Sims Cold War CC

Custom Content for Sims 4

Overview

The Sims 4 community has a rich ecosystem of custom content. I was inspired by this to make a custom content pack to imitate the style of Sims 4 assets. To achieve the right look I created a shader in blender for edge highlights and ambient occlusion, then combined with baked lighting.

I chose the Cold War subject matter for 3 reasons,

1. To capture a cultural association with institutional computing power before widespread personal computing
2. The banality of the Sims in constrast to the seriousness of the Cold War is funny to me
3. The Sims and the Cold War both share roots in game theory and simulation so they actually resonate with each other

Gallery

Renders from Blender.

Breakdown

I started with a bunch of sketches of old computers and related objects to work out a cohesive design language. I spent a while exploring different forms for the desktop terminals in particular, as subtle differences in their form carry a lot of meaning. My goal in the end was a sort of blend of older mainframe computing from the 50s/60s and desktop computing from the 70s and 80s.

After establishing some rough designs, I made sketches in illustrator to refine the scale to be Sims-accurate and make sure the forms were cohesive before beginning to model. I quite like the illustrator sketches, they are a bit sleeker and less cartoony than the final models.

The first round of models were very rigid but it helped me work out the modular buttons and screens.

The final models are less stiff, they are still pretty rigid but lean into the illustrative quality of the Sims more.