Teen woohoo to date is probably the most popular concept in modding The Sims 2. Responsible for the most page views by far on any site. And this concept naturally extended to another reality, that being teen pregnancy. I am JT, author of the site, author of the original teen woohoo, and every single derivative there of.

I wanted to discuss briefly the various concepts in achieving realism in 'showing' for maternity for those stages of life where it is desired but not included in the game. Up thru version 1d of our twoo, no pregnant tummy was available. Once we were given the ability to create and/or modify 'meshes' in the game, we started taking the existing meshes and making them 'show' for the teen age group. Let me digress a moment to discuss what a mesh is versus what a texture is for those of you who don't understand it.

Mesh vs Texture

One mesh can represent all of the two piece bathing suits offered in the game for an age group. But a texture would occur for each of those swimsuits. So thinking about the style of the suit is more in tune with a mesh, vs color being associated with the texture. So for the adult 'everyday' selections, there might be 10 meshes, but each having 3 to 5 textures.

It is the mesh that is manipulated to produce 'showing' during maternity. We have two ways of approaching this here at S2L.

Two Ways

The BASIC twoo package or BASICUNIVERSITY twoo package, along with the Pregnancy tuner, will yield pregnancy for teens and young adults with no 'showing' during maternity. They waddle and behave as if pregnant, but do not show. We offer several meshes where the tummy is stretched to give the effect of showing. These meshes are ALWAYS showing. So when the Sim is no longer pregnant, the clothing item needs to be removed. For many, and it is popular, this is sufficient.

Starting with version 1e of the twoo we include a new concept for showing in these meshes. These meshes are not required, and they can be used with previous versions of the twoo. The difference is that these new meshes only show when appropriate. They are replacements for the defaults in the game. So they apply at all times. We accomplished this by taking the adult versions of those styles of clothing and scaling them to teen size, and replacing the teen meshes with them. This yields a teen, not aged, not made to be fat, but a true teen with a different bone structure to facilitate the animation that occurs for the 2nd and 3rd trimesters. We have only completed a small sample of the possible meshes (clothing items) that a Sim can wear. An interesting finding is that if a Sim is not wearing one of these meshes during the camera pan in for those animations, the Sim will remain without showing. So it is a concept that is much appreciated by some, but certainly not necessary and also frustrating if you plan for it and then have your Sim go dress in something else while your not looking right before the animation. grrrrrr.

In any event, it is an interesting project, but one I feel we have reached the end. It is time to move on to other endeavours in Simming. But what I wanted to achieve in this tutorial is to explain the difference in the two concepts, both of which can be used simultaneously, or none at all, during gameplay. In order to make it easier to follow, I will updating all of the offerings here at S2L, marking them either as v1e meshes (realtime) or (static), meaning they always show.