Strike a Pose! - Tutorial
A lot of people have asked me how I my posed the Sims for my story so I thought it might be good to make a separate post about the methods I use. I discovered this technique on my own, and I’m sure others have too, but I haven’t seen any tutorials about it.
You may have noticed that the loading screens, icons, and photobooth pictures from The Sims 2 contain a lot of great facial expressions. All of these are available through Jaydee’s Photo Poses posebox, but if you use that alone, the Sims will only appear in one pose. A lot of these poses look a little weird because they were intended to be viewed cropped close to the face.
However, there is a very simple way to overlay the expressions onto another pose.
What you’ll need:
- A Sim
- A posebox: Pretty much any posebox will do, but I’m going to use Decorgal’s Custom Modeling Poses Overlay Hack in this tutorial.
- Jaydee’s Photo Poses or Ndainye's Smile for the Camera box.
Step 1: I pose my Sim with the first posebox, in this case the pose is “female stand-look side arm on hip”.
Step 2: While the Sim is posed, I click on anything from Jaydee’s posebox. Here, I’ll choose the cute little smirk that is “photobooth-solo-romance-2”, which appears when a Sim takes a solo romantic picture in the Nightlife photobooth. (And thus, only available if you have Nightlife, sadly.)
And that’s it! You can also overlay animated expressions using the Hula Mod, the Aikea's Painting of Doom, or Jaydee’s animation boxes. Below is “Reactions-EP2-sizzle” from the Hula Mod combined with the original pose.
ETA: Ndainye's Smile for the Camera has most of the same poses from the Loading Screen Box, but is set up so that the Sims will turn towards the camera. This still carries over to when it's overlayed. Even if you don't want the sim to be looking at the camera, you can just pause or use the freezer clock and move the camera to get them to look wherever you want!
Here’s another tip: If you use this technique with the facial overlays Decorgal’s posebox, you can still use Jaydee’s box to move the Sim’s eyes. This is “facial overlay-confused” combined with “photobooth-solo-romance-2”
You can also modify the pose with boxes that allow you to pose the parts individually.
In this picture:
- Custom Prop Hack for Movie Makers & Storytellers: “Plastic Bag”
- Parts Posing BOX(Legs and Arms): “Right 4”
- Trendy’s Natural Sitting Poses “Down 45”
And finally, in case anyone was wondering how I did Dina’s pose in the chapter header of my story: She’s doing another pose from Decorgal’s box called “female floor-lie on stomach leg up”+“left 90”+“photobooth-solo-romance-2” and put on a 67 degrees backward OMSP
I hope this info was of use to somebody! If you have any questions, just ask!