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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 18th May 2006 at 4:18 PM
Could I get a little help please.
Hi, first time post on this site (which incidently is awesome ) and already I've got problems to bitch about , well what I mean to say is Im having trouble with a mesh im trying to make and could really do with some pointers.
Ive followed the tutorial for basic meshing or at least alterations to existing meshes and thats gone without a hitch so far, moving on from that I've recently been attempting to sort of almalgamate existing meshes and my own bits and trying to stick the result on the sims as an accessory... yeah you can probably tell already that things aren't working out from the cut and paste attitude toward things Ive adopted, but as a novice im not clear what will and will not work.
Anyway best tell you what Ive been doing ( promise not to laugh). Ive been trying to make a fur mesh to be worn over the shoulders and down to around the knee area, having realised that nothing in the game ressembles the desired effect I figured maybe I could alter a custom hair mesh, having the Inuyasha one at hand I figured I wouldn't have to alter too much since the shape was pretty much what I wanted... sadly with this notion in mind I carried on undetered chopping at bits of this mesh and using general zoi's crableg mesh as a base making it an accessory ( I realise I probably shouldnt be attacking other peoples stuff, but I figured for personal use there'd be no harm).
Back in the present and I cant get the damn thing into the game ( unsurprisingly) this could be due to many factors, but at least one I know of is milkshape's warning that unassigned bones exist ( like I know how to remedy that!! the thing could have given me a hint ).
So yeah thats about the extent of my retardation so far and any assist I could possibly get would be a blessing (or some kind soul do it for me and save me going bald through stress :D).

Many thanks for reading Ive also attached the file so you can witness the trainwreck first hand :D
Attached files:
File Type: rar  Fur.rar (345.5 KB, 13 downloads)
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Admin of Randomness
retired moderator
#2 Old 18th May 2006 at 9:30 PM Last edited by tiggerypum : 18th May 2006 at 11:25 PM.
Wow, interesting experiment.

I did download it, and so... let's see.... where to start.

The good parts first - interesting shape/combo of shapes. It looks like you must have loaded a male body in there and then deleted it in order to line it up, that's good also.

One of the things that has happened is that you have two skeletons in there, looks like an adult and a child. That's gonna do weird things. But we'll address that in the step by step I'm going to try to write for you.

Unfortunately, there's a bunch of things you'll need to work out to get this working in your game.

The first thing to understand is that you will need to (say to make an accessory) get an accessory mesh (glasses) for your base. Say one of the 'hip' sunglass styles. Those will come in with 2 or 3 groups - and in the end your mesh has to have the same number of groups. Most people collapse the lens to be a single point, and then hide it in the head (in this case you could also hide it in the trunk) and then put their mesh onto the other part.

Now, you can combine the many groups that your mesh is made of into one, by using the 'regroup' command. BUT DON'T DO THAT YET.

Before you turn your mesh into one huge muddle (note that the separate pieces are handy for editing purposes) you should make sure all the pieces you have are uv mapped and uv mapped into a working place. I can see (because I applied a checkered texture) that almost all the parts are uvmapped. But many of them are uvmapped unevenly, the size of the checks on the pieces varies a great deal. But when I bring up the texture editor (with various parts selected) most of the parts you brought in are not showing me the actual uvmap. (this seems to be a milkshape bug)

(there are some pointers to uvmap stuff in the milkshape tips in the InfoCenter and a couple of tutorials in the tutorial area) So I'm not actually sure how we'd go about salvaging this mesh as constructed. I see the cylinder was uvmapped and that shows up fine. But as you can see, it was uvmapped to the entire texture, and many of the other strands are uvmapped such that very small boxes appear on them... to get the effect you want you'd need the uvmapping between the different pieces to be more even, so that you don't get big changes in the texture.

If we could see the uvmaps for all the pieces, you would adjust them by doing things like scaling down the cylinder to be in proportion with the rest of the mesh, moving pieces around so that their location made sense, and so on, much like dr pixel did his shoes - except that for an accessory you have the entire texture to yourself, you're not sharing it with a body.

So right now, I'd say this project is stuck, unless someone can explain why/how to get those uvmaps to show up in milkshape.

EDIT Well, this is not ideal, but you might be able to salvage it after all if you just regroup the whole thing together and then have it remake the uvmap from the back. That showed up. I'd then try and design a texture to fit that uvmap. It appears to be a bit stretched at the very top, and it would be difficult to undo that stretch, but you might get enough of the effect you're trying for.

Before doing all the bone assignments, experiment with putting a real texture on your mesh using the milkshape-materials and viewing it in textured mode. If you can get something you like, go ahead an finish it up!

---
The rest of the info you'll need in short.
Once things are uvmapped so that it all works together....

I noticed that some of the strands show up blackish. This has something to do with the normals. So I selected those groups and used the gmdc tools (sticky top of this forum) and used the 'align normals' command - which got them showing up properly colored.

Then I would select everything and do a regroup, and as you will need to redo all the bone assignments on this anyway - export as a wavefront OBJ. Be sure to also save your ms3d file before the regroup, so that you can go back and edit pieces if you decided you'd want/need to.

Now you need to follow the basic mesh procedure, like for a body mesh, but do it with an accessory. Get the 4 pieces of the adult sunglass mesh, create the mesh file, fix integrity, do the recolor, attach the modified shape and cres to the saved sims file. Details for how to do the extra bits for accessories, found in the infocenter.

Now in milkshape, you'll say 'new'. Use unimesh to read in the sunglasses gmdc.
select the lens and collapse the points to 1 using snap together and move them to some hidden place (center of head is good)
Then import your obj file.
Now, look at the 'frames' group. Look at the comments, and copy them.
Now look at your fur group, look at the comments and paste the one from frames into it.
Now rename your fur group to match the name of the frames group (whatever it is called)
delete the frames group. Move your fur (now called frame or whatever) up to where the old one was.
Save your milkshape file now for safekeeping.

Now to do the bone assignments.

First thing we'll do is make sure everything has a bone assignment, because sometimes I'm see odd behaviors with the underweight bone tool.

Select your entire fur mesh. Go to the vertex menu, select sims 2 unimesh bone tool. A window will pop up.

We're going to give this a random assignment just to get something in there, then later we can check if we missed any. So we're going to assign the whole mesh to the HEAD.

Make the weight 100% if it's not. Make the bone index '7' (head).
Hit "apply to all"
hit "commit to all"

At this point you could export your mesh using unimesh and test the gdmc. It will probably look okay in bodyshop, but it will animate wrong in the game, responding to head movements instead of body movements.

You will want to go find the nude male gmdc using SimPE in order to know what good bone assignments would be.
Import it with unimesh, and tell it that you DO NOT want the extra skeleton/bones.

We're doing this so that you have something right there with bone assignments in your milkshape. You could also have opened up a separate milkshape and read it into there and go back and forth.

Now you will need to do the bone assignments in 'bands' down the length of your fur. Select a point on the body near an area you want to assign. Using the bone tool is in the unimesh manual, btw.

Use vertex - sims 2 unimesh bone tool and a window will pop up. Jot down the settings.
Hide the body. Select a group of points across the whole width of your fur, and hit the bone tool again. Put the values in. Hit 'apply to all' then 'commit all'
show the body, select another point on the body near the next row on your fur. jot down the assignments, hide the body and repeat the steps above

When you think you're done, you can actually use the 'joints' tab to see if you left any strays attached to 'head'. Click on 'head', click on 'selassigned'.
Look your mesh over, if any points were selected those still need adjusting. You can fire up the unimesh bone tool and fix them, just like above.

Delete the body reference group.
Now you can export with unimesh, then go put the gmdc into your accessory mesh.

Note: if this was a head accessory, you could just assign it all to head and it would probably work fine, but as it's a body accessory you will need to adjust the assignments.

Also, your mesh will show up in bodyshop colored with the frames (likely black) so you need to make a *new* recolor of it, and put your next texture in there. You'll be changing the size, so you will need to replace the texture file and it's matching alpha file (the alpha file being all white, but sized to be 512x512 to match your texture)
Admin of Randomness
retired moderator
#3 Old 18th May 2006 at 11:08 PM
Now, there was a lot of info in the above post. You can make this easier on yourself if you set aside this project and get some simple accessory working - then you will have handled part of the issues (replacing the groups, assigning things correctly in simpe, possibly adjusting the uvmaps). Then come back to this one.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#4 Old 18th May 2006 at 11:20 PM
Thank you ever so much for taking the time to write this I really appreciate the length you've gone into. I don't have the time to try and get what youve written applied to my mesh tonight (time zone differences on display ), but I'll definitely be giving it a go during my free time over the week (especially looking at solving the uv map bit) so i'll make sure to let you know how things are going and post up any success I have.

Once again a massive thank you for this ( and mild envy at your awesome meshing powers ) I'm much obliged!!!
Admin of Randomness
retired moderator
#5 Old 18th May 2006 at 11:29 PM
Bits at a time. I started with some simple body edits using meshtool (only move the points) then I had to figure out the uvmapping to fix the necklines on some of them. I only recently did my first accessory. So, if this 'fix' is overwhelming, just back off from it for now and work on some simpler projects to lead up to it.

It *is* a bit overwhelming, but I liked the design enough to keep poking at it. The uvmap work around might be enough for you to get the mesh in working order, even if not 'perfect'. The biggest thing will be for you to create a furry texture that will look right on it.

In the process of you working on some other meshes, you might find a way to create the parts you want for this mesh yourself.... at which point you can even share the final mesh But at any rate, don't give up, and do let us know how you do. You can post pictures here.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#6 Old 18th May 2006 at 11:30 PM
And yes I think your right about getting some practice in with some simpler accessories so I'll have more experience with them under my belt first, I guess I was being a tad ambitious with this one lol.
Once again thanks for taking the time to write this out.
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