Alien Mermaid Tail

A big thanks to MermanSimmer for allowing me to post my update of his work.  The original version can be found here (no download link there, but it's the best I can find now).

Merman Simmer has a lot of great Mermaid tails, but most were made pre-Island Living and weren't converted afterwards.  Including this gem.  As a hybrid enthusiast I had to have it in my game as a proper Mermaid tail.  This involved transferring weights and redoing the UV_1 layer a bit.  But it still didn't behave right.  When I morphed it the fins just didn't stretch with the "ankles" no matter what I did!  It resulted in the ankles being large and detached from the fins.  So I vertex painted it blue.  That seemed to work.  Oddly, MS split the tail up into several pieces so I stitched them all together and fixed the UVs (he did the same for the child and Plantsim tail too and I repeated the process there).

But I couldn't leave it at that.  MS didn't make a male version!  Since Sims4 morphs female to male natively I figured it would be easy to set things up to be unisex.  Uh ... no.  No it's not.  The resulting Sim kinda had a tiny frame, boobs, and a jutting package!  Still, the frame was mostly right, so I ripped the male Sim using NinjaRipper and set about to bisect the thing so I could attach it to half of the male alien outfit.  

It's very different in terms of texture!  Why!?  So I set about remapping the texture, normals, and emission maps using Smart Objects in Photoshop (like I do for most Sims 3 conversions that need it).  Seems like morphed male meshes actually nudge the entire UV map downwards a bit, so I had to blend in some of the male alien suit into the female one.  

It was a lot of work to get it just right, so I'm glad I could share it.

This requires Get to Work and Island Living.