Update 1: Added Disabled option to hide presets.
Overview
Face Preset Editor is a tool that allows you to create and edit CAS Sim face presets.
Installation Instructions
Extract the FacePresetEditor zip anywhere you wish.
You will notice that it comes with a “Mod” folder, inside is the accompanying Script Mod you must put into your Sims 3 Mods folder.
Creating a Face Preset – The Easy Way
2. Open the CAS panel of the region you wish to create a preset for. Say, if you want to create a mouth preset, head to the mouth panel:
3. Open the console with Ctrl+Shift+C and type “presetexport (Name of your preset, without spaces)” like so:
4. Hit enter and you should get a pop-up notifying you of the category of the new preset and where it was stored:
5. You can now continue creating as many presets as you want by repeating the previous steps. When you’re done, close the game.
6. Open the FacePresetEditor tool, head to Tools -> Batch Convert XMLs and locate the presets you exported from inside the game. They should be in your Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 folder.
You can select multiple presets at once. This is why I recommend you create as many as you want at once while you’re in-game.
7. You will be asked if you want to format the filenames in a way that you can easily import them into a S3PE package:
I recommend you choose Yes, in order to make the S3PE importing step easier.
8. You will now have new .compblend files in the same location as your exported XML files:
9. Open S3PE and create a new package by going into File -> New
10. Now you can right click on the blank Resources area -> Import -> From file… and select all of your compblend files at once:
11. Save the package into your Mods folder and quit S3PE. If you did everything right, your new presets should show up in-game!
Extra options
1. Optionally, you can add a 1 after the name of your preset in the presetexport cheat. Like so:
This will force the preset to generate as a Head and Ears preset, and will include every single slider that affects the Sim, not just the ones pertinent to the head region.
2. You can go to File -> Open and load a game exported XML face preset file into FacePresetEditor, then modify it and File -> Export it into an usable .compblend. Do this if you wish to make manual adjustments to an exported preset, add sliders, etc.
Creating a Face Preset – The Manual Way
Here you can type in a name for your preset and the type of preset it is. This determines in what panel it will show up in CAS in-game.
Included is an “ExamplePreset.facepreset” file that you can open by going into File -> Open and locating it. This is an example Mouth preset I made, if you don’t want to make one from scratch for your first one or if you just want to inspect it.
Clicking on the “Add” button will add an empty Slider with its value set to 0
Notice the Instance ID is set to 0x0… This is where S3PE comes into play. Inside of your Base Game Installation Folder/GameData/Shared/Packages folder, the FullBuild0.package and DeltaBuild0.package contain resources with the FACE Tag, by opening these packages with S3PE you can filter by this Tag. These are the slider resources you can use in your custom preset. You can also use custom sliders by opening their packages and locating their FACE resources.
Right click the one you want, click on “Details” then copy the Instance field and paste it into the Instance field of the Face Preset Editor, with your newly added slider selected.
Also give it a proper name in the Face Preset Editor, so you know what the slider does.
You can now use the controls below “Slider Amount:” to tweak the slider value.
With the Multiply field you can change the limit of the slider, so you can go out of bounds and make crazy presets. With the “Set NRaas Numeric Value” you can utilize the slider values that the MasterController displays in CAS, which range from -256 to 256.
Most sliders aren’t meant to go below 0, most Bi-Directional sliders have two FACE files that take positive values. For example, Nose Scale is composed of NoseScaleUp and NoseScaleDown, so if you want to set Nose Scale to -0.5 you’d want to add the NoseScaleDown resource set to 0.5. There are exceptions to this however, such as the NoseNostrilScale slider, which despite being bi-directional only has one FACE resource. In this case, it can take a negative value for the left side.
When you’re done adding and tweaking your sliders, you can go to File -> Save and choose an appropriate name and location for the project file. This is not the file format the game utilizes, but it has the ability to store the names you gave to the sliders which is useful. After this, you can go to File -> Export, which will generate a file the game can read, but if you import this file into the software slider names will be gone.
To see your Face Preset in-game, open S3PE, create a new empty package and import the file you exported with the software into it. Give it the CBLN Type
Then give it the same name you gave to it in the Face Preset Editor and click on FNV64 to generate an Instance ID
That should be it! Save the package, put it into your Mods folder and the new preset should show up In-Game.
If you wish to modify an existing EA preset, these can be found in your Base Game Installation Folder/GameData/Shared/Packages/FullBuild0.package. Open this package with S3PE and filter by the “CBLN” tag. You can extract these files and with the Face Preset Editor, go to File -> Import and locate them to modify them.
Easier way to find sliders
To find the FACE resources, you can also look for the FBLN resources, this might be easier. S3PE will display the TGI of the FACE resource associated with the slider on the preview on the right. If the slider is bi-directional, it will likely have two resources, if so the top one is the FACE resource for the right side (1 to 256) and the bottom one is the resource for the left side (-1 to -256)
Source Code (Published on: 2022-01-28 12:00:00)
