Frodo Baggins
as potrayed by Elijah Wood
with Ring, old version (shorter hair and thinner body)
without Ring, old version
with Ring, new version (longer hair and more "fit" body, as in pictures)  
without Ring, new version  

When I set out to try my hand at constructing another member of the Fellowship, I had fully anticipated that there would be some problems -- but not the ones I ran across.  Adapting photographs to look both like a real actor and like a Sim is a tricky business; the shadows and highlights of Sim faces are much flatter than those one usually finds in even the best of photos, which requires a certain amount of dinking around in order to get a proper balance between reality and Sim surreality.  The biggest issue I've found, however, is one of asymmetry.  Sim facial structure is perfectly symmetrical, or very nearly so, and increasing the number of vertices in a face (as opposed to the hair) to allow for the subtle asymmetry of certain real faces would be a difficult proposition at best.  With some faces, it's a task very nearly beyond the realm of possibility.  I've been fighting with an attempt to make a more "real" looking Michael J. Fox face for my Back to the Future skins, and that has proved to be so difficult, I've given up on the project for the time being.

Elijah Wood, happily, has a very nicely symmetrical face, as well as an abundance of available photographs with adequately proper lighting and a suitable angle to allow for fairly easy adapatation to a Sim face (wasn't quite as easy to adapt as Ian McKellen, but then, I'm still inclined to believe that was a stroke of luck, nothing more).  What proved most difficult for Frodo was the furry feet.  Having seen a number of hobbit skins done by others, I found the attempt to draw the hair on the feet largely unsuitable to my tastes, as it generally came across as nothing more than a blur or smudge that made him look as if he has dirty, not furry, feet.  The solution I finally tried was to construct furry foot toupees meshes for Frodo's feet, an  effect with which I am considerably more pleased.

For the sake of those who might like it, I also have a version of Frodo wearing the Ring on a chain around his neck, again a separate mesh rather than a drawn-on part of the skin.  All the latter I've seen and attempted on my own never quite appealed to me.

Another note:  This version of Frodo is an adult, not a child; he will stand as tall as all typical male adult Sims, not the half-height size of a hobbit.  This is for the sake of game-play, not appearance, since child-size hobbits must be played as children in order to get things (like the hands) to appear and function correctly, a situation which rapidly becomes boring if you want to play Frodo as the adult he is and not as a child whose life options in the Sim world are severely limited.

The new versions of the head and body came about as I was working on my first attempt at Pippin.  Since his skins were and are far from finished, I tested the head and body with Frodo's skins instead, and decided I liked it much better than what I'd had before.  I'm leaving both versions up for now, but may eventually remove whichever one I like less.