Shooting scenes and townie makeovers

[katrisims]

My next chapter is going nicely. Or would be, if I didn't suck at shooting scenes and all the surrounding stuff. I've been trying to shoot the final scene of the next chapter for a couple of days now, and have pretty much nothing. Apart from the fact that the weather's been way too good for simming most of the time, why is that?


Well, I need to shoot this scene on a community lot. So, I used an existing lot which I modified kinda long ago to look fancy like I want it. The scene is pretty simple. I only need two sims for it: one of my own and a made over townie. So, what do I do? I go to the lot to buy some cheaty objects in advance so I can use them for shooting pics. There comes the first thing I trip over: oops, not all poseboxes and such seem to be available on community lots. I curse and send my sim over anyway. Maybe I can somehow manage without.

Well, when my sim arrives on the set, I realize another thing: as it's a community lot, they can't use the phones I've placed there. No actions available. And yeah, I need them to talk on the phone. Things seem to be pretty restricted if you just go to a community lot. So what I do is send my sim home and re-think things. I decide I'll buy the lot, at least that way I can better control which other sims there are going to be on the lot. The family doesn't have the money of course, so I have to multi-motherlode them. Thankfully I remembered to write down their funds first so I can sell the business and cheat the money back to its poor state later.

So, now my sim is the owner of a business. Back to the lot, off you go. That's when I find out I still can't buy all of my pose boxes even on a business lot. At least my sims should be able to act a little more freely now. When I was fooling around on the lot last time, I saw a townie I tought would work nicely in my scene, and I have their name down. After finally finding them in Inge's teleporter, I get them on the lot, yay. So next I need to make them over. And that's where I seem to utterly fail.

I tried multiple things, but couldn't get the townie to own clothes so they could change into them. I made them selectable with the teleporter. Realized that they had no extra clothes because when clicking on the changing booth, I only got "change into" options. Clicking on a clothes rack, they could only try on things. I found that by opening the business, I could work on my sim's relationship towards the townie, and then "suggest outfit" to them. It took several tries before they really started considering buying. Finally managed to persuade them buy. I could select the outfit they bought, so far so good. It's just that after they had bought it, they still could not "plan outfit" on the changing booth. Sigh.

Oh well. My next thought was to put boolprop testingCheatsEnabled to true, because "there has got to be a way to change a sim's clothes there". And there was. There were, in fact, two, but I got neither of them to work. First I noticed that by shift clicking on the sim I get an option to plan outfit. Great, I think and click it. I got the screen where you can pick clothes for buying, and I picked. I wanted a separate outfit, and after clicking "ok" I suddenly wasn't sure whether I'd put the bottom in the cart, too. So when I got the question "this outfit can't be worn until you buy it, do you want to buy now?" I clicked "no". Only to find out that was a mistake.

The game got me out of the whole dialog, and when I did the same thing again, I never got the question of buying again, but from the buying screen it went directly to the picking clothes to wear screen - which had no clothes to pick from. Great. I also found a spawnable clothing tester via the testing cheats, but that ultimately had the same problem: because the townie owns no clothes, they can't change into them.

So I'm kinda frustrated as you can maybe tell. For two days I've been trying to shoot a tiny scene, and I can't even get a townie made over. (And of course, they might appear in a whopping two pictures total I think.) I feel so pathetic about this. Sometimes it just sucks to be a beginner.

I guess I'll try again after restarting the game, to use the plan outfit option that the testing cheats offers, maybe I can get the buy option again. Or if that doesn't work, I might make them a family member for the moment so I could maybe get them to use the clothes the family owns. But tonight I'm too tired to try anything anymore.


So that's what's up with my sims. Me making them stand around while I try to figure out how to shoot a scene. Poor things. If anyone had the patience to read through this long and boring ramble, thanks for listening. Oh and if you happen to know how to make over townies, I'd appreciate a tip. =)

Now I think I'll quit this rambling and go to bed, maybe I'll figure something out later. For now, g'night all!

Comments

[docnerd.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the joy of not being able to buy some things on a community lot. Two choices: make a residential lot LOOK like a community lot, with a placeholder Sim as the owner, so that you have the ability to buy and use whatever you need; or pack all the pose boxes or whatever into a Sim's inventory, open the inventory, and stick the objects on the lot that way. I can't recall if only the owner or household member of the owner can do that, though; it does work though, because I've done it at J'Adore.

As to re-dressing Townies, you can do the Suggest Outfit option. They WILL show up in their new clothes, but if they're on the lot in their Outerwear, you won't be able to see the change. Unless one of the later EPs made that go weird, of course. Your other option is to get the Townie Gun (I don't know where it's from, though, so you'll have to Google it). My understanding is that the Townie Gun allows you to change clothes and makeup/hair/accessories on the Townies.

[katrisims.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for the info, I knew there had to be a way to do these things!

I shouldn't need to resort to the placeholder trick - and I hope not, I wouldn't want to resort to any more placeholders than I already have... But I think the sticking in inventory thing should work, I think I've actually done it in the past with food, feeding customers with food from the inventory. So that's just a case of "why didn't I think of that myself?"

Hmm... The townie was not in their outwear, so I don't know what is the problem there... Maybe I need to send them away first and then summon them back for the new clothes to show up or something. Well, if I don't figure out what I'm doing wrong, then I guess I can look for the townie gun and try that.

Thanks once more!

[docnerd.livejournal.com]

That's odd, every time I've sold a Townie an outfit at the House of Stuff, they've popped into it right away. Did they actually make it to the register and pay for it? Sometimes they keep browsing, and I've closed the business before they've paid, so they never really bought the clothes to change into them.

[katrisims.livejournal.com]

Hmm... That might be it. I probably didn't take into account that they should actually pay for the items for them to appear. =P I had the sim as selectable yesterday and realized I could make them buy clothes and pay for them, so I tried that. It didn't work though, even though I zapped them and summoned them back afterwards they still didn't have the clothes available. With that option, I didn't expect them to change autonomously, though. I guess I'll have to retry the suggest outfit thing some time.

I googled the townie gun, and found out it's not actually a download, but something you can spawn with the testing cheats on. It seems that it can only change everyday clothes, and you can only choose from full outfits from some reason. What I had in mind originally was separates, but I found something workable in the outfits, too. So at least this time the townie gun got the job done for me. I'll have to re-experiment some time. Thanks!

[ndainye.livejournal.com]

The joys of setting up a scene, finding out you can't shoot it yet, resetting, resetting and then running off screaming.

I've gone through and made my animation boxes community lot buyable in SimPE. I think this is the tutorial I used for changing them. It's an old tutorial but it works.

As for the townie makeovers, I use the townie tree/gun. boolprop testingcheatsenabled true -> spawn -> townie creator -> change outfit of . The gun only works for everyday outfits. My simself is currently the only gold badged hairdresser in town, she summons townies/npcs to her lot changes their clothing and does their hair before kicking them back to the pool.

[katrisims.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it seems I'm getting familiar with this joy of joys... Well, that's how it seems to be and I'm still learning.

Thanks for the tips! The tutorial might come handy one of these days. And the townie gun seems to be a reasonable alternative to do these makeover things.