A review of Phaenoh's new skin mod with the unfortunate name.
Before I start, a link to the mod in question.
It was done on the straight Maxis skins, so this review is going to work with that for now. As I understand this mod (and Phaenoh's language is a little circular, so I may be wrong), it's a set of defaults that check skin and hair color, and depending on hair color, switches between four versions of that specific skintone to the one that has body hair in the right hue. The gist I got is that you can either download her version, or use a Reference version that uses your own defaults, but it isn't certified to work without some tweaking. As far as I can tell, it has something to do with the hair has to load before the skin.
I'm going to use the Curious brothers as I rebuild them for my BACC neighborhood as my test subjects. I'm making them in CAS, so this is reasonably what they'll look like in game.
Pascal modeling Skin 2
I was a little surprised at how lightly furred the guys are. As you can see, from a distance and/or image reduction, the lighter hues tend to disappear - don't worry about that. Even from a distance it's possible to tell a blonde with furry arms from one that doesn't have them - but that's for a bit later.
Lazlo modeling Skin 3
I was pleasantly surprised at how well the ginger hair stands out - even if you can't see it on the chest or arms, it's still visible on the legs. Probably because leg hair is even denser.
Vidcund modeling Skin 1
On S1, the chest hair never fully disappears! And it's accurate for each hair. I admit, I didn't take any pictures of a sim with S4, but Vidcund kindly volunteered to briefly have that tone for a short while, and the body hair remained accurate.
So, the mod genuinely works, and works well! Which is impressive in and of itself - it sounds like quite an undertaking. I'm fairly certain I can still use the body hair overlay from MATY to add even more hair on the few sims that deserve that (Dean Ottomas!). Yeah, they're pretty much a pit of voles, but if you browse carefully you can find some pretty good stuff. But it's not all roses - cue the next few pics.
Bonus: Constant modeling Alien Skin
Aliens still have no body hair whatsoever. Phaenoh mentions and outright encourages others to make versions of alien defaults that are compatible with the mod, but hasn't done so herself.
Personally I'm not very bothered by this - it feels kinda right that my alien boys will either be without body fur or heavily furred.
The Boys as Girls of Differing Ages
There is no body hair for the ladies at all. Again, this is a personal taste sort of thing - I'm fairly okay with this, although I keep thinking it would be nice for them to at least have a light dusting of forearm fuzz. As for the bush, apparently there's eventually going to be an upload at Sexysims, but for MTS she needed to keep things barbie. Something to do with Paypal's restrictions.
Here's a shot of some of my soon-to-be-townie ladies plopped down on a lot - as you can see, no body hair, regardless if they have default or custom skin. This family had been made before I installed the mod, and it worked just fine with them upon startup.
This isn't the case with the boys - not in a bad way either. As you can see, our default skinned boy has a nicely fuzzy forearm, while the one with a custom skin has no fur at all. Which is how the mod is supposed to work, being teamed with your defaults.
Things start breaking when it comes to custom hair though, as this guy was made in CAS with custom hair. As you can see, there's a different skin below the neckline for this guy here - and I can vouch he has a long, dark treasure trail that doesn't match any of the other, normal fur patterns on the non-custom-hair skins.
See? Entirely different fuzz pattern.
I also couldn't get him naked - not once, not at all. Not even with the wardrobe controller. But when I switched someone else's hair to custom, his body fur remained the original color and pattern.
So it boils down to this mod works, with a few limitations - no body hair on women, no making your sim with custom hair in CAS. The body hair does look nice, and doesn't leap out and bite you with contrast - I have a hunch it'd look good on superdetailed skins as well as these plain Maxis ones. Phaenoh was nice and included not only templates for making your own skins for the mod, but also linked to a tutorial she had made. And also explained how to make her mod work with baby hair skin mods, or make those mods work with hers.
Overall impression? Pretty optimistic - the mod does work like I thought it would, although it turns out while it won't fuss with my defaults, it also doesn't really do anything with them. Other than turn my teen female's faces pure black. Creepy.
So yes, I'm going to be using this mod, but as soon as I make my own Leh-skins for it, the Maxis version is getting chucked. Do I reccomend this mod? If you don't mind Maxis, or can wait for others to finish making sets, go for it! In fact, there's an HP's Idolatry of Flesh set already done! I just hope this mod's name gets changed. All the negative connoitation aside, it's just a bit confusing.