play jarus knit tops as separate tops

A while back, play jarus made a set of long knit tops with denim leggings. Cat made separate, shorter versions of the white top on three of her alpha meshes, added short sleeves to a couple of them, and made black and grey recolors. Originally, I just intended to convert the rest of play jarus's tops to those tank top, tunic, and crop top styles, but went a little overboard. Since the meshes for the tanks and tunics support long tops, I decided to try "liberating" a full length top, since Cat hadn't done that. It worked, so I've also included separate, full-length versions of all of play jarus's knit tops, both sleeveless and with Cat's sleeves. I was even able to stitch together full-length versions of Cat's black and grey recolors, both sleeveless and with sleeves, and they are included as bonus content. Note that, while both play jarus and Cat used grey textures, they used visibly different shades of grey. There is a rar file for each style, plus a bonus rar file for the long tops made from Cat's dark grey and black recolors, so there are six in all. The outfits are available as Everyday for young adult and adult females. No expansion or stuff packs are required. Resources are compressed, and some packages are Compressorized.

The filenames are tagged to show color and style, and the files are tooltipped to show this, so it should be easy to only install the colors and styles you want. The packages which use play jarus's grey textures are tagged as "original-grey", while those which use Cat's grey recolors are tagged as "dark-grey". The long tops are tagged as knit in keeping with play jarus's usage, while; the shorter ones are tagged as lace in keeping with Cat's usage. All credit for the textures remains with their original creators; aside from recoloring parts of the sleeves as needed and making one normal map texture, all I did was a lot of cutting and stitching. The long tops hang straighter and looser than the tops in play jarus's outfits because the full-body mesh play jarus used has a distinct hourglass shape, with a narrower and more pronounced waist than Cat's long tunic meshes have.

The short tops are bumpmapped. The long tops use the bumpmaps from the tank tops and tunics for their "top" groups, but use normal maps for their "top_alpha" groups. (A normal map seems to be a different way to do the same general thing a bumpmap does, but with more fine detail.) I did it that way because play jarus used normal maps, and one of them covered the whole top and nothing else. (IOW, it was an experiment that worked.) By the time I'd decided to make a version with sleeves, I'd found a GIMP 2.8 plugin for making normal maps, and used it.

The long tops are longer versions of the tank tops and tunics, so I didn't show all of them in the screenshots. Because of the way thumbnails for tops are generated, the thumbnails for the long tops will look the same as those for the tank tops and tunics. In addition to tooltipping the files, I've sorted the outfits so that, in CAS, Body Shop, and clothing racks, the long tops are grouped together, instead of being grouped with the shorter tops of the same color. Still, if you use both the long and short versions of a top, and especially if you give a Sim the long and short version of a top, the only way to tell them apart for certain is by how they appear on the display model.

Required meshes:
The sleeveless, short sleeve, and crop top styles each use one of Cat's alpha meshes. Per Cat's policy, the meshes are not included, so if you don't have a mesh, you'll need to download it from the thread it was included in.

For both the long and short sleeveless tops, use MESH_AF_topAlphaEmpireTank.7z from ALPHA MESH - Embroidered Empire Waist Tanks.
For both the tunics and the long tops with sleeves, use MESH_afTop_empTunicLngSleeve.7z from ALPHA MESH - Belted Drape Tops.
For the crop tops, use MESH_alphaShirt_longsleeve.7z from ALPHA MESH + 15 rose lace shirts.



Other custom content in images:
Default skins by Leh
(Note: The download links at GoS don't work, the skins can be downloaded here
Default eyes by Lyran (Wayback Machine link)
(Note: The download link is the pic of the eyes. It appears to be working at least some of the time.)
Default replacement eyebrows by rainstorm25

All Maxis pants use replacement meshes by CatOfEvilGenius.
H&M jeans
NL wide jeans
BG slacks with heels

Additional Credits:
play jarus, for the original knit textures, the colors, and the design - and for permission to share.
CatOfEvilGenius, for the short separate tops, the sleeve design, the black and dark grey colors and the meshes. (White, black, and dark grey versions of the short separate tops were posted HERE, but as of Jan. 12, 2021, the images are gone, and the file has been removed from Dropbox.)

pixelhate, for the TXMT reference guide which showed me how to recognize normal map textures and use them in packages, and Michelle, for pointing me to it.
Shawn Kirst, for the plugin which allows GIMP 2.8 to create normal maps.
I wouldn't have known where to find the plugin or how to prepare a texture for it without this tutorial at the Tutorial BoneYard. Also, this one at Valve provided a small, but necessary, bit of information about the plugin's output that I probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise.