Im interesting in making a hair mesh for toddler girls, but I dont want to make it for all the other ages. I'm new to both meshing and hair, so I don't know if that will work. If a toddler with my new hair grows up, will they be bald rest of their life, or will they be auto-assigned a maxis hair? Past that, are there any spiffy tricks that aren't in the hair meshing tutorials that I should know about? Thanks again guys!

They'll be assigned a random hair from the same bin - usually Maxis, usually the short bob.

Tricks not covered in the tutorials? The Anim button on the keyframer and the ability to rotate joints using that Anim mode to see how your meshes animate without going in-game. Make sure the Keyframer is visible (Window - Keyframer), click Anim. Make sure your skeleton is visible, joint size set to 0.01 in your options. Select mode set to joint. Select a joint in the skeleton (for hair, probably the head). Go into Anim mode, then Rotate - make sure you're rotating around the Origin. Examine how your mesh rotates that way. Unclick Anim and your mesh snaps back to normal, ready to be edited. Repeat until insane and/or mesh is fixed.

Snap, didn't even think about animating it. I hope there a tutorial for that too?

What H-P is describing is using the built in animation part of MilkShape for reviewing a sort of simulation how your hair will look live in the game. If it cannot be moved in MilkShape without problems, it will not be able to be moved in the game without the same problems appearing.

H-P is the first person I am aware of to suggest using a "temporary animation" for the purposes of quality checking a hair mesh.

Transferring the actual "temporary animation" to the game is a far more complex topic. I do not know anyone that has yet actually created a new hair animation. So far, all the work on hair has been in properly assigning the mesh parts to the five "_hair" bones so that the custom hair meshes are animated by the default game hair animations. These are the animations that make the ends of the hair strands push outwards when the sim spins around, among others.

Echo describes in this message some information about how to get MilkShape animation started. While this is part of a tutorial on object animation, the essentials are the same except for the bone names:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...091#post1707091

This thread also has some discussion of importing body meshes (and a hair mesh is a body mesh with hair and no body) and animating them in MilkShape:
http://www.modthesims2.com/member/s...640#post1548640

You need not try the actual importer plugin linked in the first thread, because it is built-in on the later (4.08 or 4.09) versions of the UniMesh plugins.

<* Wes *>

Yikes, this is looking like a scarier project the further in I go...though, when is that not the case? Ok, I will give those a look.

...Do I need to worry too much about the animation? I thought that as long as I correctly assigned bones everything would work just like a maxis hair cut. The stuff you (wes_h) were talking about creating a new custom hair animation seems a bit over my head. Do I need to worry too much about what you said?

No. You need not make rela, permanent animations, or use the AnimExporter, in order to test the way H-P describes.

If you assign the bones properly, the game will animate the hair the same way Maxis hair is animated. Checking this in a manner faster than export, load into SimPE, save, copy to downloads and start the game is what she was trying to clue you in on.

This is actually pretty easy, and fast, once you learn which buttons on MilkShape have to be clicked. You would select the head joint (or more on a longer hairstyle) in the joints panel, click on 'rotate' in the model panel (and use 'local' mode) and then click on the big "ANIM" button in the lower right corner. You can now click in a window and drag the mouse to make the hair spin around.

It is hard to explain the way it will spin, but each certain view, dragging left and right or up and down will always rotate the hair in the same manner. If you have made a good backup, you can experiment until you see the way it works.

And as H-P said, when you click on the ANIM button again, your temporary moves disappear, and the default pose is restored.

<* Wes *>

I'm the first person to suggest that? Seriously? Sheesh, I thought other people were already using it and I was just slow to discover it.

I used it in doing my Adrasteia hair, to get all the layers animating right for head tilts and turns. I dunno if it'd be at all useful if you're assigning to the actual bouncy hair animation bones but it's wonderful for smooth transitions if you're doing something that goes down toward the shoulders. Made it very easy to see what was pulling wrong, what vertices were spiking out, etc., without having to go into the game for every single little change (and then trying to find what it was in Milkshape vs the game - very hard sometimes with many layers of stuff happening). I just wish I could set up a macro to click the buttons for me - I probably went through that sequence of four or five clicks at least a thousand times in doing that stinkin' hair.

That raises another question, the hair I want to make is short and full of curls. How do I make sure that animates with bounce and not like long hair does?

Ok, back track a bit. Why is creating the mesh package so darn confusing? I changed my mind and would like to create this hairstyle for all ages, but I'm getting tripped up at the SimPE steps of making a package. I'm going back and forth between the hair tutorials and the clothes tutorials, but in my opinion they seem to skip a few things. The clothes ones goes over the basics and mostly holds your hand through it, but then the hair ones are all like, we think you know what you are doing, if you don't go to the clothes and be coddled. What about the inbetweeners, who have done it once or twice, confident enough to step up from the clothings, but don't understand how to put together a complicated package. Do I make one package for each age, that doesn't seem to make sense if I want them all to link together genetically in the end. How/when do I fix the integrity of it, do I do them as separate packages and then put them all together in the end, or what? I guess what I'm trying to convey is that the learning curve is a bit step for these tutorials. /rant over, though still frustrated.

Which tutorials have you done?
http://www.sims2wiki.info/wiki.php?..._Hair_Tutorials

The second and third posts in this thread cover different age groups:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=139819

I'm thinking this thread would be better off in Bodyshop meshing. Whooshing now.

Thanks for the whoosh. Yes, I've been reading all of those. I'm just confused at the making the package stages. I understand how to find all the parts I need and add them, but im stuck at which ones i need to go get exactly, not like cres and gmdc, but like which hair style pieces to grab. I really don't understand the linking processes. Linking my new mesh from milkshape to be the one bodyshop uses and also linking the ages together.

HP - How on earth did you get the hair to bend so smoothly when the Sim turns their heads? Like which bones did you assign the hair around those parts to? It looks really good, I think you did an amazing job

Phaenoh - What do you mean by "which hair style pieces to grab"? I assume you've exported & imported your template hair from Bodyshop?

Once you create your mesh package, you just drop your fixed/modified cres & shape into the .package file created by the export/import of your hair in Bodyshop (found in SavedSims folder), then follow the steps in the tutorial from there. I'm not sure if I just made that more confusing lol.

It is when you drop in your modifiedcres and modifiedshpe and then use the Package button to drop them in the appropriate 3DIR that links them.

Don't worry if you link the mesh to all ages of your recolour - you can always delete them after.

Also, if your toddler hair is short, you don't NEED to animate them to bounce and whatnot. Even if it's long, maxis-style animations are not necessary. I'd worry more about making sure hair is assigned appropriately so that hair doesn't end up stabbing the sim in odd places lol.

I really hope I didn't make things more confusing. I tend to try and simplify things so that they're easier for me to remember later on. It's also been a while since I've looked at the basic hair/body mesh tutorial.

Good luck

I've fiddled around with it a bit more, sleep on it and such. Some things are just clearer in the morning. I think I'll be able to pull it off. Thanks again guys, and sorry for that bit of frustration showing through, very unprofessional of me. ;-)

RenegadeSims - It's a very smooth transition from spine2 to spine1 (or the other way around, whichever is higher up on the spine, I forget at the moment) straight to head - the only places I assigned to neck were the parts on the sides right up against the neck. There are no assignments to any of the "hair animation bones" for bouncyness in the breeze as curly hair tends to be pretty stiff anyway. You're welcome to open my GMDCs to prod at them in Milkshape and see what it looks like... they look awfully pretty with Milkshape's showing the vertex weights in lovely colours enabled. I think the main secret, especially at the back of the neck, was not being afraid to make them transition -really- smoothly, i.e. continuing spine transitions up the hair at the back and sides of the head quite a bit further than one might expect. If I recall the spine assignments only truly stop about a hand's width from the crown of the head.

Phaenoh - *meshy hugs* It's frustrating sometimes. Stepping away and coming back to it after a break or sleep is usually pretty helpful. Not for the faint of heart or the lacking of patience, but you'll get it.

HP - Thank you I only know how to assign spine1, spine2, and hair bones through experimentation and looking at other meshes. Though I think not assigning to the _hair bones makes the hair actually stay where it's supposed to: i.e, if the hair is supposed to rest against the chest, it will help if no _hair bones are assigned to it, otherwise it is more likely to clip. At least, that's been the case for me.

Although, spending a LOT of time creating a smooth transition would probably get that effect. I admire that you did that - it is VERRRY tedious work!

Milkshape highlights vertex weights?! This is news to me, unless there was another Milkshape update recently. I currently use 1.8.0.

Phaenoh - HP is right, it's very frustrating sometimes and taking a break definitely helps. If you keep your patience (you don't need to keep your sanity :P) you'll eventually work it all out.

By the way, showing frustration is not bad at all: you need to be able to vent, and this is the Meshing help forum! It's okay to show a bit of frustration, pound the walls in frustration, etc lol, most people here have been at that state! I'm pretty sure this forum here is for help & support, so definitely come here when you need it Again, good luck!

I lost my sanity a long time ago, design colleges tend to do that to you. I find life is alot better without it anyways. You can relax, breathe, pause time, and actually get your work done that way!

By the way, we do have an IRC chat about Sims 2 creation of all kinds - http://chat.modthesims2.com ... I'm in there most of the time and can be prodded (by way of saying whatever name I'm under at the moment - usually this one, HP|Something or Aychpee) to yowl at about meshing issues or to show pretty pictures or just vent or whatever.

Renegade - 1.8.1b is what I'm using, but it's been in the last few versions... Joints tab, draw vertices with bone colours. Do it with a body mesh first. Pretty colours. Ooooooh.

I honestly haven't done much with bouncy animation. I haven't done meshes that I feel it's really necessary or would add enough to the mesh that I should bother. And it does simplify things a lot, yeah, you know where something is gonna be, pretty much. Assign it to the actual hair animation bones and it starts flying around when the sim turns fast enough. I think it adds a lot when done right - Nouk's stuff is a great example of it done well.... and looks absolutely terrible when done wrong (you know what I'm talking about here... *eyepatchy wink*). But I'd rather see a mesh without it than have it done wrong, personally.

Had no idea about the livechat.... learn something new everyday. Is it interesting?

It's awesome.

Ok, so I'm picking this project up again, and I'm able to articulate my original frustration in a constructive fashion. When I'm putting together the hair package, do I put the modified cres, gmdc, etc into my bodyshop package for all the ages I want to change and then Fix Integrity, or make four new packages, each with a different age in them, fix integrity, and then add them into the bodyshop file? I don't really understand what fixing integrity does, so I can't answer this question myself.

Bribe: I'll save a brownie for anyone who answers before they come out of the oven (50 mins, go)

What I do is make each age group one at a time, first as it's own separate MESH .package. This is necessary, because "fix integrety" is meant to assign a uniquie ID number to all your mesh parts - similar to the GUID number that object .pacakges use - but it will assign the same id number to everything in the .package so it is necessary to first make each as it's own separate .packge, do the Fix Integrety on it, and then the linking step.

I always do just the adult one (which is for adults, young adults, and elders) first and do all the actual editing and experimenting to that one.

Once I have that working, textured the way I want, and thoroughly game-tested, I next make the teen's MESH .package and convert the adult mesh to it.

Again I test it in-game, and make any needed changes.

Repeat for the child's, and finally the toddler's.

I find, at least with longer hair, the Toddler is always the hardest to get animated right. Because unlike the other ages, toddlers spend a lot of time crawling on the floor, with their head and neck bent back at an extreme angle. But later, when they can walk, they will also stand up with their head in a normal position. So it can be tricky to get it to look right in all those positions.

Once I have all four finished and tested, I then combine all the separate MESH .packages into one MESH .package. This won't cause any problems now, as long as you do NOT use fix integrety again.

==================================================

HP, for your mesh animation testing, you could actually just do it once and export it as if it were going to be an actual in-game animation. Just do all the testing movements you want, setting them as keyframes like in the animation tutorials. Then export it someplace safe. The animation exporter exports only the bone animations, not the mesh, so your animation isn't "married" to a particular mesh at all.

Whenever you want to test a mesh, just import the same animation and have it play while you spin the view around in the 3d window to see how things are working. You can also single-step through the animation, as if it were a set of still poses.

Where do you want me to send you your brownie?

Thanks so much for answering my question so quickly! Your explanation cleared a lot of things up for me. Now, back to following your tutorial...

Later: SWEET ACTION!!! I've finally got my mesh into bodyshop!!!! Granted it looks like crap, but its actually working enough for me to be know that it looks like crap! HURRAY!! Is there a "Happy-Mesh-Working-Dance" that I could be doing right now? Cuz I'm feelin' it.

...now to make it not look bad and figure out how to give it a proper UV map, i do hate those things, but they are always worth it in the end. Any ideas on how to map a spiral? Or better yet, 38 identical spirals?

Even Later: I kinda feel bad that I'm asking so many questions, I don't want to bug you guys too much, but I get one thing solved and three more questions pop up.

Three more questions: 1) How important is it that my starting mesh have the same number of groups as the ones I import? So far, I've just been combining the existing groups to get back down to the right number (I'm making curly hair for toddlers from the kids curly pigtails and the adult curlsup bun-ish hair style) Currently my toddler base just has the hair and hair_alpha. I'm starting to think having more groups to work with will make uv mapping it alot easier. Currently I've got no idea how to pull it off. 2) What are the comments for, and how important are they? I've pretty much been disregarding them so far, and in bodyshop, my mesh looks about as what I thought it should look. 3) This style is going to require some layers to be transparent in some places, so I don't get a silly cylinder looking curl. I'm understanding that this is done by having 2 groups identical but inside out of each other. Is this the only way to do it, so going back to my first question, I'm going to need a new base for it right? Thanks again. I'll I can promise is that once I learn how to do something, I never have trouble with it again, so all your help will not have to be repeated for me atleast.

Comments are pretty important, I'd say. From what I've been able to figure out, the names need to match the group name. Set the opacity to what it should be, and ideally, you'd want NumSkinWgts set to 3. The "hair" group generally always has an opacity of -1. I don't think the "TangentArray" is overly important, but I think it does enable things like bumpmapping and whatnot.

Here's an example of what the comments box looks like for my hairs:

ModelName: hair
Opacity: -1
HasTangentArray:
NumSkinWgts: 3

And questions are good. I wish there were more detailed hair-specific tutorials out there, unless there are and I just can't find them lol

Dr Pixel - An interesting idea if I was doing the same animation over and over... unfortunately what I would do each time, animation-wise, was slightly different - tilt the sim's head forward, to the side, back, etc., and watch what happens with certain vertices. I just need to find a macro program that will click stuff for me so I don't have to click the same four buttons a thousand times per mesh.

Phaenoh - Regarding that "how do you map a spiral" - take a look at the curls on the curlsup hair. They're a cylinder mapped like a soup can. Bit of a pain in the ass if you're doing a brand new fresh texture, to texture across the seam properly, but you could probably trace the original textures and do okay that way.

Regarding the number of groups... that's the very FIRST thing you should look for in a hair. Before you even start meshing, you'll need to draw yourself out a little plan, trying to predict how the layering will go, how things overlap, etc. - this is often the hardest part to get right for me, and if you do it wrong you can get transparency issues. If you only have those two parts then you don't have enough to do what you need - you'll need at least three parts for inner/outer on your curls, and then your non-transparent alphas-to-skin hair group. More is better - Nouk made a totally kickass package with I think up to 15 groups for all ages (and you don't have to use all the groups - they're just there if you need them). Might send her a PM and ask if you can clone from it (she'll likely be using it on any of her new hairs) - I'm sure she'll say yes.

Something that may work for you, I'm not sure... you -might- be able to get away with just the three groups though. If you look at my Cherub hair, it's just got three groups - hair, and two alphas, which are the front and back of each curl. For some reason, despite being jumbled and overlapping all over the head, the only transparency issues that hair gets is when you're viewing, say, a wallpaper behind it - it gets edges where it overlaps the background, but not itself. Depending on how long and volumeful your hair is gonna be that may work for you. I have no idea why it works at all - it doesn't seem like it should... the layering stuff is... really annoying.

And yes, the comments are very important. You can usually just copy the comments from the original groups and be fine - just make sure the NumSkinWeights is always set to 3, as Renegade said (otherwise if you weight a vertex to three bones, it'll strip off the third assignment and you'll end up with inexplicably transparent, underweight parts).

And yes, you're correct on the nested cylinder concept. Normally when I build a hair mesh I do all the outside parts, piece by piece, and then when those are ready I select each group in turn, duplicate it, scale by .999, reverse vertex order to flip it, then align normals. That gives you a perfect inner layer, and you don't have to worry about getting everything aligned properly with your inner layers until the very end. With certain strange shapes you may end up with your inner layer glittering or flashing black through your outer layer in Milkshape - this is perfectly fine.

Asking questions is GOOD! It's how you learn! Don't be afraid to bombard us with queries - eventually you'll be knowledgeable enough to answer some questions from baby meshers yourself. Pay it forward and all is well.

Renegade - I thought about writing a more advanced "mesh parts from scratch" tutorial when I was doing the Adrasteia mesh, but there's just so many different things that can go wrong, and it's SUCH a long process, it's really hard to do without just telling people how to make that one thing. At least in my experience, hair meshing is equal parts experimentation and frustration, with a little sprinkle of asking questions when you get stuck.

True, though that would have been an awesome tutorial. I've been wanting to learn how to mesh from scratch, since most of what I do is just fixing or pulling around Maxis hair. If you were up for doing a "mesh parts from scratch" tutorial, maybe do something basic, but not too basic? Maybe a short-ish straight hair or something like that - nothing too complex, but something that would create a stronger ground for those wanting to learn how to make a hair mesh from scratch. I guess something that would cover making shapes, etc. I'm sure you know what I mean I'm sure writing a tutorial like that would take a really long time (only because it would have to be very detailed, probably) and the questions that would naturally spawn after...hm. Well, if you're still thinking about doing it, then I wish you the best of luck.

Personally, I've followed some of the clothing mesh tutorials, but I get to a point where it all just goes over my head (sometimes I need things to be explained to me as if I'm 3 lol), and I also for some reason have a hard time relating the clothing mesh tutorials with hair stuff.

Also, I don't think I've found a comprehensive guide for bone assignments (for hair), though that can also be figured out by looking at others' meshes in Milkshape.

But I'd say Phaenoh seems to be doing quite well so far Just keep at it, and you'll finish it well. I'll be looking forward to seeing the result!

I may do a little mock-tutorial if I find the time, showing how to create fresh new parts and put them in place. I don't have much interest in making hair lately myself but showing how to make a couple new parts and squish 'em into place wouldn't be too difficult, I think.

Honestly all I ever do is use subdivided planes (or, in the case of the Cherub, simple half-spheres and subdivided planes), kind of plotting in my head how many bends I'll need before I make them to see how many subdivisions I need before making the piece. Once it's made, flat and basic, it has a really basic map that covers the whole texture, which is fine... And then I just spend a lot of time shifting around individual vertices and aligning normals till I have something smooth and nice in there, the shape that I want, and then I apply Tig's blue grid for UV mapping and then adjust each piece until it has as close to the grid in undistorted squares as I can get. Bone assignments come last.

When it comes to the bone assignments... yes, most of that I have figured out by looking at existing meshes, and also just applying basic assignments based on a Maxis body mesh underneath, duplicating the assignments from the body in my hair mesh - if there's a vertex in the body on the shoulderblade and there's a cluster of several vertices in the hair over that vertex that are close enough, they'll all get the same assignments as the body vertex... Then I'll just continue duplicating body assignments on clusters of hair vertices till I have something really basic on the hair, and then start doing the Anim thing and tweaking from there. This is especially helpful in things like overlaps on chest and shoulderblades, where the r_clavicle and l_clavicle assignments are really helpful in preventing clipping around the edges.