Very nice detailed skins turning splotchy and ugly, help!

[parttimeninja]

[My first post is a cry for help, how embarrassing. *meep* Anyway, hi. ]

*clears throat* So...

For a while I wondered why my sims (downloaded) skin never looked quite as nice as the screenshots of the skintones on the download page. I soon realized that while the creator's screenshots showed a nice, smooth, hi-res skintone, mine was a splotchy mess. It's like Bodyshop snuck all of the textures into Photoshop and saved them as compressed jpegs just to irritate me.

I thought it might be due to my being on a Great For Everything Except Gaming Mac, especially because I've seen other people's sims using the same skintone with great results, but I recently downloaded a set of defaults which didn't have this problem at all--it looked fine and nearly identical (or close, at least) to the skintones in the creator's screenshots. Since I'm sure I've thoroughly confused everyone, here's a visual aid, using Enayla's Pixie Rust skin as an example:

Here's her original screenshot, taken from here:

See? Nice, very "Oooh, shiny." Also, see that nice definition in the eyebrows? Where you can see, y'know...hairs? Doesn't happen for me. And you can forget seeing freckles. *sigh*

And here's what it looks like when I use it in Bodyshop:

I put in pretty skins, Bodyshop spits out this splotchy, discolored mess (though that does give kind of a neat texture to the lower half of the face...hmm). It's particularly visible on the forehead. :angry7:

To confuse even more, here's the same exact same skin, made into a default: (from here)

Looks great, right? (if not nearly as warm) Smooth as a baby's butt! Why does this version look fine in Bodyshop when the exact same skin, just not defaultified, turns icky?

Another issue in roughly the same vein as this one: Since I'm a little X-Geek, I made myself a pair of Gambit contacts out of some of Enayla's eyes that happened to look, uh...Gambit-esque. Just for fun, let's see what kind of crazy stuff it does to the eyebrows!

Whoa nelly! Pixellated liek woah! Why'd it do that? My downloaded eyebrows are all fuzzier than the originals, so more fuzziness? Not cool!

Also, I discovered while doing this that every time I export something for editing, it lowers the resolution so the quality of the edited texture gets worse and worse with every edit. Is it supposed to do that? That's a real problem when all I want to do is make a contact out of an eye so the guy's offspring doesn't all get the same freaky eye mutation as their dad, yanno?

I don't have this problem with one particular skintone (or eyebrow, or whatever else). It does this to ALL of them. Enayla's, Rensim's, Helaene's...they go in gorgeous and hi-res, they come out looking like that. All except that one default version. *flails* So frustrating! Any advice? Please?

(Bonus unimportant question: Anybody got a link to the site that made the clothes in the Thanksgiving banner that's up now? I love that site, but I lost the link!)

Manymanymany thanks! :love2:

[XPTL297]

Are you trying to make any modification on those skins? If so, be aware that the simple export/import of Simpe cause a lot of deformation on skins.
You need NVidia DDS Utilities to get a better import of Photoshop modified textures.
Unfortunately there's no other resources available to skinners to get a smooth effect on their skins than include a lot of noise to overcome the uncomfortable rainbow lines around shadows.
I have worked over the Enayla pixie night (with her permission) and my Sims pictures look in my own computer exactly the way I post them on-line.
The visual effect also depends on the quality of your graphic card. I have two powerful graphic cards in my comps and cannot claim about the skins I have downloaded.

[parttimeninja]

Is Simpe available for Macs? I've just being using Bodyshop to do any modifications. But anyway, I haven't edited these skins, that's just the way the skins look when I put them in the downloads folder. Instead of looking the way it does in the creator's screenshots, it looks like I've exported and re-imported them. Except I haven't, Bodyshop just likes to mess with me.

I wondered if it might be my graphics card, but the skin that was made into a default looks fine, so I know my computer is capable of showing the skins nicely. If the rest of the skins would look like that, I'd be happy, lol. Maybe it has something to do with the other skins not being defaults. Effin' Bodyshop... :cussing:

[Rogue777]

Have you seen what the skin looks like in the game? Sometimes custom skintones look completely different there than they do in Bodyshop.

[parttimeninja]

Yep, still just as splotchy, especially the dark skintones.

[~*Jax*~]

At first I thought it might be your graphics cards, but reading on, I see it's not.
 
Bodyshop isn't really the best place to "test" skins.  Whenever I make a skin, I do it in bodyshop, then load up the game itself to take a look.
 
It's a pain in the butt, but it's worth it.

[caffeinated.joy]

Just to satisfy our curiosity, and to help us cross graphics card issues of the list of possible culprits, what card are you using?

[XPTL297]

Forget the card. I use a BodyShop and a game without Pets to make my skinning. After your report I checked my BodyShop and game WITH Pets installed. You are right. All dark skins are as spotted and bad look as you mention - and I don't use a Mac but a normal PC. My graphic card is very powerful (PCI express NVidia GeForce serie 7000, 256MB Vram)
The skins are useful in BodyShop to make pictures, but as soon as you check them in CAS they are a pure spot (really unacceptable).
And it is not only the very dark ones. I tried to make a small modification on a skin that was far too pale and the result was looking like a sickness.
There was some kind of modification in the light effect in CAS. Maybe Maxis tried to match both and as usual, they failled.
I never noticed such trouble, first because I do not use those modified skins in game (they were always spotted for me), but only for pictures. Second, I do not play "close-up" cause I play strategically and need a general view of the lot. So, I play in the very old TS1 system (bird's view). So, I never noticed any disturbance cause at bird's view, Sims are very small.

[parttimeninja]

Sorry for the late reply, for some reason I didn't get notification emails with the previous three replies. :\

I've got an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 (what came with the computer), and if it helps, I'm running Sims 2 with University only.

I'm just so baffled as to why the non-defaults look like they have skin diseases whereas the same skin that's been turned into a default looks wonderful, even in Bodyshop. It just seems like a lot of wasted resources if the program is taking the time to actually edit the texture file when placing it on the sim (splotchifying it in the process) when all it needs to do is paste it on the mesh.

[caffeinated.joy]

Second questions. In your game setting, what are graphic settings at? It could be they are set too low.

[parttimeninja]

*facepalm* That was my problem. I changed the settings to high and it looks great in-game now. Not so much in Bodyshop, but unless there's a hidden preferences option somewhere, I wouldn't know how to change that.

[Mary647]

I own an imac 24 inch, and i have the exact same blochy problem, its not the graphic settings or the graphics card. its really annoying me

[RBWpg]

I have been playing with the body shop program quite a bit. I have tried everything including simply transferring the files without opening them. It seems the problem is with the bodyshop program, I have a feeling it is set for a low resolution skin. When I find a nice skin-tone to download in the correct body type it shows up beautifully in my game.