Hi, this is my first post on ModTheSims, so if I'm in the wrong forum, please say so.

I'm relatively new to meshing, but I've managed to convert some hairs from The Sims 3 and 4 to The Sims 2, but when I'm working with Sims 4 hairs, I always run into the same problem.

When I import The Sims 4 mesh (when adjusted to Sims 2 ofc) into Body Shop, there always appear these weird texture parts on the scalp behind the ears (the rest of the hair looks fine). They also appear in game, so it's not just a Body Shop issue.
I've tried to get rid of these by adjusting the mesh in Milkshape 3D, but the problem is that these parts of the mesh are invisible in Milkshape. They only seem to appear in Body Shop and in the game. I also cannot find the right part of the hair texture to which they might belong to.

They're not part of the hair design, as it happens with every mesh I try to convert and those stripes don't appear in Sims 4 Studio.

I've tried many things, such as moving verticies to try to find the right (in Milkshape invisible) part of the mesh. But I just can't seem to fix it!

I also searched the internet to find something about it, but I found nothing. That's why I've decided to ask for help.

Does anyone know what causes this? And if so, how to fix it?
Help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

The weird texture parts probably come from the part at the bottom. It's mapped over the ears and all around the head, it looks like.

If not, you'll want to check which texture the "head" texture uses in your file (the one for the scalp/head). This one should use an empty texture. If it draws textures from the same map as the hair parts, that could be the source of the texture problems.

If you replace the texture for the head/scalp with an empty map, that should fix the problem (replace with a transparent 512x512 px texture and use a floodfill color for the background before making it transparent. You can also fill in the texture in Bodyshop with a single color. Making it "floodfill transparent" cuts down on the filesize because the game doesn't have to read any details in the texture. Don't use the original mapsize from TS4). There's also a few other ways to do this so you don't get an extra texture, but it requires a tutorial.

Hi, thank you so much for your reply!

I already tried altering the verticies of the bottom part of the mesh, as I personally thought that had something to do with it too, but it seems that is applied correctly (in the correct place). So that couldn't be it.

I have a question though. You suggest to make the texture for the head/scalp transparent (which makes sense to me, thanks for the tip), but the only problem I have is that I don't know which texture file I have to make transparent, as my file doesn't seem to have a texture specifically assigned to the scalp, only the hair textures appear (or do I have to create one, if so, how?/can you link me to a tutorial?) (sorry if I'm a bit of a noob at this). See images below.

The only texture I could think of that may be the one you mean is the one in the plugin view below (but I personally think that's the toddler hair and my mesh doesn't have a toddler version). The other textures are replaced with the new hair texture, as they all didn't feature a scalp and weren't blank.


Hope I'm not being too stupid and
again, thank you so much for your reply!

Can you upload the files (mesh and recolor package files)? It's easier to help you if I have something I can look at, to see how your files in particular are built up.

There are usually small differences from files to files in names and such, so having the exact files makes it easier to tell you exactly which resources to look in or edit instead of having to do a lot of guesswork, which can get confusing.

The texture shown is the toddler texture, yes.

You can try this first:
The "Hair" group tends to be the one that's connected to the skin, so this is the one that should have the blank texture (the Hair_Alpha groups should have the actual hair). If you find the TXMT resource that just says "hair", and look at the texture number in the "stdMatBaseTextureName" value, you can compare this to the TXTRs. The one with the same number is the one that should have the blank texture. Import the blank texture with DXT3 or 5 in SimPE, and it should be fixed.

Hi, thanks again for another reply!

I will definitly do what you suggested and if it for some reason doesn't work, I'll upload my files!

I'll take a look at it this afternoon.

Hi, I took a look at it and did what you suggested (import a transparent texture for the scalp/head.) The problem was that it made the whole head bald, so I did something wrong, I thought. What's weird though (for me at least) and what may cause the problem is that I also checked which TXMT files belonged to the Hair_alpha textures and it seems that they both (the hair_alpha3 and the hair_alpha5) have the same value number behind the stdMatBaseTextureName as the hair (the scalp). I think this shouldn't be the case if we want it to work. But, how do we get it fixed?

So, yeah, did I screw things up while creating and linking the hair, or is this issue very easy to fix?

Looks like the "casual1~hair_TXMT" is the correct one for tthe head/scalp texture. Find the TXTR that matches this, and only change that texture (not the two others).

The other ages should in theory use the same texture, so you should only need to do it for that one texture.

Well, I did that, but it made the adult hair invisible.

Thank you for your quick reply btw.

Can you upload your files?

Okay, I will, a moment please.

You can find my two files in the zip. I didn't make any recolours yet, as I wanted the mesh to be fixed first. This is why one of the files is called s2hairbase (I always export a new hair I made again if I want to recolour it).

All the TXMTs were using the same textures, so that's why it didn't worked.
I swapped around the textures a bit, and fixed the "head" textures, adding in a blank texture. See if it works now?

You do have a few redundant extra references in the PropertySet files, which sometimes can cause problems (usually it's more of an issue in accessories, though). If you add more ages to the mesh, make sure you use the mesh names and setup from the PropertySet resources.

It works now! Thank you so much!

The only thing is that I don't fully understand what I did wrong, I understand that something went wrong in the TXMTs and that the textures had the same name. But how can I avoid this issue in the future?

Again, thanks so much for your help!

I think what went wrong was probably somewhere in the Bodyshop step, if you changed any of the textures there. Alternatively if you've made more than one copy of the recolor file.

Bodyshop combines any textures that are 100% identical (alpha and texture combined), so if you at any point use the same texture for any of the maps, Bodyshop will then combine them into one, which is the one(s) you'll see in SimPE. This is to make the filesize smaller. The TXMTs will share these textures wherever possible. If you make a new project in Bodyshop, the textures will be extracted again from that same texture, so you'll always get the option to edit them as long as you make sure to use the correct textures for the correct TXMTs.

The current hair_alpha textures for the CF and PF ages are a bit broken, so if you want to use those for anything, make sure to edit those. I did fix the "hair" textures for both. If you don't want those ages, you can remove them from the recolor files with for instance Cat's hair binner--> https://modthesims.info/d/434016

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The best way to avoid the issue is to make sure you keep track of which textures go together with which mesh groups. The simple "Hair" group is with very few exceptions the one that has the skin and no fully alpha editable parts, which means this is the one that in most cases shouldn't have hair on it, at least if you're doing 3t2 or 4t2 conversions. It's a little different with TS2 edits, because sometimes the "hair" group has a hair texture, but no fully alpha editable parts.

If you're having problems figuring out which is the "hair" group, open up the TXMT, find the "stdMatAlphaBlendMode" in the list, and see if it's set to "Blend" (it's an alpha group) or "none" (it's the "hair" group). You can also go to the "cMaterialDefinition" tab and see if it's set to "SimSkin" (it's the "hair" group) or "SimStandardMaterial" (it's an alpha group). May not work 100% with all hairs, depending on which you're cloning. Most EAxis hairs will have textured "hair" groups, though.

Okay! I understand it better now! Thank you very much for the explanation and for fixing my mesh! It made me very happy!