How to make a UI Emotion Pose Override
I figured I'd explain how I made the UI Emotions pose overrides for Sims 4. This guide assumes you know how to make a pose and know Blender basics, it just explains how you find the relevant files to override and other little bits. I did search and couldn't find a tutorial for this, but maybe I didn't look hard enough. These aren't too tricky to make, and also for me make a pretty big difference in not having to look at EA animations / poses as much, haha.
You will need Blender, Sims 4 Studio and MCCC for easily achieving the relevant moods for testing.
Go to Animation > Override on Sims 4. Click the Animation button.
Type in ui_mood_ into the search bar and it will bring up all of the mood UI poses, the ones that appear in the bottom left of the screen. a_ui is the Adult poses, c_ui is Child poses. There's also i_ui which I assume is Infant, and p_ui which is Toddler. We'll edit an adult UI pose for this.
Some of them have different names to in-game: Depression - Very Sad, Elated - Very Happy, Fearless - Very Confident, In the Zone - Very Focused, Miserable - Very Uncomfortable, Pumped - Very Energised, Frustrated - Very Tense, Passionate - Very Flirty, Imaginative - Very Inspired.
This is an example from the Sims Wiki, even though this doesn't look too exaggerated on this particular example, I always thought this expression seemed a bit too cheery for some of the small things Sims get +1 happy about. (Hey, if we can't be happy then neither can any of our pixel dolls.) So let's find the one labelled 'happy' a_ui_mood_happy_x and open it. Leave the dropdown as Adult Female, then click Export and save the .blend file.
Open it in Blender, and then press 5 on the NumPad to set it to Ortho view. Now you have to try and move the view around to get the 3d viewpoint as close as possible to the rough viewpoint of the appearance of the emotion in-game. Use a screenshot of the Emotion as reference.
Once you have a similar enough viewpoint (this is more or less at the same angle as the UI pose), then make sure you Save and I recommend naming this file 'BASE' or something. This way, if you want to make more than one emotion override for the different emotions. Saves having to find the correct 'view' for every exported pose. Now it's time to make your pose!
Limitations to bear in mind:
- You can't have anything that is too far forwards, like a hand reaching forward or something or it will cut off those parts (I tried a pose with the hands facing right the way forward for the 'possessed' emotion for a kind of 'grabbing at the viewer' effect, and they just are invisible if you do that) and you have to keep the arms relatively close to the body or they will also be cut off in-game if they are out to the sides too much.
This is the one I made, which is much more subtle and more suitably 'normal happy'. This tutorial assumes you know how to make a pose, so LocRot and lock in the pose on the 0th frame. Save, then go back to Sims 4 Studio, Import on the same screen you Exported the .blend on, import the new pose .blend file, then Save. Then put the .package in your Mods folder.
After that, you need to go to My Documents / Electronic Arts / The Sims 4 (or your equivalent on your computer). In this folder you'll see a file called localthumbcache.package. Delete it, otherwise you won't see your new pose in-game since it stores the emotion thumbnails.
Once you've done that, boot the game. With MCCC, if you shift-click a Sim it should give you an option to Cheat Emotions if you need to (you can use these multiple times to get the level of emotion you need depending on what Emotions you've made overrides for) to test how it looks in-game.
The top left is the new, more subtle Happy pose which I greatly prefer. The rest are examples of other poses that are part of my (free) UI Pose Overrides. The 'Very Happy' gives you an idea of the space you have and where the 'cut-off' points are.
You can easily take the overrides out without issues as well if you change your mind or want to try out new ones, you just need to delete the 'localthumbcache' package each time you add or delete a pose override so it can 'reset' the portrait images and show the right poses.
