While working on a hair, I came across an issue and I'm honestly stumped. This is a Store hair ("Louie Little Louie") which I've converted for females, children and toddlers, but the teen-elder male version I've only retextured (so haven't touched the mesh itself). Yet it still displays the issues below: it looks fine in CAS and Milkshape, with no hair bits overlapping each other, yet there appears to be quite serious overlap in Live Mode. To the point where I'm considering abandoning the project altogether, since I can't figure out what's going wrong.

I attached pics below of the teen-elder male and female versions (they are NOT the same file/mesh).

Anyone have any clue why this is happening? I can provide any necessary files. Thank you!

Do you mind if I take a look at them to see what exactly is wrong with them?

Sure, what files do you need?

The ones that don't show up right on live mode. I could test them out on my game to see what's wrong with them. What's the poly count on your hairs by the way? My game doesn't play right with high poly content.

Here are all the hairs: http://www.simfileshare.net/download/646721/

The toddler and child versions have clipping as well, from what I've noticed, but it's not as glaring.

Polycount is 3366 for LOD0.

Whoa that is pretty high but a few high poly items shouldn't do any harm although I would really prefer them if they were lower poly.

3366 for hairs are pretty normal, even for CASpart-y stuff because the sim's body without the head is already around 4k in polycount. (Exception for shoes and small accessory obviously )

Regarding the issue... I have been having the same thing for ages and haven't been able to figure it out myself. I do however know that:

1. In-game textures get... well, compressed. (not sure what your texture settings are set to? But even for very high they look the same like you're sharing. CAS always looks better because it uses a different shader)
2. HQ mods can really show a difference
3. meshes seem to have a different bone structure in-game. So what I do ususally is move the locks of hair that are clipping in-game and see if that works. it's not super effective but it helped me a little.
4. Another thing that might be the issue might be... transparency? not sure if you know about this technique: http://modthesims.info/t/414488
5. I guess what might fix it (and i'm not sure if you tried that) is use the normals tool? it should help with the underlaying bits of the mesh and the upper layer bits of the mesh as explained here: http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?tit...s_3_Hair_Basics (Scroll to extra data and you see what I mean).

The hair looks fine in the game for me. It still clips in some parts but it doesn't really bother me that much and I could only tell that by zooming in on the hair close enough. In Blender however the mesh flickers whenever I turn the mesh around. I made a small clip video of it with Bandicam and I will attach the video in the rar file along with the pictures that I had taken in the game with Bandicam and sorry if the quality is not that great. I can't get Bandicam to take better quality pictures and videos. On a side note could you tell me what skin and eyes that you're using on your sims?

It gives me a similar result in Milkshape when I assign the diffuse as its material (because of the alpha channel, I assume) - see attached screenshot below.
The clipping isn't that noticeable on darker colors, but I'm just a stickler for details and I'd be hesitant to release something that has issues to this degree So if it's possible, I would like to try and fix it.
As for the CC, I believe the skin is Kurasoberina's Primer and the eyes are the Fourth of July eyes by pleyita, as defaults.

@Lyralei - Judging by the in-game pic here, it does appear to be a transparency issue. However, the hair is one big group, and I'm not sure how I'd go about separating it into multiple groups. I tried reducing the polycount with the DirectX tool, then generating the smoothing groups again (which helped me fix normals on clothes before), but this only generates two groups - one small strand on the inside, and the rest of the hair.
The Extra Data method does give the hair a nicer appearance, but I'm afraid it didn't fix the transparency-clipping :/

ETA: the thing is that even though the mesh looks black in Milkshape, it looks fine in-game, so I'm not sure if it has to do with the normals? I tried some tricks like reversing the vertex order twice, and flipping the mesh back and forth with Autosmooth on, but that just messes up the normals.

At this point I can only assume EA's original texture was shitty enough to hide the mesh errors, lol.

ETA2: after reading about the underside, mind if I ask a question? Do all CC hairs have undersides? I tried the underside step and it just doubled my polycount. Would this be another reason why some CC hairs are so high poly, or did I misunderstand something?

Um what are undersides? I don't really know much about 3d modelling so I couldn't answer that.

To tell the truth, I haven't bumped into needing to work with them yet (?), so all I know comes form the article that Lyralei linked above:

Ergo, I assume undersides are simply a flipped, slightly scaled down version of the hair that ensures the interior part of the hair won't look black in-game, and will instead use textures and be recolorable like the exterior one.

Since the hair looks fine in the game I guess you can try moving parts of the hair around that clip until you're satisfied with the results. I'm actually working on a little project myself but those seams,mismatched skin and the see through collar are getting in the way.

Hi @sweetdevil !

Sorry for the late reply, life got in the way

Anyways, regarding the undersides question. I actually... doubt most people do that these days. Especially if you look up specific hair tutorials, it almost seems like a lost art.

On the transparency however, I wonder... do you use Blender or know how to? The reason I'm asking is more due to the fact that with Blender you can easily hover your cursor on lock of hair, use the short cut L and it selects the lock (That being, if the grouping and UV mapping isn't done weird, but I've done it multiple times with EA meshes. If you want me to do it for you, I'll try to get some time and take a look

No biggie, I've put this aside for some time too as I've been busy with work

I'd greatly appreciate if you could take a look at it, if only for curiosity's sake. I took a look at the UV map in Milkshape and there don't seem to be any scrunchy or overlapping areas.
I've actually encountered some issues with the GEOM plugins for Blender, but that's something I have to look into some other time. Would importing the hair meshes as OBJ or WSO suffice, or would that mess up other things like the UV mapping? (bone assignments I'm not too worried about as that'd be easy to fix)