Sims 4 Tutorial - Blog Posts

Hey I hope you’re doing okay! Ive been stalking your page for a while! I’m in the same process of making a visual novel! I was wondering how you do the AI+Sims 4 without it looking you know jacked up! Would love to know your progress!

Hold your hats everyone, i'll be explaining in details...

I was quite sceptical about AI previously. It felt like I'm being replaced with something monstrous, artificial - the imitation of life that's superior me on every single parameter. The sudden sting of a guilt for years of seemingly vain trials and tribulations. Was it all just for nothing? I believe everyone of us came to that question sooner or later. But here I stand telling you how to make a machine fulfill your demands.

First thing. The machine loves precise. From my personal experience, a better formed human wish grants a better machinery result. A less formed wish gives it a choice. Think beforehand, seek the patterns (keywords) that may help you sustain the artstyle throughout the workflow.

Tell the AI what it needs to do. Give it a reference image and explain how you want it to be changed. For example, I want this alien dude becoming a:

"A visually ominous face of an eyeless humanoid creature. This divine image, resembling a digitally rendered painting, showcases the ancient Egyptian god of chaos in detail: sharp chin and cheekbones, dark gray and beige skin, shimmering with pulsating rainbow hues, blood is visibly circulating under his translucent, cadaverous skin. His mouth with tightened teeth grins menacingly. The overall composition is dynamic and captivating, evoking a sense of fear, malevolent power and impending chaos". That will be my prompt. If you're lacking skills then put your hands on other's results, copy their prompts and reshape according to your needs.

Oh. Not so eyeless. Let's give it less of a free will shall we?

Better now! Sadly the eyes are in place, as you can see it is not perfect even with precise input. Now let's make about 5-10 generations with same settings. It may take time to pass a cooldown after you'll run out of tokens, so be patient. If you have absolutely no spare money to buy a decent amount of generations (or if the transactions themselves are banned in your country 👍) and your enthusiasm is on pathetically vigorous level join me on free trial option almost any of the AI sites provide. That is fair exchange - money or your time.

You get what I mean? It could be anything shaped into another anything. Put here your sim, order a nice shot - here you go! Make something out of nothing with the power of words. Make a human being... some kind of.

Hooray! Not only we have the result we craved for but a whole bunch of reusable high-quality textures of various nature.

Our next step: we go in a deep dark lair of creator's mind. Hm-m, I'd correct here and there, erased that part and attached that one... Now we play "compile your Frankenstein out of everything that is not in its place". Of course a machine is not yet on the level where there wouldn't be a possibility to distinct its presence. So to hide these little (big, actually) inconsistencies we use a power of photo editing. Grab your software. With the power given to you by the sense of vision eliminate the overgrowing fingers and fight back mutilated teeth clumps.

Meet my favourite one hundred percent AI generated method. Generate a simple low quality image free and effortlessly (I use Craiyon, the perfect weapon)

Let another AI add the details for you. Catches the concept just great. Though it does not mean no handiwork after.

You can stylize it even further. Here you can see AI generated monster dudes crispy pixelated after a luxurious tour into pixelart AI. Good thing for a pixel indie gamestyle.

So, that's it. The secret is basically in your own hands. Acknowledge the style of your game, follow it while generating contents and patch up the AI mistakes.

+ zero investments

+ compensation for a lack of skills / hardware

+ easy to use

- even more work than if you would do all the same without AI

- straight dependence on sites / chat-bots, etc.

- time consuming

- many limitations (forget this if you're not on a free subscription... wait a second that abolish the first plus too!)

Hope it was helpful!

Photoshop tip: turning your sims into drawings

Choose a proper image. You need a good (3+ different light sources) lighting for filter to work better. Make sure there are no black spots on your sim or they're covering a very little spaces. If you render in Cycles, don't forget to enable denoise option.

Open Photoshop, go to Filters --> Artistic --> Cutout

3. We have pretty decent result already but don't be afraid to play with available settings. Press Ok.

4. Let's make a copy of our image using CTRL + J shortcut.

5. While this new layer selected, clean Cutout filter and follow the same path: Filters --> Artistic but this time it will be Poster Edges

6. We'll use it to restore the details that were lost after using Cutout. We won't need them all, just enough to make our sim more cartoonish.

7. Grab a basic hard round brush, reduce the size and check the opacity and flow to be 100%. I also recommend to play with layer filling, in my case it set to 65%.

8. Invert the mask (default is white - 100% layer visibility, CTRL + I to make it black with 0% layer visibility)

9. Now draw the missing details with white color on the black mask. It can be anything you think should be preserved.

10. You can add as many similar adjustment layers as you want, use it wisely!