ONE:I am bored with just moving vertices so I decided to learn how to add vertices. When I make a sphere or cylinder in milkshape, it won't show up in bodyshop on my mesh. I want to make it show up, and use a texture. How do I do this?

TWO: I can't get my adult hair meshes to show up in adult, they only show up in elder. I fiddle with the right 3DID file and everything!

!HELP!
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(I think this is in the wrong catergory, I'm new and unsure)

Right place to post, and I am looking for the part about adding stuff, there were some comments in a body mesh question that I think might help you.

Here someone was saying their work was not showing on the uv map and down the thread some dr. pixel says the new parts need to be added to the group - I hope this helps - definitely read his explanation
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=120320

Someone else will need to help with the 2nd question.

When you make a new part, like a sphere, in MilkShape it automatically becomes a new mesh "group"

But the the other parts of the mesh .package are not set up to recognize it, so it will never show in the game.

The best solution, in most cases, is to texture map this new part first, then combine it back into one of the existing groups.

I'm in a bit of a rush right now, no time to explain fully how to do it - but search around the forums, this has been explained before.

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About the mesh showing up only for "Elder" -

Adult, Young Adult, and Elder actually all share the same hair meshes - but each has it's own 3DIR file. You must find and "link" all three to your BodyShop .package when doing "adult" hair meshes.

In other words, for "adult" there is not a correct ONE - there is a correct THREE.

Teen, Child, and Toddler do have only one each....

I have only the base game if that changes anything.

Learning this the hard complicated way myself too, as per the other thread, and I do pickup some tips here and there =)

The very first thing you should *forget* is trying to save the joints assignment intact. I had (and still have) a hell with reasigning the joints as the last step, and was trying to only change a minimal of verteces (delete or add in new) so the joints would stay as they were as much as possible. Without realizing it, this was making all the other parts of editing the mesh soo much more complicated, so come to terms with having to rebuild the joints in the end and you will have an easier time =)

As to the UV Map, and making new parts in Milkshape - .obj is your friend. As Dr Pixel explained in the other thread, when you add a vertex in MS *anywhere* it will also place a UV reference, but with no value (0,0). Once placed, the UV will also not change according to your vertex, so you get one shot at getting this right.

Here's how I do i now. First just export your base model into MS, then save it out as a .ms3d again (MS format, retains all info). Don't save over this for a good while yet =) Plan ahead and try to anaylyze what exactly it is you are doing, it helps a lot instead of just diving right into adding new stuff. Say you want to make something *easy* like a pair of boots with more visual edges (like you were creating the boots outside the body).

What I would do is load up your "original" from the .ms3d save. Delete BM1/2, and then delete the parts of the main body you *won't* use in your new part. For boots, lets say they are above the knee, I would retain the whole legs up to the crotch, deleting everything else. Once you have a new base to work with, save it as a new different .ms3d.

Now work with the vertices you have, move them around and make the changes you want. Once you're fairly happy, look at the group and it's name in MS - change that to something appropriate (like boots1). Now select the group and *Export* as a wavefront object (.obj). Open up your original again (the .ms3d). Import the wavefront object of the boots you made. You see you have to make changes to the original to properly weld the new part in, but that can wait.

First things first now, as MS has properly created a whole set of new UV points on the verteces you just imported, just invisible yet. Immediately, go to Materials, click new, give it a name in the box (boots1 work=), remember to hit rename, and see two wide buttons named "<none>" above. Click the top one and pick any .bmp from your projects folder. Then make sure you have all the verteces of your newly imported obj selected (groups > select), and hit the "Assign" button in Materials.

Go to Window > Texture Control Editor, or hit CTRL+T. You probably wont see anything here yet, but look at the two dropdown boxes on the right side. Find your groupname in the upper one and hit select. Magic should happen by now =) Do you see the full texture with the wireframe of your boots now? Great. Select all of them, and then move. Now you can move the UV points wherever you want on the texture map, especially useful for things you know will overlap or crash later. Although Maxis use very connected UV Maps, you don't really need to. If you move your legs to a different part on the texture, they will still map just fine, only from another part of the texture. You could theoretically break up every face of the model and map it wildly around the texture, and you would still get the same result as a textured Maxis model (not that you should =).

When you have moved your verteces around and exit the Texture Control Editor, you are basically done. You can now continue work with your boots/mesh part and move it around as much as you want, but know that the UV points will never change in MS again (deleting or adding a vertex in your modelpart will *not* change the UV one bit), . If you make your boots model shorter, the verteces will still have the same UV points and mapped out just like you did that first time (and thus causing stretching of the texture). You can change the UV points around in MS freely now though, but the most important part is that your new model part now actually exists in the UV Map =)

Thus the UV Map is actually the most important thing you do in your model, and should be your first priority to get right. Much rambling, hopy you got atleast something from that =)

Ok, I just finished a hair mesh in Milk-Shape. Did everything in Simpe. Then, I went to bodyshop and the hair came out great. But, something really freaky happened. And I mean scary! First my manequin sim had no face, then when I rotated the manequin, you could see the bangs through the back of her head! Now that's weird! I'm sorry, but Hair is definately a lot more complex than clothing. Could somebody possible help me with just this one problem?

It is because you didn't re-assign the hair mesh.

Re-assigning the vertices is explained in this post:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...552#post1228552

In case you are not using the UniMesh plugins (which you should be using if you have MilkShape) a complete hair meshing tutorial starts here:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=158048