Okay, I'm so fed up, I had to ask.
I searched all the tutorials and I have Unimesh v4.09 for milkshape.
I'm running Milkshape 8.0

I've got SimPE 0.62.1

I've tried importing and exporting with SMD format. I've check my comments in MS3D a thousand times... I've assigned each vert myself for 3 hours...

and I'm still getting THIS:



What am I doing WRONG?

I have done short hair and assigned small parts to b_hair and r_hair and whatever.. and I've been fine!

Is there any little rules I'm missing? I've got 3 bones per vert (not 4).
My comments reflect as such........ I don't get this at all.

If a bone assignment is less that a specific percentage, does it go unnassigned? Is 4 percent like having no assignment? That's all I can think to change... just make sure all my weights are more evenly distributed and at least over 10 percent on a bone if at all... but that still should not matter......... ergh. This only happens with hair bones..... never on body or head.... my mesh is fine if assigned to neck, spine, head and whatever.......... but then I get a helmet and I hate that...

Help? Anyone?
>_<

Cant be much help im affraid....
The only thing i know is that the total of your boneassignement on a specific vert must be atleast 85%.
If you go below you get probs...uhm, im not sure if this is for hair the same but with clothing/bodymeshes it sure is.

Well, everything is at 100%. So nothing is underweight.
My distribution is like...

Head = 63
r_hair = 21
b_hair = 16

total=100

It's like that sort of thing all over. 3 assignments all adding up to 100 percent.. although the distribution is odd numbers like 16 or 3 or whatever.
If it was like this:

Head = 63
Neck = 21
spine2 = 16

Then everything would be totally fine.
It just starts messing up when I use the hair bones. The hair bones are annoying as heck.
I think I'll export the entire mesh in pieces. See how each piece turns out in BS. then combine all the working pieces..... and waste more hours of my life. Lol XD

and if THAT does not work.. I'll make a mesh with very limited animation (or hardly none at all) and play it like raonsims. But I really would rather get some animations in there somehow...

I have the same problem, anitmations being messed up and the hair pulling inside the head. I have found no good solution, except rebuilding the meshfile and swopping out the skeleton. Even that only works one in 10 times.

Thanks! I'll give that a try! ^^
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one that has issues with these silly hair bones. They are satan.

I'm learning something here.

The hair always crushes up. But it's only supposed the crush slightly when relaxed.

It seem the more parts you combine from various meshes, the more the hair will crush.
So this is why you must eliminate all information from the hair bones and reassign them yourself.

What I've done is I've finished my mesh, then broke it down and worked on the animations in sections.

Then slowly rebuilt the mesh in SimPE by replacing my GMDC file with a fixed section, then exporting the parts as SMD files. Then after doing this for all my repaired sections, I import all my SMD files in order into one GMDC.

And so far, this time consuming hell is creating some VERY impressive results.

I'll see how far this takes me... I've got my long hair animations working in the back.

Shall we report this problem to the SimPE team? It may be a damaged CRES file.

Can you please post how you've done it? I am also having big problems in animation. It's devastating! I don't want to delete all of my mesh files.

I'd like to know too.

I'm having issues with hair pulling in and scrunching no matter how many times I check the bone assignments. It may help to know I have Bon Voyage and use the SimPE that was updated for ..was it Seasons & Celebrations? Whichever was the latest one, since I don't think a Bon Voyage SimPE is out yet. But why would that cause issues, if it weren't causing any before?

Actually, I was having an issue with a Maxis mesh BEFORE I installed BV. No matter how many times I created the mesh package from the maxis mesh, the mesh kept messing up (part of the bangs kept sticking straight out). I kinda gave up on it, since it was just supposed to be a simple mesh edit (make a hair longer), and make it available to the Teen age group, but it was giving me way too much grief

Oddly enough, I am having these issues with Teen hair meshes only *knocks on wood* For example, today -as a test- I took an adult and teen version of a mesh - it was a short hair style so it was assigned 100% to the head. I took a selected group in the back and assigned it 70 to the hair bone and 30 to b_hair - the adult worked fine, and the teen part became scrunched up. I tried everything from double checking assignments, comments, using a different imported mesh for a new skeleton, etc. Still resulted in a scrunched up ponytail. When I changed it back to assign it 100% to the head, it didn't scrunch up anymore.

See, I'm not crazy! I'm not!!!!!!!

....

shaddap. :D

NO! It's a failure!
It was working with the back.. but the bangs failed when I did the front!!
ARGH! It's so annoying.. I'm trying something else though...

HUZZAH!
I knew it. It's the skeleton.
I fixed my hair. Fixed it! The STUPID skeleton IS different for every hair!

Check this yourself!
Import a maxis hair into MS3d.

Go into the joints tab to view the skeleton.
Select one of the hair bones. Any of them. Go into comments.
You'll get some coordinates that look like this:

ImpQuatDat: -0.000000 0.707152 -0.707062 -0.000000 0.000001 -0.104309 1.811441

All bones have this.
But all the bones share the same data.. the head bone for example, will have the same number in "comments" all the time if you are dealing with the same gender and age. That makes sense.

But the hair bones... they get differentcomment data for EVERY different hairstyle! The comments change all the time.

If your hair doesn't work... you need to go into the hair bones and change their comments to fit with your new style.

I basically got my bangs working on one skeleton... but this skeleton was causing my ponytail to warp. I only have my ponytail attached to b_Hair. So my fix was simple.

I separated my bangs from the ponytail.
I brought in a new skeleton from a different hair (one that was back heavy with no bangs). Got my ponytail to work. Then copied the b_hair comments from the bone in the joints tab.

I combined everything together again on the skeleton that had the bangs working. But then I changed the b-hair comment in joints.
I changed it to the number I copied from the other skeleton that had my ponytail working correctly.

After I brought this new mesh with the adjusted bone comments into bodyshop.....
No warping. No sucking in.. no stupidity.
I'm still testing this out... but the key is the hair bone/joint data...
You just need to play with their numbers until you get them to correspond to your hair.

At least.. until there is a better way of doing it.

***
Also, I JUST got this working now... so I don't know what each number stands for in the comment (i just cut and paste).. I'm guessing it's a location/coordinates thing. I will play with the numbers and do some trial and error to see what happens........... unless someone figures it out first.

Ponytail and bangs working with animations.


*dances*

Actually, I'm going to adjust the comments on r_hair ans l_hair a bit too, because they are spread a bit far apart for my hair and pull the bangs a bit too much to the sides.

yup, your right.....Awesome
I also found out(just today, by accident) that there related somehow because of this post:http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=29339 (adult site, you might want to remove it....)
the guy experimented with the hair bones on the breast's to give it a bit more movement and the results look pretty cool.
But the body mesh only works when used with a few hairmeshes.
The breast's scrunches together when using hairmeshes that have the same settings or somehow are linked to those bones as the breast's scrunches diffrent on every hairmesh you pick......

the comments in the comment box refer to a position and i did know you could change it/replace it on objects when adding a bone , but i never thought you could change them with the normal skeleton.

/me gawps in awe at anyone who can understand a concept such as "hair bone comments"

w000tttt!!!

Now this explains it all. If I can make a base hairmesh with 15 groups, and with all the hairbones enabled, I'll upload it here, and you'll never have to mess around with that again :D
Now I need to find the correct settings for full support of all hair bone assignments
Thank you, Lunar Eclipse! :D

With objects(especially cars) we adjust the parts similar but in the cres, like the wheels and doors and such.

The comments you are changing are related to the cres, but im really surprised that the changes you make actual take place and work ingame.
So if you can do this on objects and now even hair meshes, it should also be possible to do this with accesoires and maybe even with the body skeleton?

I hope so. That would open so much possibilies :D

Ahh... very informative.
The comments are created when the importer reads the GMDC file. This data is similar to what you see in the CRES Heirarchy for each joint, but is expressed differently.

The comments are there because the exporter needs to have these values in order to place the bones in the right spot, and the comment field was a way to retain the data between import and export.

Anyone that ever moved a joint accidentally knows that if they are not in the original location when exported the mesh renders wrong. This should not be an issue for body/hair meshing any longer, because the recent versions do not use the altered bone position for body meshes, only the original location, which is stored in the numbers in the joint comments.

What I did not know, and have lerned today, is that these locations vary between different meshes. As you pointed out, all the rest of the bones seem to stay in a standard location.

When you use the method Nouk described to replace the mesh skeleton, essentially what gets changed is that the new bones will have the comments 'refreshed'. When you copy the comments from one skeleton to another, you are doing pretty much the same thing.

What I do not understand from your posting is what mesh are you getting the comments from that fix your problem? Is it that you are fixing the teen hair mesh, which was what I think you said was broken, with the comments from a teen maxis hair mesh?

At any rate, this is very interesting to me, and you should be proud for figuring it out and letting us all know about it. Thank you.

<* Wes *>

I'm only fitting adult comments to adult meshes.
If converting a hair to teen, I need new comments for teen hair. The comments won't work if you copy adult to teen... ^^
But it's nice to know that (even if it takes a while).. the problem can be fixed in the bone comments... it's not like people will need to abandon hair in a rage after playing with it for days. Hehe

I'm really very happy to figure a little something out about this (even if it's small) because these hair bones have been irritating for way too long... and I'm also glad that I could have helped here, because everyone has been so ridiculously helpful to me and I've learned so much. ^^

just wondering....
Wont it be possible to create a default replacement mesh with all the correct non crunching comments in the bone settings.
Was experimenting with the hair bones on the breast's and its so cool lol.
Except it only works with a few hairmeshes.
Hmm, guess that aint possible, you gotta create one for every excisting hairmesh eh.

hmm Lunar?
You dont have to do all that work if you just take a maxis hair skeleton without the bugs....
I created a female bodymesh and assigned the breast's to the Hair bones
If i take that mesh and create a sim in bodyshop and now go to all the hair meshes i can easily pick out the meshes that causes problems.
Here a example:

OK. Just a little note on the joint comments and what they mean:

The numbers in the comments come from whatever GMDC you imported.

There are seven values, and they represent the rotation and location (translation) of the joint. They are related to the entries you find in the CRES heirarchy, but the importer rearranges the order of the axes to the OpenGL (MilkShape) order, and the values are the absolute coordinates, versus the CRES where they are parent relative.

If you can fix the mesh by using the joint comments from a teen skeleton, then the main thing it indicates to me is that you cannot adjust an adult hair to a teen mesh using the adult skeleton.

Now, replacing the skeleton is fast and easy, and you will update the comments at the same time. So perhaps if you find the right starting skeleton for the teen meshes you can make note of that, and replace the skeleton when starting your teen conversion.

<* Wes *>

I hope to find / create one for each age, (or someone) and then have it uploaded here as a base skeleton set. This would be easy for alot of people
It should be versatile as in: working with all hairbones used.

Maybe start with the bald one?
I think they made them diffrent to give more possibility's to the animation.
The skeletonbones of the hairmeshes you can rotate, flip and such in the cres file, like with objects.

So only certain skeletons cause a "crush" effect because they are designed specifically for a certain hair?
And an easy method is simply to test each hairstyle is simply to match it with a body with hair bone assignments and check the results? cool :D

But some skeletons can handle all hair animations?
That's very neat to know.

What's funny is... my ponytail works only on the skeleton comments I grabbed from the male skull. So the bald skull.

But bangs do not work on the bald skeleton.. but it handles long b_hair pretty decently. (I'm using adult male)

The breast thing is neat... actually, I wanted to make a flowing tail. But It would have the same issues with the wrong hair.

EDIT:
Something weird.
On adult, the bangs only worked when I used the comments from the PGskater hair for r_hair and L_Hair.

But when I used the exact same hair (PGskater) teen version to get the bangs working... it crushed!
My bangs only worked in the teen version with the comments I got from the teen bald skeleton!

That's weird... the bald hair comments did not work on adult... but it worked with teen.

Does the location of the piece that uses r_hair, l_hair, etc matter in order to successfully use those comments for a trouble mesh? Like let's say you're working on a short hair that uses r_hair, but it's crunching up. If you use the comments from a mesh that has working r_hair animations, will it matter if the r_hair for that working mesh is maybe down at chest or shoulder level? Or does it only matter that r_hair is used and working, so it will work on the trouble mesh?

I'm also just boggled at why these issues are more common now than before, when it seemed to rarely happen despite hair meshes still being different in comments, etc.