudlessnights. I LOVE those outfits, but they do have the problem of the screenprints. I don't mind using them sometimes (even if the asymmetrical placement was only trendy for five minutes), but what I really want is a plain tee. An added benefit of this would be the ease with which we could make recolours with different and new screenprints and logos on them.

So I decided to remove the screenprint myself, by editing it out by hand.

Since I'm giving you the narrative version, I'll show you my first version. It was pretty crappy. *is embarrassed*

The method I was using to recolour this was giving me that weird pixely distortion. I didn't really know what I was doing, and my options (and knowledge) were limited in GIMP.

Still, I was happy enough to have it, and I used it in this short story.

After switching to Photoshop, I gave it another try. My SO knows the program pretty well (he teaches a course on it), so I asked him to show me a better method for adjusting the hue and saturation of the shirt. He figures there are a number of acceptable methods, but suggested that I fiddle with the blending mode of a colour on a new layer.

That seemed to work just fine. I have good control over the hue, and if there's any loss of quality, it seems pretty minimal, don't you think? *squints* I'm still not convinced it's perfect, but it's getting closer.

(If anyone has further tips, I'm all ears, by the way.)

I think the "inside" of the sleeves are still in that olive brown colour, but I don't think it's very noticeable, or much of a big deal either way. It just looks like the dark shadow on the inside of the sleeve to me. What do you think?

So now I'm planning to make a whole set of these in different colours. This was my own personal mission for the perfect male tee, but I thought some of you might like them too, so I'm going to share them when they're finished. With that in mind, I'm open to some suggestions for colours. Otherwise, you'll be at the mercy of my palette.

What I'd really love is for someone to make a mesh conversion to place this tee with the H&M jeans (my favourites), or liberate it to be a top-only mesh. My handful of attempts at meshing weren't very successful, so I'll have to keep dreaming that someone else will decide to do it. I do like the TSS mesh as a whole, though, so I'm happy enough with just that.

I hope to get this set of recolours together in time to post them as a sort of holiday gift, if all goes well (most of the hard work of cloning over the design is finished, so it shouldn't be too difficult to do).

For now, I'll share this one plain red tee shirt, since it's all ready to go. You'll be seeing this one worn by Ripp after his next transition.

You can download it here:

Link to TSS Plain Tee with Jeans collection download

You'll be needing the mesh for the Teen Style Jeans and T-Shirts converted for Adults, brought to you by cloudlessnights, who has made me a very happy camper with these conversions. *loves*

The file was compressorized and I'm pretty sure it works for both YA and adult life stages. If you have any problems with it, or notice any oddities or errors, just let me know and I'll try to fix it.