You mean the skirt at the waistline? For a bottom, the waistline vertices should be at the exact positions of the nude top/ bottom waistline vertices. If skin is visible at the waist, the normals should match the nude waist as well. The skirt down to mid-hip should match the nude mesh exactly or very close. That way, over-shirts will cover the upper part of the skirt and tucked shirts will tuck properly. You should use the Sims 2 Unimesh Vertex Data Merge tool for this, plus the Sims 2 Normal Data Merge to match normals. Import the nude bottom in Milkshape, move it above the skirt mesh in the Groups tab, select corresponding vertices in the nude and skirt meshes, and use the tool. The skirt vertex will move to the position of the nude vertex.

You should also check the bone assignments at the waist - if they don't match the nude mesh assignments exactly you'll get more gapping with a nude or tucked or crop top. Toolkit has a tool to match bones at seams, once you have all the waistline vertices positioned correctly.

So I'll have to mess with the GEOM-M-00 aka the morph part, yes? How do I export the altered morph, then?

When working with morph meshes, you must import the base mesh first, then the morph. You can import more than one morph for that mesh if necessary. The base mesh must be the first mesh in the list in the Group tab. When exporting, again the base mesh must be first in the list, then export as usual.

Don't add or remove any vertices, or use Weld.

If you need more than one mesh, for example if you need to match your fat vertices to the nude fat morph, you must import the base and morphs of one mesh, then import the base of the second mesh, move it to the top of the Groups list, and import its morphs. When you export, make sure the base of the mesh you're exporting is on top of the Groups list.

Hi,

I'm still having issues after following those steps. I used the vertex data merge on the waistline of the skirt and the bottom mesh as well as the normals merge. I then did the match bones at seams from the tool kit.

In the first pic there is a bizarre sheen to the skirt. It happened after the normals step.



In the second pic you can see that the waistline still sits away from the torso, even with the vertex merged.



I wish I could figure out what I'm doing wrong...

On the plus side shirts tuck in okay and jackets go properly over the skirt.

One tiny step at a time!

Hmm. That weird sheen could be a missing normal map texture. Every mesh has a link to a normal map (bumpmap) texture, and if the texture is removed or missing for whatever reason you get weird lighting effects. If that's the case, you can replace any texture you may have removed, or replace the group comments of the mesh with the group comments of a similar EA mesh.

I can't tell from that pic if there's an actual gap at the waistline or if the mesh has a built-in ridge where the top of the skirt was meant to fall. If it's a ridge, the texture should be modified to match the top of the skirt to it.

And I don't know what that shadow ring around the waist is, unless it's part of the texture.

If you want to upload your package, I'd be happy to take a look.

I'd really appreciate you taking a look - I don't want to go any further until I figure out what I'm doing wrong...

Can I use the Snap Together command, though?

Snap Together should be fine, yes.

Did you make this mesh by taking a skirt or the bottom of a dress and putting it on top of an entire bottom mesh? That's what it looks like. That's what's causing the weird sheen effect - in CAS, if you have two (or more) mesh areas UV-mapped to the same part of a texture, you get this effect. It shouldn't be visible in the game, though.

To see the UV mapping, go into the Groups tab and select your mesh. Then go into the Materials tab and click New in the bottom group of buttons. Then right above that, where there are two sets of buttons labeled <none> and None, click the first <none> and browse for your multiplier texture. Then click Assign in the bottom group of buttons. You should see the texture applied to the mesh, and depending on how you have the view set up the legs and any other parts with bare skin may disappear. Then click the Window menu at the top of the Milkshape window, and then Texture Coordinate Editor. You can see how the skirt and legs/hips meshes overlap. This is one of the reasons why it's better to remove the parts of the mesh that aren't necessary. (If you want to learn more about UV mapping, here's a good tutorial that covers it: http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?tit...D_Meshing_Index)

In the attached pic of the UV window you can also see that the shadow around the waist is in the multiplier texture and needs to be erased.

The gap or unevenness at the waist is because your morphs aren't working. It looks like you imported your morph meshes as BGEO files instead of making new BGEOs. Looking at the fat morph, you can see another reason to remove the underlying hips/thighs mesh; it pops outside the skirt in a few places, something that's virtually impossible to avoid in layered meshes.

I'm afraid you need to start over with the mesh - take the skirt part and Frankenstein it with just the legs. You can see where the bottom of the skirt has holes for the thighs, and you can join up the top of the legs there. Import your new mesh and morphs to tweak the morph meshes as needed, then make new BGEOs and import the new base meshes and BGEOs to the package. Edit the multiplier texture to remove that waistline shadow. Then I think you should be all set!

Ok, trying again. Once I remove everything but the legs from the bottom portion do you think I will still have an issue with the morphs?

What about the Unimesh Normal and Vertex Data Merge tools?

@bamani71: As long as you make new morph meshes and new BGEOs following the directions in the tutorial, the morphs should work.

@blakegriplingph: The Normal and Data Merge are fine to use.

Ok, here's a new problem. I deleted the hips and attached the skirt at the legs, and then did the FrankenMesh in the Mesh tool kit with the original morphs for the skirt and bottom nude. It created new morphs for me, but when I try to open them in Milkshape it tells me "incorrect vertex count in morph". Is there another step I should be taking in the Toolkit?

When you used the Frankenmesh tool in Toolkit, it should have made a new base mesh along with the new morph meshes. Did you import the new base mesh in Milkshape first and have it at the top of the list in the Groups tab?

If you did and it still doesn't work, could you upload your original modified meshes, the original morph meshes, and all the meshes Toolkit created?

I've attached the file with all you requested. The bottom lod and skirt lod are the modified meshes, mini_pleat and BottomNude are the original morphs. I've also included all of the files created by the Toolkit.

I started again with just the nude bottom mesh and build the skirt out of a cylinder. Now I just have to figure out how to create morphs where none existed before...

I had no problem importing skirt test lod1 fixed and then skirt test lod1 fat, skirt test lod1 fit, and skirt test lod1 thin over it, so I'm not sure what you're having a problem with at this point?

I don't know what happened when I posted that error, it worked fine for me as well. Now he just has a second belly button, which may have to do with my vertex data merge. I believe I merged with the top instead of the bottom...

I feel really stupid now - apparently the belly button is part of the texture maps and I just have to figure out how to get rid of that potion.

I did figure out why it hadn't shown up in previous versions - I'd cut the top two rows off of the mesh where the belly button part shows up...

Ok, final edit, redid everything and i still have a seam - even after doing the vertex merge and the match bones at seams. I'm going to fiddle a bit with the textures, and maybe just have long shirts...

You've made a lot of progress! Check if the seam changes as you use the fat/fit/thin sliders - you may need to match the waist vertices of the morphs too.

In the future you might find it easier to use Toolkit's Auto Morph function, which I did after this tutorial was written. Using that, you would work only on the base mesh, make sure the seams at waist, ankles, and neck match the standard, then use Auto Morph with (in most cases) the nude or a full-body swimsuit mesh and morphs as reference.

Ooh, I'll try that next!

Thank you for all of your help, I've learned a lot in the last couple of days!

So I have a new question - What do you do when you're frankensteining a top and bottom into a body mesh and in lod 3 you have one extra vertex at the waist. Do you just join it to an already existing one? I wonder if that may have caused an error in a mesh I was working on today - I couldn't do the tangent thing in Toolkit because of a 0 vector...

I would just manually place the extra vertex between the two vertices next to it. In lod3 no one's going to see the seam. The error you got was caused by this as you said - by joining two vertices in a triangle to the same position, you got a triangle with a zero length side and the tangent calculation for it got that error.

I'm learning so much! Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. I keep coming up with more the further along I get.

One final thing that I should have asked at the beginning. When merging vertices on my skirt mesh I should merge with my bottom reference not the top, correct?

It's a learning process and very challenging at the beginning.

I assume you mean the vertices you copy data for? You can copy from either the top or bottom for the waistline. The EA meshes all use a standard waistline for each lod that's identical for top and bottom. (Not including long tops, of course.)

Yay! I didn't think to ask that before.

Now to figure out UV maps...


One more question - how do I test textures on my mesh without going in game? I'd like to be able to see both the skirt mesh and a top to make sure that things are lined up correctly. CTU only shows my bottom, so I can't tell if the waist band is too high or too low without having to go into the game every single time...

The only tool I know of for this is TSRW. It lets you open a package, shows the clothing on a full figure model, and lets you pick the other parts of the outfit. It even lets you preview the fat/fit/thin morphs. It can be a bit buggy but works most of the time.