ivycopur

Introductory Info

By default in TS2, all Maxis face templates default to the 2nd face template for infants - except for the 28th face template, the alien face. Since the default Pollination Technician uses this face, alien babies will visibly show features inherited from PT, but all other features will show up as template #2, regardless of the other parent’s features. And by default all non-alien babies have identical face meshes, because all the default face templates from which all sims are created, except template #28, have identical facial data for the infant life stage. This video by Marticore offers a good explanation of this!

This tutorial will go over how to add unique infant face data to a pre-existing sim in a neighborhood. This will not change the appearance of this target sim; it will make it so that when they reproduce, their babies will show the features inherited from them. So for example if your sim has a large nose, and they have a baby who inherits that large nose, you will be able to see it in the infant life stage, and not have to wait until the baby ages up to toddler to see their features. (If you only do this with one parent, the features inherited from the other parent will still show up as template #2.)

If you want to add infant faces to an entire neighborhood, you’re going to have to do this for every single one, so get ready for a lot of copying and pasting. (If some of them have default Maxis faces, those ones at least will go a lot faster - simply drop the all-ages default Maxis face templates linked below into your Downloads, and then you only have to follow steps 1 and 5 of this tutorial for those sims).

If you want to create custom face templates with infant faces for general use, you can follow essentially the same steps - in Step 2, tweak the faces of all the clones to your liking, and in Step 4, make sure to use whichever face template you want to be replaced with yours.

Required Downloads

SimPE
Alt Sim Surgery plugin for SimPE (extract and drop in the Plugins folder of your SimPE install)
All the files from Meowingcookie’s download here (only put TEMP_BU-PU_FaceMeshes.package in your downloads folder when the tutorial says to!)
Optional: all-ages default Maxis face templates (you can use either these or Argon_Arch_AllAges.package from the download above, this is explained in Step 4.)

Step 1: Extracting Target Sim

Open your neighborhood in SimPE and go to Tools -> Neighborhood -> Alt Sims Surgery. Select your target sim from the list and click “use” in the Patient Sim section, then click Export. For our example here we’re going to be using our good buddy Nervous Subject.

The pop-up window should default to your SavedSims folder; if it doesn’t, go ahead and manually navigate there (Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/SavedSims). I recommend renaming the file to something more informative than the sim’s default character file name.

Step 2: Clone Army

First, a note on Maxis naming convention for age/gender categories, if you’re not familiar:

B = Baby; P = Toddler; C = Child; T = Teen; A = Adult; E = Elder

F = Female; M = Male; U = Universal

Babies, toddlers, and children have “universal” face templates rather than gendered ones because both male and female sims use the same face meshes. Teens, adults, and elders have separate male and female face meshes. So the 9 face types you need for a complete face template are: BU, PU, CU, TF, TM, AF, AM, EF, EM. (Young adults use the same meshes as adults, so you don’t need to worry about them here.)

Make sure SimPE is closed, and open BodyShop. The sim you just extracted should appear there. You are going to need to create clones of the sim for each age/gender category listed above. (We’ll get to the Baby stage in the next step). For the Toddler and Child ages, you only need to make one sim, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s male or female (because they use the same “universal” meshes). For all the other stages, you need one male and one female. None of the hair/clothes/etc options matter, you only need to change the age and gender.

Each time you confirm a new sim in BodyShop, a new .package file is generated in your SavedSims folder with a bunch of random numbers as the filename. Since you can’t change the names while BodyShop is open, the way I like to wrangle these files is by sorting the SavedSims folder by Date Modified, so the most recently generated file is at the top. Then I make another folder for the project, and each time I make a new sim, I copy the newly generated file to my working folder, and rename it there, so I know which is which.

Now for the real magic trick…

Step 2: Infant Face Sorcery

Make sure BodyShop is closed, and have a copy of the PU (toddler) clone of your sim in your SavedSims folder.

Place Meowingcookie’s TEMP_BU-PU_FaceMeshes.package into your Downloads folder. ONLY have this in your Downloads for this one step, then move it back out afterwards. Definitely don’t play the game with this file installed unless you want to see some mutant babies.

Now launch BodyShop and select your toddler. It should look a little… unusual.

What you’re seeing here is an infant face mesh on a toddler’s body. (If you change the hair to one of the bald or “painted-on” ones the scalp will at least stop floating.) To be honest I don’t understand the black magic involved in how this works exactly, but it allows you to actually edit the infant face with regular BodyShop sliders! Custom sliders will work as well; this face length slider can help if the infant face comes out too squished-looking.

Once you’re happy with your face, confirm and close BodyShop. Move your newly generated sim to your working folder and rename it to BU (or however you’re choosing to organize your files).

Step 3: Extracting GMDCs

At this point you should have 9 files, something like this:

You will need to open each one in SimPE and go through the following steps. (Tip: you don’t need to close and re-open SimPE between each one; you can just drag the next file into the SimPE window and it’ll open instantly. This may seem obvious, but I regularly forget and then kick myself as I have to wait for SimPE to boot back up from scratch.)

Under the Resource Tree panel, select Geometric Data Container (GMDC).

You should see two files under the Resource List panel. Sometimes there will actually be more than two; as far as I know, this happens when the sim has a beard or accessories. The ones you want should end in 0_gmdc and 0LOD15_gmdc; if you see any with 1s instead of 0s, ignore those.

Right-click and extract the two GMDCs.

These files contain the face meshes. The file type for these is .5gd. LOD means “level of detail” - this is the version of the face that appears on low graphical settings. If you look at the file sizes you can see that the LOD version is about half the size of the regular mesh.

I like to keep everything in the same working folder and rename these files to match the age/gender group, with -lod added to the lod file, so from af.package I’ll extract af.5gd and af-lod.5gd. Of course you can organize things however you want.

Once you’ve extracted both GMDCs from all your clones from each age/gender category, it’s time to put together the template!

Step 4: New Custom Template

Now you will be taking an existing face template .package, and replacing all the meshes in it with the ones you just extracted. You will need a template with baby faces already included to use as a base. As listed in the Required Downloads section above, you can either use the non-default template (Argon_Arch_AllAges.package) from here, or the default templates from here.

If you are just creating a temporary template for a single sim, as I’m doing with Nervous Subject here, it probably doesn’t matter what template you use as a base. I say probably because there are still a lot of unknowns about how sim facial data is actually stored and passed on genetically (see this post as an example). Just in case the game does somehow remember which face template was used to generate a sim, I like to use whatever default face template most resembles a sim as a base. So in Nervous Subject’s case, that’d be template 16, archeeng. The process is the same for any template you may want to use, though.

Make a copy of the template you want to use and open it in SimPE.

Again, under the Resource Tree panel, select Geometric Data Container (GMDC).

The files you see in the Resource List should look familiar by now; two for each age/gender category, just like the GMDCs you just extracted. I like to click the Name header so that they’ll be sorted alphabetically.

Select the first one. In the Plugin View, select and copy the Filename.

Now right-click on the file in the Resource List and click Replace.

Navigate to the corresponding file that you extracted earlier. In this case I’ll be using af.5gd. SimPE will ask to reload the resource; click Yes.

Now you can see that the Filename has changed. Paste the old Filename that you copied back into the same box you copied it from, under Plugin View. Then hit Commit.

Now repeat these steps for all 18 GMDCs, save your file, and close SimPE.

Step 5: Babyfaced Clone

Take the face template .package you just edited and drop it in your Downloads folder. (If you already have custom face templates that you use for your regular gameplay, temporarily take those out so they don’t conflict. You can move them back in when you’re done.) You will also want your original target sim that you extracted in your SavedSims folder, as well as a test infant (you can use the one from from Meowingcookie’s download here, just drop it in your SavedSims folder).

Launch BodyShop, select the infant, and hit Clone Selected Sim. Navigate to the tab with the full face templates. If your template is working correctly, it should be visible and you should be able to select it and see how it looks on an actual infant sim!

(Tip: the default BodyShop camera will be at the wrong height to see the infant properly. Hit F3 to click and drag the camera to a better viewing angle.)

Behold: Baby Nervous!

Just to be sure everything is working, it’s a good idea to click through the other age/gender categories and check that your template is showing up correctly for all of them.

Once you’re done testing, you can cancel your test baby. Now make a clone of your original target sim and select your shiny new face template. If you did everything correctly, they should look exactly the same!

Just make sure the slider for your template is all the way to the right, save the sim, and close BodyShop. Rename your new clone to something intuitive.

Step 6: Face Replacin’

Open your original neighborhood in SimPE, open Alt Sim Surgery, and select your target sim once again. This time, click Load in the Archetype Sim box, and select the clone you just made. Check the Face only box, and click Surgery.

Now save the neighborhood, and you’re done! Congratulations, this sim’s facial features will now show up on any babies they may have.

To test this in-game, you can use the SimBlender (or other cheats) to impregnate the sim with themselves. When the baby is born, it should look just like the infant version of them from your template.