Hi! I found some shoes (many) from a CC creator that I really like. However I find a problem that I haven't encountered with other shoes. The shoes that are in the game, when you try them on CAS they cast a shadow on the other leg (so, normal, fine). But when I try this creator's shoes they always create a double shadow on both legs, as if there is a "third leg" casting another shadow in both legs. It is more evident in the picture. I have checked all the textures (overlay, mask, multiplier, normal map and specular) and there is nothing weird on them (I did so because in some models that shadow looked more like a shine or reflection but the specular was black; it became more evident that it was a shadow finally with the boots I use in the example).

Does anyone know why this is happening? Can anyone give me an indication of what to "touch" to fix it? I'm not an expert in CC creation but I handle some tools and try to learn what I don't know. However I can't come up with any ideas anymore as to what it could be.



Pic of what I mean

I have never seen what your pics show. Is this only in CAS, or also in game? Without the package to take apart, it's hard to say what the shadows are.

The glossy reflection/shadow issue usually appears when the GEOM has old texture references, but it is hard to tell without seeing the package.

It often looks fine outside of CAS, but it would also be possible to fix it quite easily by remaking the item with all the resources already included. I can write out the steps for you if you'd like

Thank you to you both.

I would really like to try to fix it even if it looks OK out of CAS. I may not have all the knowledge required but I will try my best. So I would appreciate some steps to follow.

Is there a way to share the .package so you can see it?

Files can be uploaded to your reply by scrolling down the reply page, click upload, then drag pics or zip files to the new window. Close the box, then click the "copy link", and paste it in your reply.

Just to note, that depending on why there is a shadow in CAS only, but not in your game, it may be a matter of howw the UV was arranged. Both JoshQ and I will overlay matching UV parts to save space on certain meshes. The game renders differently in CAS and in game. Why EA does this, is anyone's guess!

This is one of my open bottomed dresses. To make open bottomed, no garment UV can overlap the legs. In this project, to gain space on the UV map, I mirrored the left arm UV and placed it over the right arm UV. That opened the left arm area on the UV map for other things. Draw back is Sims with assymetric tattoos. The arms look messed up in CAS, but are fine in game...



If it is something else, we will see if it can be corrected.

Thank you very much, again. Part of what you say escapes my level of knowledge but I still find it very interesting. The mirroring thing actually makes sense to me. I'm attaching the shoes I used for the example (although I noticed it happens with more shoes of the same creator) so you can see things more clear.

Each creator will settle in on a way of doing things. Or, it depends on how long they've been creating, if they changed, and what period certain CC comes from. I've learned a lot since my first upload, even since last year.

As for mirroring, the UV of these boots uses mirroring. Big problem I found is a few parts were off the UV map. I moved them back. The UV does not imterfere with the legs at all. What I did see is wierd marks across the normals map, but they wouldn't cause those shadows on legs. They should cause odd textures on other areas of the body. I made a new map.

I put the mesh and normals map in the package. There are other issues I do not have time to fix, however. The morphs are bad. Looks as creator used the sneakers from the donor as bone and morph reference, but the boots have legs, and need to be morphed with feet and legs, together. Also, the laces distort. Morphing laces is a longer process. Takes me a couple of hours... definitely no time for that.

Let me know if the shadow is gone.

Ooops. I think the shadow is still there in CAS. For some reason my computer was not being able to capture screencaps so I took a photo with my phone. Nevertheless, I am grateful for all the comments and I found it very interesting to find out about the mirroring thingy.

It takes a village to make CC

I fixed many of the other issues while I was looking into the shadow- but even after basically remaking the item in a new clone, it's still present in CAS. I'm assuming this must be caused by the UV mirroring or something similar and the way the skin shader works in CAS specifically, because it's absolutely fine ingame. I'd love to crack what it is exactly one day, but for now here is what I added on top of LadySmok's modified mesh-

+ Fixed the morphs and bones by copying them from the World Adventures galoshes
+ Made a LOD2 because the mesh didn't have LODs at all, I kept the LOD3 of the galoshes because they are so similar
+ Recalculated normal vectors because there was an untextured faces warning

- EA shoes don't actually use normal maps, so didn't reimplement the fixed one LadySmoks made. You could probably modify the Material in TSRW or S3PE to add it back, but there isn't a notable difference.

Looking pretty cute ingame, if you ask me

I guess it's possible the shadow is from being mirrored and overlayed? I have made a few pairs of boots that way. Normally in CAS, you see triangles from the mesh faces, but I have never seen a shadow like in your pic. Hmmm... Honestly, as long as the one @CardinalSims did looks okay in game, I wouldn't worry about it.

@CardinalSims , since the original used a normals map, it's a 5 second thing to remake a new one. Most EA shoes would benefit from them, and not appear so flat. I use, to the point of abuse, normals maps! ))) This outfit is 90% done by how I made my normals map. )))

Oh I do love normal maps, as the pain in my right hand knows well. I've been denoising diffuse, darkening speculars, and generating new normals for every piece of Store content I have and I'm well on the way to carpal tunnel, I think.

The issue was that I took the resources into a new package to rule out what I thought caused the shadow, and the EA clone didn't have a normal map. I haven't added a slot to the material data manually in S3PE before, so I left it alone. Probably easier with TSRW's material tab, that may be how the original creator added them.

Yeah, I either denoise or use a little gaussian blur in one direction to clean up EA diffuse maps.

It's there, but S3OC might not show it? In TSRW, most EA shoes have an 4 x 4 untextured normal map that is easy to replace with a detailed map. GIMP has a plugin that does normals maps pretty easily. Manually adding data in S3PE can be a PITA! Using a hybrid method of a tutorial by Bloombase, that involves adding data in s3pe, I have a couple of 4 group meshes for my special projects.

Wow. Thank you very much to you both again for your effort and time invested in this. Now the female version of those boots are going to look sad next to the male ones with all the improvements. And thank you for all the replies to my question.

Wait a minute! I believe the ones I uploaded as an example were the male ones, and the ones that LadySmoks fixed were still male ones. But the ones from CardinalSims seem to be female. I am confused.

That'll be my bad, I didn't notice they were set for male and used the AF galoshes as a base package. The mesh is still the same / unaltered, it's safe to simply switch them back. Let me know if the morphs look incorrect, though.

In S3PE, click the CASP resource, then the Grid button on the bottom panel. Click the AgeGender dropdown, change Male to True. You can remove it for female if you want, but it obviously fits them too as showcased by Amy Bull in my screenshot :p