Thank you tiggeryplum for your tutorials 2 were easy and the 3rd one it was hard at first but I got through it at the end. it was very understanding but I have some questions

When I made a new mesh the arms became deformed for some reason how do I fix that I don't know why this keep happening?



Second, Everytime I enable bumpmap on my mesh do I have to modify the MORPHMOD Mesh everytime?

And a Curious question is that if I want to make my mesh reflective or crystal white like blinky's meshes how do I do that?

Sorry for the big pics

Picture size is good we can see details.

Hmm, I can't answer on the elbows, I'm going to have to go stare carefully at my meshes. If you fixed all underweight bones and didn't change any bone assignments at the elbow, I'm not sure why it is doing that.

Also you have a _neck gap_ on your new mesh, which is unusual also. See the narrow line where we can 'see through' and see the background.

Exactly what steps did you take to make your modified mesh? Which unimesh version did you use? Did you fix underweight bones? And what changes did you make to the mesh.

The way bone assignments work, if your mesh was moved 'down' on the screen a bit, then you would probably see deformed areas around joints like the elbows, but I'm not sure if that's the cause of what we're seeing.

To make the entire mesh reflective (but that will be both clothing _and_ skin_) you can modify the matd settings in the recolor files. If you only want to do part of the mesh it needs to be built with 2 parts. Bink changed the settings on the _skin_ files for his special characters.

PS- moved this to it's own thread.

I Used the previous unimesh (V4.06) before wes_h updated it could that be the problem? and once I did the bone assignments I checked to see every vertex was already set to equal 100% For the steps of making a modify mesh I went through all of the steps but I'm am not sure if the Sims2 Unimesh Bone Tool (step 35) is doing this? do you think I might have to start all over again?

The square looking elbows are likely a bone assignment/weighting issue (this was all we had before the BodyChop version, UniMesh's ancestors). That square look comes from 100% weighting to joints that flex. Without MilkShape 1.7.7 up, and the UniMesh plugins, all you can get from MilkShape is 100% to on bone. This is a complex topic, but I will try to be less verbose than usual:

When a joint like an elbow flexes, if the vertices above it are assigned to, say, r_upperarm and the ones below to r_forearm, when the joint is flexed the vertices move away from each other at the back of the elbow (and towards each other on the inside). The faces between these two different sets of vertices stretch, making the flat edge at the point of the elbow.
The multiple assignments and weightings helps this by assigning the vertices closest to the elbow 50% to each of the upper and lower bones. Then as you move away from the joint, the influence of the primary joint gets stronger and the secondary gets weaker, and at a point the secondary is dropped entirely.

The shoulders, neck and some other places are even more complex because there are three (or even four) bones that influence the shape when animated.

What I believe happened is that you, likely accidentally, had parts of the model on the arms selected and changed the assignment from part upper and part lower arm to 100% one or the other while you were fixing a different thing. For instance, the button on the BoneTool that says 'Apply to All' copies the current assignment you are looking at to all vertices that were selected (this, of course, is to allow mass assignments). So the wrong thing can be copied overtop of the old assignments. In general, most of the Maxis made assignments are very good, done by professional modellers.

Of course, when you went through all the model looking at these in the BoneTool, they looked OK because it was 100%. Neither MilkShape nor the plugins are smart enough to see this. It takes a human eye.

What I saw from the screenshots looks like you can probably repair these by studying the way the originals were made and assigning your new model like that. If your machine has a reasonable amount of memory, you can run two copies of MilkShape at one time, one open to each different mesh. Remember, the BoneTool works only on selected parts (vertices). If you only select 4 vertices, for example, that's all that you will have to look at in the editor.

<* Wes *>

Sorry it took so long it finally worked I tweaked the bone assignments like you guys told me It was kinda hard it took me a while but i managed to fix it I downloaded the latest unimesh and have no problems so far.

Thank you very much Tig and wes for helping me out I really appreciate it.

oh....on the MATD settings to make the mesh reflective Which values can I tweak so that I wont mess my mesh up?

EDIT:Can you also create your own joints?

You can't change the skeleton.

And if that body is all one piece you can't change the matd's either, unless you want the entire body, skin and all to shine.

Discussion of matd (with various bits of info burried in it) is here http://forums.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=35769

aw That sucks oh thanks again for your help. I will take a look in that thread.