How to pose your sims in Sims 3

This is a short tutorial, on how you can pose your sims in Sims 3 and how to take reasonably good screenshots of them.

First things first – here are the things you need to start posing your sims:

Of course, you will also need some poses to use with these tools – for example, you can check the ones  I made or the ones I list here.

The poses packages are installed like any other mod. If you don’t know how to do it, please check here.

Once you have all the above installed and running, and you have also put at least one poses package into your game, you can start using it.

One thing to note  –there are two kinds of packages with poses:

The difference lies in the way you will be able to use them. If they are pose-list compatible, it means that when you use Pose Player, you will have an option of selecting the pose from the pose-list (it will have its own thumbnail and description, so you should be able to identify it easily. On the other hand, the poses that are not pose-list compatible, will not show on the Pose Player list. You will have to manually enter the name of each pose you want the pose player to use, which is really time consuming. That is why I prefer tu use poses that are pose-list compatible.

To make the process of taking pictures smoother we’ll use some console cheats. To enter the cheats:

Press three buttons at the same time:  CTRL  SHIFT  C

A line for entering cheats should apper at the top left of your screen.

Type in the following:

testingcheatsenabled true  – then hit ENTER – this cheat makes other cheats work. If you type it correctly, the console should disappear and you will not receive any info that it worked. If you receive an error message, check the spelling.

Again press CTRL+SHIFT+C and type:

hideheadlineeffects on – then hit ENTER – this makes the plumbob and other unnecessary things (like skill progress bar) disappear.

Again press CTRL+SHIFT+C and type:

moveobjects on – then hit ENTER – this will allow you to move your sims freely in buy/build mode, as if they were furniture 🙂

If you have Generations there is one more very useful cheat – Again press CTRL+SHIFT+C and type:

moviemakercheatsenabled true – then hit ENTER – After entering this cheat, SHIFT click your sim to disable free will and turn off look ats.

Ok, so you have your beautiful pose you want to use, and your georgous sim that should perform it.

First, choose the location wisely. Frankly, for my screenshots I tend to build special rooms, that have only the things I need. Make sure, the place is not too clutttered, or your sim will be hardly visible. Also try to decide what colour palette you are going to use – if you use too many colours, that contradict each other, it ill be unbearable to look at the screenshot.

Set up the lighting for your photoshoot. For me this is a two stage process. First, I choose the general lighting I want to have – the overall colour and brightness of the scene. I put lamps that I feel suit the scene (like torches for a dungeon), then I CTRL+SHIFT click them, to choose the colour and intensity of the lighting. Then I put the sims on their places and adjust the lighting by moving the lamps around and adding Bohudain’s invisible lights, to highlight the things I want.

Finally, to pose your sim. Place somewhere on the lot the pose player (you’ll find in Decor / Misc in buy catalogue). After that, if you installed the Pose Player Interactions Add-on, all you have to do is to click your sim you want to pose, select Photo Shooting / Select Pose and choose your pose. If the pose is not pose-list compatible, you choose Photo Shooting / Pose By name Instead and type in the name of the pose you want.

Sometimes, the pose you like is prepared to suit sim being on the floor and you think it would look splendid on the bed. Not to worry. Use OMSP (you’ll find it in miscellaneous surfaces in buy mode), place your sim on it, adjust the hight (CTRL+SHIFT click OMSP) and you’ll have what you want. Use tipsy OMSP to adjust the angle, at which the sim is located.  The OMSP is also useful to rotate sims freely. While you can move posing sim without snapping to grid (holding ALT while moving), there is no option of free rotation. To remedy this, just put your sim on OMSP and rotate OMSP with your sim.

A helpful tip if you want to use OMSP to lower the sim and still see the OMSP (to be able to move it after lowering below floor), is to use two OMSPs at the same time. Put the first one on the floor, and make it up 1 cm. Put the next one on the floor, and raise it by 2 m. Then, try to put the 1 cm OMSP ON the 2 m OMSP. When you succeed, you will have a construction that allows you to move two OMSPs at the same time, by grabbing the one that is higher. Put your sim on the bottom one, and to lower the sim, CTRL+SHIFT click the 2 m OMSP and choose “down”. This way, you can freely move your lowered sim (or any other object), even if it starts below the ground.

If some object is getting in your way while taking a screenshot, click on it in life mode, choose Nraas / Debug enabler and then Fade. It will make the object invisible.

The Pose Player Interaction Add-on has also two more invaluable facilities. First one is change facial expression, which allows you, to choose one of emotional expressions for your posing sim, instead of using the expression cetaed in the pose. the second one is” Look at“, which makes your posing sim look at a chosen sim or object. Depending on the pose it may even cause the sim’s head to move  in the right direction, but it doesn’t work with every pose.

I sometimes have trouble making up my mind, how my sim should be dressed while taking a pose. To be able to change the outfit without the sim loosing the pose, simply use Nraas master Controller. First, after clicking on the posing sim in life mode choose Nraas / Master Controller / Stylist – this will allow you to create the outfit you like. When you finish, exit Stylist, again choose Nraas / Master Controller and then Basic/ Outfit. This will let you choose the outfit your sim is wearing and the sim won’t stop posing.

Remember, that you can use poses in whatever way you like, you don’t need to keep theur original context. For this tutorial I used the poses I created for the garotte. They don’t look perfect at all angles in the setting I used here, but they allowed me to make a screenshot I wanted. Remember that usually first few screenshots will not be too good – take lots of them and then choose one that looks best.

The camera mods I mentioned as needed will make it much easier to take good screenshots, as they give you better control over the in game camera, like eliminating the irritating floating of the camera or allowing the camera to get closer to the ground.

If your PC can take it, use the high quality mod, to make the textures clearer. You will find it under the link above – download it, it’s a separate aplication (you don’t put it in mods folder). Download button is at the bottom of the post called download s3hq. Onece you have it on your PC, unzip it, run the aplication and input the preferences for the graphic settings you want. Remember, that you need a strong PC to run this without lags. To make the game faster, check also my speeding up the game tutorial.