I have a couple of children's dresses that seem to have an issue with how the skeleton (or bones, skin weights?) is set up. When the child sits down, the legs don’t come out where they’re supposed to. Also when they run, legs come out through the dress. I know how to use Milkshape to some extent, but I’ve never worked with skeletons or bone settings before. Is there any simple and easy solution for this? I could, of course, take the dress texture and use it on another (functional) mesh, but I’d like to keep these specific meshes.

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It's an issue with the bone assignments.

Are you sure the original creator is unavailable, and that they didn't already posted a fix? This does seem like something that would've been noticed reasonably fast (that, and the "normals" issue - the shadowy lines along the seams on the shoes, arms and neck on the blue dress).

The upper part of the dresses seem to be assigned properly (which is the hardest part to get right), so you could use a variation of methods to assign the skirt parts. Copy/paste assignments from another skirt the same length could work (import in another skirt with working assignments, mark a vertex on the dress with proper assignments, in the "Joints" tab click "Show" to show (and copy) the assignment for that vertex, then mark a vertex on the dress you want to fix, and click "assign". You can assign multiple vertices, but it needs to follow roughly the same pattern, and should have roughly the same color spread with "Draw vertices with bone colors" ticked when you're done. It's a bit of trial and failure.

It does help to read through some basic tutorials on making clothes first, if you've never made a mesh before. You'll need to extract the mesh and import the new one back in, and more or less do the same steps as when making a new one (but you can skip a few since you're just fixing it).

There aren't a lot of tutorials that explain how to manually assign joints for clothes, since a lot of people tend to use different tools (for assigning a whole outfit), but I did find one for hair (it explains and shows the tools - it's the same principle, just different bones)
https://pforestsims.tumblr.com/post...mation-ts2-hair

I don’t know who the original creator of the mesh is. At least the green-brown dress was originally an adult dress by All About Style, which someone adapted into a children’s version. The blue dress, on the other hand, is one where I lengthened the hem in Milkshape—could that be causing issues with the bones? And actually, I’m not entirely sure if I remember correctly, but I may have also lengthened the hem of the brown-green dress. So it’s possible that I caused the issue myself by lengthening the hem.

What does ‘Normals’ mean in Milkshape? What kind of error could have happened with them? Is there an easy way to fix the bone issue somehow? (Edit, oh, I saw you already answered, thank you for the link, I am going to check that out)

If you change the shape of a mesh (legs, arms, etc.), you also need to fix the bone assignments to match the joints the parts cover. In addition, you need to make sure there's enough geometry for the skirt to bend with the joints, and that this geometry is placed in the correct spot (in your case there needs to be enough geometry around the knees). It's not enough to just drag the bottom vertices down.

I did it! Thanks for the help