I have a soft spot for the older 2009-2010 CC era for that exact reason- specifically Raon and RoseSims, it was by editing their hairs that I learned to make my own! Almost none of them needed any polycount reduction, one of the benefits of coming from creators who originally made content for TS2.

Hardware can't make up for bad CC practices outpacing TS3, though. The game engine from 2009 is going to be the limiting factor long before the fanciest of graphics cards and misc from 2025+ can salvage it.
If everyone in town has an Anto hair, the game is going to collapse even if you're running it on a nuclear reactor. Begone, I say, to Patreon and TSR artists and their lazy conversions for a game they don't play and don't care about. Maybe if they had any skill in retopology they'd have jobs in game dev already

And entirely unrelated, but I just noticed you're creator of the men's bustier I just put in my Save for Later. Thank thee, I love it

Haha yes! I am well acquainted with proportional editing already :P

Bad news re: morphs - I made my fat morph, but it does funky in TSRW.



The normal LOD0 and the fat morph LOD0 on fat morph head + torso (not ea torso, this torso has moobs which I took into consideration)

Vertex ID range in GEOM tools and MTK:




....Fat morph distortion in TSRW:



Are you sure it's vertex ID count and not vertex count? With it being 1,5k above the 10k limit if it were vertex count, *slight* but not insane going everywhere distortion makes sense.

And even though it doesn't have fit and thin morphs yet, it deforms with changing those sliders as well.



Now I am looking at where I can decimate more.....

Definitely.
I'm not familiar with TSRW workflows, so I'm not sure where exactly it's going wrong in the original, but I was able to make a functional fat morph by pulling it out of the package you sent me and reassembling it more or less with the steps in the tutorial (it's admittedly outdated and may not all be identical to how I do things now) so it is possible.

I would suggest at least using Transfer GEOM Data from an EA hair (there's really no telling what all is hitching a ride on CC, best to strip all of that early), renumber, and remake the morph. Then delete the BGEO out of whatever base hair you start with / clone- which is also best if it's an EA hair- before you add the new one.
Hopefully those steps are compatible with your workflow, as I know my .packages can't be opened with TSRW but I'm not sure which part causes that.

The broken morphing, especially the hair reacting to morphs that weren't added yet, suggests there was leftover data from the original hair.

I managed the lower the polycount and vertex count more (11,5k and 9,7k), and it isn't squiggly now with sliders - it stays put, still morphless, but doesn't change is the point!

I made it by hand originally using your explanation, and actually stopped using TSRW now (I mostly do it at the beginning for the main set-up/textures, and with clothes presets, once I have to redo morphs or bones more than a couple times it goes and I just use MTK and s3pe), I will delete the old bgeo's - because there indeed are mystery ones in the package - and add them with MTK. I started out be extracting the og lod0 simgeom with s3pe, opening in blender, edits, export simgeom, simgeom to wso, wso imported in BG hair.

Either way, getting somewhere, (high contrast hair-skin combo to check certain things) you've been a tremendous help obviously!


(Not most recent version)

I still has some ugly bits in some spots - (parts of) faces seemingly being sort of sharp and peeking through the hair, but I've gotten them fewer already and the LOD0 would be ready to go if it wasn't for my annoyingly detail oriented eyes seeing those ugly bits to begin with. I feel like I am talking too much but if you go "hmm, interesting, show me that", feel free to pm me, I haven't dared to go back in game yet after the last attempt (I can't recreate it at all in blender atp, I have also redone the transparency trick already so it isn't that I think) for fear of disappointment xD

I can certainly relate, perfectionism with hairs takes up a lot of my time and is largely behind the delay on updating the tutorial. I have the technical know-how, but if the quality degrades in-game compared to Blender it can be quite disheartening. If I have to take a hundred example screenshots of something, I'd like it to be above and beyond in quality.

I think you should be proud of what you've made so far, as those kinds of flaws come from the way the game itself renders- which, without the original tools EA used, we just have to fly blind about. Blender can only approximate the game engine, then we make up for the rest with trial and error.
The way all of the textures layer together, the influence of the bone weights and idle animations, etc can create those little troublesome spots.

The best advice I have for it so far is to check your work on multiple sims, as different facial sliders will reveal different problems, and look at some of EA's worst work to make yourself feel better And check in Live Mode, because the rendering in CAS is harsher than anywhere else.
Taking a break to make something else before ironing out those little issues also helps. It has that frustrating quality that programming does- that sometimes you can return to a project and you won't encounter the issue you were before, and you won't know why- but you'll take it!