Sorry, Adele, no. Morgade was going to do that, and I put a lot of effort into making the MLOD decompiler/recompiler tools use an easy intermediate format to make it easier. I don't know whether Morgade has lost interest, or is just busy with other things. Perhaps he is working on them now, he hasn't said.

I went through the exercise of trying to work with quite a few meshing programs while working on TS2 stuff, and again with Spore. None of the free programs are very friendly to work on, and most of the meshing programs that have useful interfaces are considerably more expensive than MilkShape.

If someone else wants to try their hand at it, feel free. While taking MODL packages apart and putting them back together is very challenging, the decompiler and recompiler use a rather simple text intermediate file format that should be east to write plugins for.

<* Wes *>

Ah, I see. Thanks for letting me know!

Adele: I purchased milkshape myself, it is a really great buy, everyone says "you won't regret it" and "it is worth every penny", and i was sat here thinking "really can't be that good", but in the end i gave in and bought it and it really rocks

Thanks so much, this tutorial worked great for me.

DD: Yeah, I think it wouldn't be a total waste of money but I wouldn't be using it to mesh at all. I'm just not too excited about the idea of having to filter everything through Milkshape, so I'm just going to wait until someone wants to write plugins for Blender.

Wes,
Would you be able to create a plugin for Maya. I do use milkshake, but only to export meshes into SimPE for Sims 2. I personally find Milkshake very limited for meshing... or maybe it's because I have been using Maya for so long. LOL.

DD - This tutorial looks great and well written, looking forward to trying it out later.

Thank you.

Man, I really wish I could get milkshape... but my dad probably wouldn't let me pay for something that I'm crap at... when I had the trial version... I don't want to go into that

Hey there! You could do your Mesh in Maya, but you'll have to export it into Milkshape to import it into s3pe. That way you dont need to do any meshing in Milkshape, it'll act just as a exporting and importing program.

Haha, that is how i do my mine Also to everyone else, i am glad you found the tutorial helpful

Thanks Fresh-Prince for the response.
This is what I am currently using Milkshake for (Sims 2), so this is wonderful that I can continue using the same method for the Sims 3.

The question I'm having is from an object that I'm trying that has multiple 'texture' states. Of course what originally seemed to be a simple object isn't.

My object is a jar of honey.

Here's what I understand: Each object can have a texture, recolorable areas, bump map, and the one that defines the shine. but the trouble I'm having is where is the alpha layer? Is it hiding somewhere?

with my jar there are four different areas on my mesh and all require different combination of the above texture states.

Lid: Texture, moderate shine, and no alpha
Jar: Texture, high shine, possable bump map, and alpha to make the glass transparent
Honey: Texture, maybe some shine but possibly not, and alpha to give slight transparency
Label: Texture, very light shine, bump map, and alpha to 'cut' the label into an oval rather than a triangle like it currently is

As confusing as this sounds, I actually understand it very well, but just don't know how to find or do the alpha or is there a new way to go about that too? Is the transparency applied to the texture like you would for PNG files?

I'm having to learn about the DDS files, I've never worked with them before.

Thanks in advance.

Hi

I did everything as they say, and yet I can not export, or have forgotten a passage, but being french and my very bad English, it is difficult without not images

I'm using Widows Vista and this is what I did (This one confused me as well!):



Now it will show up in Milkshape like this:



And here it is on the export menu:



I have to scroll down on that menu to find it. Does anyone know how to get rid of ALL of the unnecessary entries on those lists? I only use this for Sim stuff and have never even played most of those other games and it's a REAL pain to have to sort through them every time. It's this dyslexic's nightmare.

You will notice that in the MilkShape program directory, there are many files that start with "ms" and end with ".dll". Every one of these is a plugin, and each one will make a space on the menu.

For instance, there will be a file "msQOBImporter.dll" that is the menu item "Rogue Spear QOB models".

If anyone follows this method, you must do it carefully. But if you rename some of those files, they will no longer be recognized at startup and thus will no longer crowd your menu.

I renamed "msQOBImporter.dll" to "xmsQOBImporter.dll", and did the same with many others, all plugins for games I do not use or even own. Should I ever need a QOB exporter, well, I can rename the file back by removing that "x" from the front, restart MilkShape and it will be back.

Perhaps I need to post a thread about how you can set a hot key to invoke a plugin, bypassing the menu altogether. On my machine, I just press the "m" key and my Mesh importer pops open (asking me for a filename to import).

Thank you very much,

it works

Now I'm in the "S3ObjTool" I did not understand the translator is not really great -_-

Oups

I have another question, how to find the patterns to change?

If you browse through the "_IMG" files you will find two or more that look like a pattern, so wood or metal, edit those with your pattern

hello

i have gotten stuck at step three and would like it if someone could explain a little further for me. I have put the extra two dll files from west object tool in the main folder of milkshape. i click on browse and open up the milkshape folder however the two dll files are not showing in the milkshake folder. they are there but are not being recognised. could someone explain what i may have done wrong or have missed. sorry

Both the tool and the plugins require the "Visual Studio 2008 Runtime" package be installed. This is free from MicroSoft, and can be found here.

thanks west for the quick reply but i have already installed microsoft 2008 c++. maybe its my vista?

OK, these MilkShape plugins should only require 1.79 or so, which is a pretty old version. The GEOM (body meshing) plugin needs 1.8.5, but not the object meshes.

I re-read your post, and I am confused about when you said "browse". In the C:\Program Files\MilkShape 3D 1.8.5 (or whatever version you have installed) folder should be msS3Objexp.dll and msS3Objimp.dll.

If those are there, and the VS 2008 runtime is installed, you should see the "Sims 3 Object Import" item in the File/Import menu, and the "Sims 3 Object Export" item in the File/Export menu.

Vista/XP should not be an issue, it should be there on either.

<* Wes *>

Images would be nice as it would make it easier for people like me but overall a great tutorial :D

this is the part i'm confussed at (.mcfg file, there should be one .mcfg per MLOD or MODL) i have the mlod x3 and modl file how do i get the .mcfg ?

The .mcfg is created when you "decompile" each .lod or .model file. "Recompile" builds a new .model file from the decompiled parts, plus the .mcfg. In-between the two steps, you can edit the mesh data itself.

<* Wes *>

thank you west. I can now move on to stage four tomorrow after some rest and baking.

amy