I followed the tutorial to clone a mesh from an EP, and that went fine. I didn't change the meshes at all, just extracted them because I wanted the shape. So I went about my business changing the textures and all that, but when I imported those mesh files (because I needed to change the bump map) it's giving weird shadows, despite never touching them.

I opened them up in milkshape to see if perhaps I imported the wrong lod as they weren't descriptive. I got these errors:


How the mesh looks in milkshape:


I really don't get it. If I had gone in there and moved things around I could see the possibility of there being issues, but I didn't even open them up until I saw there was a problem. What would cause this?

Here's a comparison to the original LN mini skirt beside mine. As you can see there's also a slight gap above the ankle. While you can't really tell in the pictures, my mesh also slims the legs.


I'm also having an issue with CTU not saving colors in the patterns. Everytime there's more than one color in it, it reverts the background to black.

I'd appreciate any help you can offer

You can ignore the import errors. All they mean is that you haven't provided a skeleton so a default one is used, and that a bone in the mesh is not present in that default skeleton. I don't want to say there's NEVER a problem with this, but I've never seen one.

Do you have Autosmooth turned off in Milkshape in the Groups panel? If it's turned on it messes up the normals and I think could cause that shadowing and the break effect at the ankles.

I'm not clear on what the issue could be in CTU - can you give a little more detail of what you're trying to do?

Autosmooth is turned off. The meshes were appearing that way in CTU and in-game themselves before I even opened milkshape so that can't be it. It seems like CTU is the issue, as though it borked things when it extracted the mesh parts. And considering that I'm having the patterns issue as well, I would think there's something wrong with it. Only, I just deleted it and "reinstalled" CTU to achieve the same results. So I have no idea.

As for patterns, basically what is happening is that when I'm choosing patterns and colors in CTU, everything shows up correctly while I am there. Yet if I open the file in CTU later or look at in game, if I'm using something that uses more than one color (such as leopard print) the one that serves as the background turns to black, while all other colors remained as I set them. It's happened on two separate projects despite redoing them several times. It just will not save that color.

Strange! Have you tried just opening the FullBuild for LN and extracting the mesh without CTU? Or if you tell me the name of the skirt I'll do it for you.

As for the patterns problem, I haven't a clue unless somehow CTU isn't working right as you said, but that seems unlikely. Hopefully someone else can help you.

How did you clone the EP skirt(wat tutorial?) and wats the name of the outfit? (afbottomep3skirtruche?)

I did the fullbuild in s3pe. I actually expected the process to be much more difficult and was quite pleased to find otherwise. Too bad things mucked up in the end.

The mesh is afBottomEP3ClubChic.

According to my quick extraction using Postal and quick test in Milkshape, your original idea was right - you've got lod2 instead of lod1. I attached all the mesh files for you, clearly named. I don't have time right now to run it through CTU and test in-game, sorry.

Huh. That's weird though because I looked at all three files and each were messed up. Maybe Postal made things different somehow, which I didn't use.

Nonetheless, it worked! Thank you so much for all the help! ^__^

ETA:
Well, it looked good in CTU anyway. The legs were bleeding through the top of the skirt while planning an outfit, so I tried making a sim to check the fat slider. Holy crap she looked like she was hit by a truck. I have no idea what happened, lol. Thanks for trying anyway!

Maybe you're still having a lod problem? Are you sure you loaded the meshes in the correct lod slots in CTU? The morphs not matching the meshes you imported would cause the 'hit by a truck' mesh explosion effect. Can you upload your package so I can take a look?

Man this thing is acting weird. Before I gave it to you I wanted to try some things out first. I thought maybe I could bypass needing to import the mesh parts by leaving it on the same mesh I extracted and replace the bumpmap in s3pe, except I couldn't find it. In CTU If I use the LN mesh and try to import the parts, it throws errors. Yet if I clone a base game skirt and do all the textures, then import the mesh parts it's fine (until going in game, that is). I've also noticed that using the LN mesh kept my pattern color as set. Weird, isn't it?

I should have mentioned in my previous post that there was some slight crumpling in the fit state, too.

Aha, I may know what's going wrong. CTU is set up for base game clothes only - I think there's some way to use it with EP stuff but I've never tried, and maybe that's not working for you. Anyhoo, what CTU does with morphs is to take the clothing you've cloned and link that clothing's morphs to your CC clothing. It assumes you'll import the same mesh back in, maybe with some vertices moved, but still the same mesh. If you import a completely different mesh, like the miniskirt, it's getting linked to the wrong morphs and you get a mesh explosion. Probably the easiest way to fix it is to grab the BGEO (morph data) files for the skirt from Fullbuild and use MorphMaker to update the package with them.

Oh boy, intimidating. Is it *just* the bgeo files I need? And when I export from s3pe, do I do it to file or to package?

Also, when you checked the file were the patterns showing up right for you? Just curious.

ETA:
I tried following your tutorial about 4 times, and another one a couple. I still get the same result and I just don't understand it.

If its to difficult then try TSRW?
You easily can clone a EP outfit with it, without to worry about morphs and such.

Hmm. The morph problem is something I would expect to be caused by your not having added the LN FullBuild files to CTU's extra packages list - did you remember to do so? If you did, I'm afraid I'm stumped.

To add the BGEO files:

Extract the four BGEO files for the skirt from the EP Fullbuild to files. Be sure to name them so you know which is which.
Run MorphMaker. On the left, click the 'Clothes/Hair' button at the bottom.
Now click the 'Add morphs to package' button.
Browse to your package and open it.
In the screen that pops up, browse to the four BGEO files and put them in the appropriate slots.
Click the 'Save as a new Package' button and save. (Be warned, under Windows 7 MorphMaker tends to freeze while selecting files. If this happens wait about 20-30 seconds and try again.)
The new package should work correctly.

The image below shows the patterns that I got in CAS.

Your other options are to set up CTU to work with the EPs,clone the skirt CASP, and set up your patterns again. (WhiteRider's tutorial is here: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...ontent_with_CTU
Or you could try TSR Workshop as Bloom suggests. However, I haven't been able to get TSRW to load any of the EP clothes. Maybe Bloom knows how to set it up.

I think TSRW needs you to add the EP install paths to its Preferences - I don't *think* it does so automatically, though I don't know.

Thanks - I finally got it to work. The only real 'trick' was it doesn't take effect until you restart TSRW.

srry, had to mention that....

YAY, I figured out the problem! It wasn't anything I was doing... just that I hadn't updated S3PE to the more recent version. Which feels incredibly silly.

Thank you so much for all the help, guys! *huggles*