Well, EA's implementation of the model is lame. It would have freaking killed them to have added "geneticizer" buttons to BodyShop to group your creations with similar Maxis content? Instead, you gotta find a tutorial or find someone who specializes in "geneticizing" other people's skins!
The model itself is better than halfway good. I love being able to have babies with grandma's eyes and grandpa's hair and skintones half way between mom and dad (especially with Madame Mim's genetic versions of Enayla's skins which place them "between" the Maxis skins, so siblings can be just a shade or two different)!
To some extent, the hair color and style
are separate. If you choose the red hair with the two braids, then switch to black, that style will be automatically selected. Theo's hair binning plugin (the geneticizer tool for hair) automatically sets the "family" of all hair colors of the style you're working on to that of the black version. Obviously, this doesn't work with non-genetic hair, which is just jumbled together in the Custom bin. Guess I should finish my tutorial and send out a press release about that!
There is "dyed hair." The hair your Sim is created or born with
is their natural hair color. If you go to the mirror or the beauty parlor chair, that hair color can be considered "dyed," because their children will not inherit it. You actually have to fire up SimPE to alter their genetics to change that.
Sandy: I was just thinking... You could make the standard non-genetic version, zip it up, then geneticize it, zip that up, and offer both for download. Once you know which people like, you can drop the less popular version if you want.
I'm still looking for your tutorial -- I got side tracked into downloading Marvine's slim body builder and athletic girl meshes...
And I discovered another bit of EA stupidity... although you can fiddle with the insides of the skintone files and swap in Marvine or Warlokk's meshes for the teen/adult/elder nudes, the same mesh is used for both the "normal" and "fit" versions of any particular age! That means you can't have your "normal" Sim work out and suddenly pop out muscles like the slimBB mesh. I think
that would be so cool! I PM'ed BeosBoxBoy, and he says trying to get that to work is one of his summer projects, but he's afraid Bodyshop would basically destroy his hard work when you tried to apply it to another skintone. If Bodyshop can't handle it, he won't even release it.