Description
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.