SMD Tools

Overview
This is a simple small tool developed to automate a little bit of the process of creating custom clothing meshes for The Sims 2.
Meant to be used alongside SimPE, using its built-in SMD exporter and importer.

This tool was inspired by CmarNYC's Meshing Toolkit.

The tool assumes you're familiar with the mesh creation process already - You need to provide your own extracted reference meshes.

Features
Settings such as Max Influence Distance and others are tuned to give good results most of the time, so you might not need to modify them.

Auto Morphs

Allows you to create a morph automatically for a target mesh of your choice, using a reference base mesh and a reference morph mesh.

The interpolation distance can be increased for smoother results, and the Max Influence Distance can be increased if there are gaps in the final mesh.

Fix Normals

Transfers normals from a reference mesh to a target mesh. Can fix seams and shading problems in meshes.

If "Check Normal Facing" is enabled, the program will try to copy normals from vertices that are also facing roughly the same direction, not just those that are below the maximum distance from each other.

Auto Skin

Transfers bones from a reference mesh to a target mesh, and automatically assigns weights to vertices.

Re-Export

Exports a mesh back into .SMD without any modifications, but in a format that's more compatible than how SimPE exports it by default. Allows plugins like the Blender Source Tools to actually import the mesh.

Installation
Simply extract the zip anywhere, and launch the program from "TS2SMDTools.exe"

Usage
This program works with SMDs, not raw GMDC files.

To use it effectively you have to export meshes to SMD format. This is meant to be used in conjunction with SimPE, as it has an SMD exporter and importer for GMDC resources.

You need to provide your own reference meshes. To do this, you can load SimPE, go into Tools -> PJSE -> Body Mesh Tool -> Extracting Stage and type in the name of a mesh that loosely resembles your custom mesh you want to transfer data to. For example, I've found that the "afTopHalter" mesh works pretty well as a reference for most female tops.

Examples

Auto morphs was used here to transfer the fat morph from a Maxis reference mesh into a custom one.


Fix normals was used here to transfer correct normals from a Maxis reference mesh into a custom one, fixing oddities with hand shading.