Hey Guys, I am having a little problem with the texture for a sofa. I have mapped the sofa in uvmapper and it looks great in the uvmapper viewer but in game the texture looks a bit distorted. I am wondering if anyone can help me get on the right track, I have read all the tutorials on mapping for Sims 3. I have attached two pictures to show what I am talking about. One picture is from uvmapper the other from in game. Thanks

This may be a problem with split/welded vertices. To check, decompile the mesh (the in-game one) again and check the UV map. If parts of it look like uncooked spaghetti dropped on your map, that's the problem.
Wes gave some insight here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...224#post2847224

i have the same problem when i pick the IMG file with white in it and make it all white... now i leave that one alone and it oke now.. maby you have to put the old IMG file back.. the one with white in it, and it's oke.. maby this is not the anwser but it works fine for me..

CMOMONEY.. THX for the tip .. il'check it out

Thanks for responding everyone. I have tried both methods with no success. So I guess it is backing to the drawing board. But thanks again.

If you want to post your package, I (or somebody) could look at it for you

Here you go cmomoney. I have a feeling I am just not getting the mapping part correctly. Thanks for offering to look at it. I am going in to work right now. So there is no rush. Thanks once again.

I believe I have fixed the problem. I have to do a little more testing but I think it was the sofa that I cloned. It had no joints when I cloned another sofa it had joints and I was able to convert another sims 2 sofa with no problem. I will post my results as soon as I can. I have to go to sleep because I have to be at work in the morning. Night all.

Or you might have used unimesh to import a sims 2 couch.
If you do not fix the bonesettings the game will use the old bonenumbers(wich are totaly wrong)from the imported mesh.
I had this with a clothing mesh, with the strangest results :D

But Base1980, when you use Unimesh to import a TS2 mesh, you can say "no, you do not want to INCLUDE additional bone definitions" , did that not work for you?

I'm actually experimenting with exporting the TS2 object GMDC with rightclick in Simpe, and importing the TS2 mesh using Unimesh. If I use the .obj I get some strange lonely seperated vertices?? , if I hide all the groups.

Well, I made a picture of it, did anybody got this too and do you know what it is??

That is a known problem in the SimPE .obj exporter that I don't think was ever fixed. It happens when meshes have compacted vertex buffers... some of the vertices get duplicated, but they are not attached to any faces. The vertices that they are copies of are in another group, and those are attached.

The solution is to delete the loose vertices, or use the UniMesh importer. I think exporting an SMD file from SimPE and importing that works OK, too.

Thanks WesHowe, for the confirmation. But what do you mean with exporting an SMD file, the one I export with rightclick in SimPE has .5GD extension??

Petallotus, that couch of yours has some serious troubles. The UVmap looks like a splash of spilled spaghetti and halve of the normals are out of line.
I'm going to try to see if I can do something with it, OK?

That will prevent a 2nd skeleton gets imported, but the mesh will still import with the bonesettings(bone assigned to a vertice)

Try it out for your selve, open a GEOM mesh and import a sims2 mesh, when using unimesh bonetool on the sims2 mesh you will see that the old bonesettings have been converted to alligne with the skeleton that came with the GEOM import, some will be zero but most will have now wrong settings.
Nothing spectacular as you still have to reassigne them anyway.

If the couch was imported with unimesh and had sims2 boneassignements it is possible these caused the distortions.

Uhh, I have not visited the clothing department yet, but my understanding of a skeleton is, that it consist of joints connected with bones, or bones connected and moving with the joints.
Vertices have bone-assignments, are assigned to a bone, they move if the bone is moved with the joint. If the joint moves, the connected bone will move and so will the vertices that are assigned to that bone.
If I have understand this wrong, I must re-read WesHowe 3D tutorials again.

Most objectmeshes I have seen sofar, do not have, or have only 1 or 2 joints. Usually in objects that have moving parts, like the crib that has 2, one for the bed and one for the gate that can be animated/move.

Well, in this case, the sofa does not have a joint and so no bone assignments. But I'm sure it is appriciated you are trying to find an explanation too.

Cocomama, I have already fixed it but thank you anyway. I used another model to clone from. And all came out fine. This is the wrong file anyway. When I redownloaded it I found that I had mixed up my lod and model files.

The one you get with a right-click Extract from SimPE is a raw GMDC, with a .5gd extension. UniMesh will import those.

If you choose Export (from the button) you get to pick from .obj, .smd and MilkShape Ascii formats. I don't think the last two have the loose vertices issue, and both have bones, at least the single assignments needed for objects.

But the bones from TS2 will have the wrong names. Giving them the TS3 bone names from a comparable object should work.

So Wes in your opinion is it better to extract a TS2 object as an obj file or a .5gd file?

That is correct. A second mesh will end up with parts assigned to the first mesh's skeleton. In the case of a Sim skeleton, the joints are all the same, and it works just fine... later versions do not ask about the second skeleton for body meshes, it just imports it sans skeleton.

Objects usually have different, incompatible skeletons. There are arguments and reasons for working with them either way, that is why the importer plugin makes you choose. Either way, to combine two objects into one mesh will require some amount of bone assignments work.

A .5gd file works better, because the joint locations and assignments get transferred. While not a beginner level project, you can modify the skeleton by renaming the joints and retain the original assignments.

However, only MilkShape and Blender (working from memory) can import .5gd files. .obj can be transferred to many other packages, but it cannot transfer weights and bones. And a subset of the multi-group objects will have the loose vertices you saw. While the reason is hard to explain simply, those are erroneous copies of vertices from other groups, and can just be deleted.

That is not a serious impediment for many objects, because the bone assignments are pretty easy to do, except for a few beds. You could, on the cars for instance, set each joint assignment to be a different smoothing group. Smoothing groups transfer in .obj format, and can be selected, making it easy to select by smoothing group and then assign the selection to a particular joint.

Update: I am just about finish with my sofa, I just have to change my texture map a little more. The more mistakes I make the more I actually learn. I can say that this has been a long two weeks in getting this one object right. Just some notes. The SofaClub which is the object I originally cloned does not have any bones when imported into Milkshape. This had to be the source of my problem because when I converted another Sims 2 couch using a different sofa (with bones) it worked. So I decided to try the durable sofa the first sofa I tried to convert and it worked with no problem. I am going to report this in the s3pi forum also just in case. So the SofaClub is not a good model to clone from.

You can see from my picture that I posted that I still have some areas showing too much light but I know how to fix them. I really have to get to bed now. Goodnight Everyone.


Thanks Wes, something to keep in mind. That is probably why I was having so many problems.