Slavic-Style Red Wooden Beads

This piece is now obsolete. An updated version can be found HERE.

I told you accessories don’t count ;)

I don’t actually know how universally ‘Slavic’ those beads are (plus I guess there must be a number of non-Slavic people who wear them as well), but in Poland they are a HUGE thing. Heck, even I, a city girl through and through, have my  string of red beads, now, in 2019. And in folk outfits? Absolutely indispensable!

This was supposed to be just a small side project, but it was so easy that I decided to make 3 versions of the beads... And then, of course, it got way more complicated.

It comes, as planned in, 3 versions. Each of them has 2 swatches: bright red and dark red ^^ (ofc feel free to recoulour if you want more diversity). I dare to say they ended up looking quite cool, especially the Lush version.

HOWEVER:

They won’t match every single body type.

Have you ever noticed that there are no Maxis-made long necklaces? After my  fight with those buddies, I think I know why. I don’t want to confuse anyone with the talk of UVs and weights, but to put it simple: if you make a necklace which reaches sims’s boobs, you have a choice between it getting badly distorted in this area or looking all pretty, but disappearing if the sim gets too curvy.

From what I’ve seen (yes, I downloaded a bunch of other creators’ CC to check how others solve this problem), most people go for the second option. I didn’t like this solution too much, so I experimented a bit with different versions, to find some compromise between those two extremes. What I ended up with is:

All the necklaces, even the longest one, will appear on MOST figures. The bigger the boobs, the bigger the clipping chance, but they seem to work on most of the realistic configurations.  Unfortunately, that comes at a price: the beads WON’T stay all that pretty and round on each of those figures. The further you get from the ‘default’, the weirder they look. Body fat seems not to influence it too much, but sliders do, especially if the disproportions between body parts are big.

Still, I think it’s as good a compromise as one can make in this case. I’d say it’s better to have a necklace you can use on different sims, even if it doesn’t look perfect on all of them, than have it cut into boobs of all your curvier sims. Here’s how it looks in  the game:

All this talk doesn’t apply to the ‘Simple’ version. This one should be perfectly fine, no matter what.

Also, I probably have to warn you: the polycounts of the necklaces range from  “still OK” to “horrendously high”. It seems that’s what you get if your necklace is made of lots of small spheres!

The next thing will be folk-unrelated, I promise ;).

Enjoy (and ofc let me know if something else is off)!

PS. Oh, and in case you'd like to know the details: the long necklaces are UV-mapped, vertex-painted blue and fully assigned to the spine-1 joint. I tried solving the clipping problem by assigning them to the boobs, but... Let's say, it wasn't my best idea ever ^^.