First Navy Jack Tank Top


Tank Top with the US Navy's First Jack
SimsHost subscribers can download the outfit by clicking on the image. (~476 KB. Pretty big.)
Unzip the archive and put the .package into your Downloads or Saved Sims folder.
This is a top, but it includes the panties shown. The panties will show or not, depending on what bottom your sim is wearing.
This top uses the default mesh from The Sims 2, so your sim might not appear quite as shapely as the one shown here. (I have a mesh installed that overrides the Maxis version.)

And for Warlokk fans, two additional sizes are available:
Navy Jack Tank in Size 34C - Requires Warlokk's 34C Nat nude top mesh (A cold draft blew through the studio while we were working on that one.)
Navy Jack Tank in Size 34D - Requires Warlokk's 34D Nat tank top mesh (Deployed the heaters this time so the model wasn't quite so perky.)
Get the meshes from Warlokk's Tower.
(I considered making larger versions but when our full-figured models tried to squish themselves into that tight tank top, they kept having embarrassing wardrobe failures; so we gave up on that idea. Ya just can't stuff ten pounds of [mud] into a five-pound sack!)


Here's something for history buffs! The flag on the ribbed tank top is the first jack adopted by the U.S. Navy. It was one of many flags that came out just before the American Revolution in overt defiance of King George, depicting a rattlesnake with the warning, "Don't Tread on Me".

The panties are part of the top. If your sim is wearing something a very low waist (or a daringly short skirt or shorts), they'll show; otherwise you won't see them when the sim gets dressed.* If you get close enough, you'll note that the undies have "The Pearl" logo on them. While you're there take a quick glance and you'll see that you can actual read the text on the flag, too. A quick glance is all you're going to get, though, because you're about to get your face slapped.

The default version of the garment includes a bump map ("normals") that don't show in Body Shop, where I made this screen shot. If you have bump maps enabled in your game, a few more wrinkles will show up as well as more definition in the ribs. (That would be the fabric ribs, not the model's ribs.) The Warlokk versions do not have a bump map.)

As you might have guessed, this is yet another project where I got an idea while surfing around the net and thought I'd just knock it out in ten minutes, and then after many hours of fiddling was finally satisfied with what I got.



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*I suppose they'd also show under some alpha skirts if for some reason you decide to turn your sim upside down and look.

That's really neat!

Oh I like this! I like the colors especially.

I was looking at the background of the image I used to display the shirt and thought that the flag would be a pretty neat thing to have to hang on the wall. (The one in the image above is an artifact of Photoshop.)

If'n somebody who knows how to mesh were to be so inclined, this might come in handy:


Click on the image to get the big version.

I'd guess that it would be relatively simple mesh, just a simple rectangle based on a picture object with the right aspect ratio to match the flag and the right width to fit nicely on a wall panel or two with a strecher behind it. I'm thinking that if I had one of these things in real live I'd make a simple flat wooden frame, like an artist's canvas stretcher, to support it from behind and maybe cover the frame with a dark fabric so that it doesn't conflict with the flag.

For your amusement, here's a link to the Wikipedia article where I pilfered the image that I started with to make this one. The jack has a really interesting history.

I modified the image by adding a fabric texture, aging the colors, changing the font and making it look a bit more crude, making the snake appliqué a bit transparent (that took four Photoshop layers), and adding shading hither and yon. I condsidered adding some stains, tears, and deterioration to make it look really old, but that wouldn't have been historically accurate (none of the original flags are known to exist) and I just couldn't bring myself to besmirch the jack.

Isn't there a horizontal poster mesh somewhere already?

Yep, it looks like it's a NightLift item...

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=175637

miros1 wrote:

Yep, it looks like it's a NightLift item... http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=175637

Hmm...

Too big. Wrong aspect ratio. Even if I had NightLift, I wouldn't modify the jack to fit a Sims 2 object. I already feel guilty about cropping classical paintings!

Wasn't this the Maine state flag at one point? Or am I confusing it with Ben Franklin's snake cartoon?

miros1 wrote:

Wasn't this the Maine state flag at one point? Or am I confusing it with Ben Franklin's snake cartoon?

The snake emblem first appeared as a cartoon in Benjamin Franklin's newspaper with the motto "Join Or Die."*

I looked up the state flag of Maine but couldn't find any references to the snake, but I might not be looking in the right places.

Ref: http://www.maine.gov/sos/kids/allabout/symbols/flag.htm



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*Which is in stark contrast with the motto of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society: "Death Does Not Release You!"

I found a great site... it was another early flag I was thinking of, the Gadsden flag, not the Navy Jack...

http://www.gadsden.info/

Now if I could just figure out why I've got Maine mixed into it...

Maybe your mind dropped an R. It says here (http://www.gadsden.info/history.html) that the first Marines carried the snake.