Hey there,
I've tried to attach Al's shoes to a body mesh using the tutorial at simskins.net. But somehow I can't fix the flat line at the legs.
I imported the mesh itself with Unimesh, then removed the lower legs and imported Al's shoes. I selected the vertices at the flat line and klicked on "Weld together". But the flat line is still there.

You shouldn't use "weld" - it can cause problems.

Instead, one at a time select each pair of vertices where the parts join together and use "snap together"

Then select all the faces around the joining area and use Demon's "align normals" tool on them to get rid of the visible lines.
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=139859

I also tried Al's shoe meshes (too busy to model my own now =p) and it seems the weighting is wrong everytime i do it, even if I assign the vertices as in simskins.net. Last time I checked the vertices are set to 100%.
I am attaching a image with the problem I mention.

Any kind of help would be greatly appreciated.

The tutorial at SimSkins is rather confusing about the vertex assignments - you must use multiple vertex assignments in the area near the ankles, you can't just assign them totally to "foot" or "calf" or your mesh will not animate right as you found out.

Import a non-altered Maxis mesh in a second copy of MilkShape, and carefully compare the multiple vertex assignments using the UniMesh bone tool, then duplicate them on your new mesh.

Thanks a lot, that worked nicely, for some reason I thought that the vertices were to be rigid (some confusion because I had to make them rigid for a different game) but now it deforms nicely. Hopefully I will get some time and will be releasing new models like there is no tomorrow <3!!!

Lately Ive been having problems with attaching tho shoes,for some odd reason the mesh stands piegon toed like tommy pickles from rugrats,but in the game it looks all deformed,is there anything i may have missed?

LegacyEcho, there's 2 things that can case warped/deformed meshes that I know of

1) accidentally moving part of the skeleton in Milkshape. If that happened, I believe you need to start with 'new' - read in your base outfit (of the correct gender and age), and then you can read in your other meshes

2) mixed up bone assignments, like having the left and right leg wrong.

Thank you for showing me to that website. I had no clue you could add different shoes to meshes... I'll have try it out! Thanks!

In SimPE, when you look at the Property Set of an outfit, there is a line that says shoes and then an 8 digit number like "00000003"

I think 00000000 refers to bare feet, and each Maxis-made shoe has it's own special number. I think I changed this number once, and made one of the little girl dresses bare-foot so it could be a nightgown. It's been a long time. I can't remember if I did it that way or copied and pasted from the bodymesh. Anyway, if this works, you could theoretically use the high-tops from the cheerleader on your workout clothes and all kinds of other combinations.

Has anyone else out there tried this?

This setting changes only the sound the Sim makes when walking, it will not change the appearance of the shoes. The mesh and textures control what the feet and shoes will look like.

See the thread here for a full explaination :
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=157145

I really hate to be a bother but Im having issues with this new mesh im making the right leg is looking very warped.I did all the steps i normally do its just I dont know what happened

Those are Al's shoes? Meaning you had to do all the bone assignments by hand? You probably go the wrong leg (like assigned left to right) or some other thing that really whacked out the bone assignments.

OR... you had your skeleton visible and actually moved the location of one or two of your skeleton points - that will throw off the entire thing also. If the bone assignments look good, you need to go get a new skeleton.

Start NEW, import a maxis original gmdc (so you know it is undamaged). Hide the skeleton. Import your new gmdc, and copy the comments and names and whatever and delete the original mesh bits... etc. (tutorial #3)

with my meshes where I add shoes the legs have a strange bend when they walk.is there any step by step to fix this

the mesh comes out perfect,not so perfect when they walk

Have you compared your bone assignments in unimesh with others that deform properly to see if something is way off in the calf - foot area?

You must use multiple vertex assignments, using the UniMesh Bone Tool - See post #30 in this thread

Well, I've finally managed to attach Al's shoes to a new mesh ... thanks a lot for the advice.

However there are two things that still annoy me:

1.


I've assigned calfs, feet and toes ... did I assign to many vertices to the calfs or what else is wrong?
I looked at the assignments of an original Maxis mesh and tried to duplicate them onto my new mesh.

2.


I don't have a clue what I've done wrong. I followed Dr.Pixel post (#28) ... I snapped all the vertices together and then used align normals.

I'd be thankful for every little hint ...

#2 is covered in unmesh tutorial #3. You cannot only snap vertices together, you need to make sure they have identical bone assignments, one pair at a time. As this 'cut' was made very close to the knee, I expect you have bone assignments that have multiple values there, and they just aren't perfectly matching.

#1 Assuming your mesh is has the number of bones set correctly (you should check that numskinweights is set to 3 (or 4)) and you used a maxis mesh for reference for the bone assignments... and that you used Wes' Unimesh bone tool to set the bone assignments, and NOT the built in milkshape bone thing...

The problem is that the ankle bone (you could checkmark 'view skeleton' to see where it is) does not get raised for the higher heels. So you need to experiment with the bone assignments, your heels will not animate quite the same as maxis ones. Dr. Pixel recommends 2 things (was not able to find his best post on it right now) One is that he doesn't assign 'toes' but does that part all to the foot. (you might want to assign more to foot and less to toes and experiment with that) The other is that he adjusts the bone assignments to correspond more to the vertical values compared to the other mesh.

It will probably take several rounds of experimentation to determine which bone assignments will give you a smoother animation that looks fine most of the time.

Thanks a lot! :lovestruc
I got rid of the whole on the legs, however the next problem appeared ...
I used the extended manual edit and when I adjust the vertices on the side of the leg it messes up the uv map ...






I think I know what the problem is, but I dunno how to fix this without having the whole again.

Did you weld the vertices, because that's what it looks like. Or did you use extended manual edit to change the uvmap? (I didn't recommend fixing the uvmap that way in tutorial #3) Extended Manual edit can show a lot of different things in it, the vertex positions, the uvmap, the normals, and bone assignments. I expect you were looking at the uvmap values instead of the vertex positions or bone assignments. The little buttons in the upper left control what things you're looking at. To have a gap that only sometimes appears, the issue is bone assignments.

I suggest going back to the previous version again. I don't have an easy suggestion for how to undo the uvmap mess, although it could be undone with extended manual edit.

I am going to take you through the various steps for attaching the meshes together though:

Select each pair of vertices (sometimes it'll be 4, when you hit a seam) and use the snap command to make sure their values are the same. (Easier than extended manual edit, it's even got a keyboard shortcut - just watch as you do it and make sure you don't accidentally grab points you don't want) You already did this, and it's probably good.

Then after the snap, use the Unimesh bone tool and look at the bone assignments and make them identical (pair by pair). Quick and easy, let's say you always will use the value of the first one, so just click apply to all and commit to all for each pair. This is the part that will close up that periodic gap for you. What's happening right now is that the bone assignments are not quite identical, so part of the time as your sim moves, the vertices are being pulled in slightly different directions.

Now to check/fix your uvmap. Go into the texture editor and scale it to 2x or 3x the size. Move down to where the legs join and look at the placement of the vertices and make sure they're on top of each other. If they are not, use the select and move commands to fix that. As these are Al's shoes I expect they already match up or are very close.

Last - to fix your NORMALS. Go back to the big view, and select the row of vertices where the legs meet and use demon's "Align Normals" tool, which will be in the vertex menu.

I followed the Unimesh tutorial #3 and I didn't use weld together.

It looks like this when I use the Extended Manual Edit:


And everytime I copy the first X, Y and Z values and adjust the others, the UV map looks as shown above.

I've tried it with snap together and now I got rid of the gap (and the UV map is okay as well). I forgot the bone assignments the last time.
Thank you. :lovestruc

Hmm which version of milkshape are you using. I see the right settings are chosen from the looks of it. I HOPE the updates didn't somehow break this plugin, we haven't heard much from demon lately, although he did login a couple weeks ago.

I'm using the 1.7.9 version.

Okay 1.7.9 is the version used in the tutorial. So that's not it. After staring at this several times I'm realizing something -- You don't have 4 vertices there.... only 3. How is that happening I wonder. For proper uvmapping, there has to be a seam there and there should be 4 vertices. And the legs _are_ properly uvmapped. I wonder if Al's shoes (they are older, from bodychop days) come in welded together. Welded behavior was changed with milkshape 1.7.8 in order to support preserving the normals. I don't have the time to explore this right this moment, but I will try and download some of Al's shoes at some point at poke at them.

Meantime I guess the answer is - do not use extended edit on Al's shoes, but use 'snap' and 'align normals' and the unimesh bone tool to work with those vertices.