• Naturally Posed

Always try to alter every or at least almost every joint a little bit. Altering just a few joints can leave your pose looking quite stiff and unnatural. Begin with the big changes and work your way down to the details. Don't forget to pose the face, hands and fingers as they count a great deal towards the overall quality of your pose.

• Anatomically Possible

Just because you can move the joints any which way, doesn't mean it's a good idea. Don't go beyond what's anatomically possible for the type of body you are posing. Avoid bending joints in impossible directions or at impossible angles unless it's required to fit a certain theme or context. E.g. If you are making acrobatic poses then it's fair to expect that they may be able to bend in ways that the average human being would not be capable of.

Keep in mind that a pose that is anatomically possible for the human body, isn't necessarily doable for sims without looking really bad. It doesn't make a useful pose if you alter a joint in a way that the sim mesh gets badly distorted even if it would be possible for a human. If the mesh gets badly distorted, try to work around it or go for something else.

Tip: Whenever you're unsure, use a mirror to check what's possible on your own body or maybe work from pictures of real people.

• Respect for the Laws of Gravity

The center of weight of the sim should be within the footprint. Whether you're standing upright, balancing on one leg or bending over; if you have no external object to lean on or support you then you must have at least one foot directly under your center of weight. If you don't, you fall over. Try to pose your sims so that they look evenly balanced and not like they're about to fall over. Of course this doesn't apply to poses that are supposed to show sims falling over or in full movement.

• No Sinking of Floating

Whether the sims is supposed to be sitting, standing or leaning on something, they should not noticeably sink into or float above the object their weight is intended to be resting on. Of course, this doesn’t apply to poses that are supposed to show sims in motion (jumping etc).

• Skeleton is Stretched or Compressed

Always keep all the bones at their regular length. Stretched or compressed skeletons never look realistic, and can completely ruin an otherwise good pose.

Tip: Never move a joint! Only rotate them.

• Clipping or Anti-Clipping

Always aim to have no clipping or as little clipping as possible with your poses. On the other hand, if parts of the body are supposed to make contact, e.g. hand on hip, they should actually make contact and not miss each other by a wide margin.

Tip: Remember to consider the type of clothing that may be used along with your poses. E.g it might make sense to factor in winter clothing if you're making poses with a ski holiday theme.

You will need to include certain screenshots with your pose set. You must:

• Show Your Whole Creation: You should have at least one picture of each pose you are sharing, showing the whole thing from top to bottom, left to right. Don't crop bits of the pose out of the picture or obscure them with text etc.

• Include Additional Angles if Necessary: Your images should show at least the key elements of each pose which are the face, hands and limb joints. You may need to show side on views or take a few shots from additional angles if the pose is quite complex or if it's in a bending/crouching position.

• Show Props in Use: If your poses are made specifically to be used with a certain prop or special item of clothing you should show them using the objects as intended in your screenshots.

• New Mesh pictures: If you made a new mesh to be used specifically with your pose set and have included it in the file for upload you should treat it like any other new mesh upload and provide pictures of the channels, CAST presets and tiling.

Please remember, for your required pictures:

• In-Game Screenshots: All required screenshots must be taken in the game with actual in-game backgrounds. Please don't cut and paste your models onto non-game backgrounds. Images should be lit well enough to show the poses and not so overly cluttered and fussy that it's difficult to see where the pose ends and the background begins.
• Poses Labelled: It should be clear which poses are which. The easiest way to do this is to add labels to the pics, but you can do it another way if you prefer.
• Clothes and Hair Obscuring the Pose: Try to choose hair and outfits that don’t hide the actual pose; we should still be able to tell how the joints and skeleton are posed. If you're unsure, just use short hair and tight pants and shirts.
• Pose Box (TS2 Only): Please show the pose box in game or the icon to be used in game.

Keep the following in mind for your screenshots, especially the required ones:

• Size: 800 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall is a good size for the smallest pic you would want to upload. Your images can be up to 2560x1440 pixels, and 800 kb, so you have lots of space to work with!
• Lighting: For most things, it's best to take pictures in an interior room with good lighting. For lots, pictures should be taken during a nice sunny day, for floorplans, take the pictures with the lights ON.
• Clarity: Neither blurry, nor pixellated/crunchy. Do not size up small pictures to make a large one as this will blur them, and make sure not to use too much compression/too low quality when saving your images.
• Distance: Take your pictures so that your creation fills the screen without anything cut off at top or bottom - neither zoomed in too close, nor zoomed out too far.
• Distortion: If you resize your images, retain the aspect ratio so they don't get stretched or squashed. Take care when zooming in and out with the camera that you do not create a fisheye effect on your pictures.
• Photoshopping: Do not apply filters like sharpen, contrast, etc. to the required pictures, as downloaders want to see what your creation will look like in their game, not your skills at using Photoshop.
• Attached: All required images must be attached directly to the MTS upload, not just inserted using the img tag, so that even if the pics get deleted from your Photobucket (or other host), the upload on MTS is still complete.
• Show all items: For most areas, if you are uploading a set, you must take all the required pics for each item in the set. If there is an exception, it will be noted.
• Picture limit: You may upload up to 100 pictures for a single upload thread, so feel free to add some additional pictures just to show off your work to its best. Of course, keep it reasonable - nobody needs 50 pics to show off one sim or hair.
• Inline pictures: Inline pictures are those that use the [img] tag to show up in with the description text. So that it doesn't take too long to load, please keep this to no more than 4 pictures done inline, unless you put them inside an [infobutton] tag. To do this, see our guide on post formatting.

• The name, price and category in which your pose box can be found (TS2 Only).
• Pose List Compatibility: All poses should be pose list compatible. Please state that they are compatible in the written portion of your upload or provide a screen grab of your pose list in game to show that they are. Pose pack tutorial
• Pose Names should be in the format that you would type them into the pose player. E.g. a_dancepose_3. The pose names must be included in full somewhere on the upload post but it's up to you if they are in the main text or just on the images or maybe both.
• Links to custom content that the poses are specifically designed to be used with. Remember, poses that require pay content props will not be supported by MTS.
• New Mesh Info: If you have made a new mesh to use as a prop for your pose and have included it in the file, you need to follow MTS2:Creator_Guidelines/Sims_3_Objects/Sandbox and be sure to include polygon counts (for LOD1). If you don't know how to check your mesh's poly count, see Tiptorial:Poly Counts for Creators.

For instructions on compressing your files into an archive, please see: Creator Guidelines: Creating Archive Files.

• Do not include multiple archives with the same contents - that is, please don't put your files in both a .zip as well as a .rar because some people only want .zip files. Choose one format.

• Do not double-compress your files... a .rar file inside another .rar file (or any other archive inside another) doesn't compress it anymore, and it makes it so we can't see the contents without downloading, and also just makes an extra step for the people downloading.

• The file size limit on MTS is 50 mb. If you exceed this limit you will need to split your archives. This should probably never come up except for large worlds for The Sims 3, or huge sets of smaller items.