I’ve talked before about the fun you can have with the Sims 2 Body Shop. The Sims 2 Body Shop is a free program that lets you create custom objects that you can import into The Sims 2. This is a first in a series of articles about how to create custom objects. Today we tackle blue hair.

Custom hair color for your Sims is easy to achieve. You will need The Sims 2 Body Shop and a graphics editor program like Photoshop or PaintShop Pro. I use PaintShop Pro simply because I am more familiar with it.

The first step is to open The Sims 2 Body Shop. Click create parts then click start new project. Select create genetics and click on hair. Select a beginning hair color and click on the Sim so that you can now click export selected textures which is represented by a button that has a folder with an arrow shooting out of it. Name your project then click the checkmark to export the files. Next it will show the location of where the save project is on your computer. It should be in My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 Body Shop/Projects/nameofproject or something similar.

Now you are ready to open you graphic program. Open the first file. You will be altering files but not changing the name. Each file has an alpha (black and white) which does not need to be altered. Once you have your first hair texture file opened, create a new image that is the exact size of the texture. For hair, create a blank 512 x 512 image. Now choose which color you want to make the hair and then take the bucket tool and apply that color to your blank image.

Next copy the colored image and paste it as a new layer onto the hair texture.

In Paint Shop Pro, find the layers menu and click on the Raster layer, which is our blue image. Move the opacity down to a level that you are pleased with the blue color. I chose 70%.

To save some time go back to your blue image and promote the background layer. You can right click in the layer menu, then select promote background layer. Then change the opacity to 70% or whatever value you used for your first hair texture. Now you will just have to copy/paste as new layer the image and not have to change the opacity for each hair graphic.

You can always go back into The Sims 2 Body Shop to reload your project to see your progress. Hair textures are imported for the many different ages of a Sim, so you may not have to change all the files. It just depends at what age you want your Sim to have blue hair.

By changing afhair_Casual1~hair~stdMatBaseTextureName,afhair_Casual1~hairalpha5~stdMatBaseTextureName, and afhair_Casual1~hairalpha7~stdMatBaseTextureName, I changed the adult’s hair to completely blue.

When you are happy with the blue hair, just click import into game, the button that has the folder with the inward pointing arrow. That’s it! Now start up The Sims 2 to enjoy your creation, which should be found under the custom settings in the creation part of the Sims. I will add specific instructions when I play The Sims 2 and can make graphics for it.

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