SWEET ACTION!!!!!!!!!! It took me freaking forever, but I FINALLY got a working package with 5 groups for all ages!!!!!!!!!!! bLURR's suggestions at the bottom of HP's tut did the trick for me. Now I just have to go redo everything. THERE IS HOPE AGAIN! I might finish yet! (I'm excited, can you tell?) :: does happy dance ::

Later: Almost everything is done, I'm so happy. So obviously something has to go wrong. Two things have. First, the toddler hair is STILL not being cut by the alpha layer like all its counterparts are. Second, I've got no idea what when wrong with the adult hair mesh. I created my mesh as a child hair originally, then I exported all layers except the hair layer and made it a teen hair, resized, etc, then made that one the adult hair. Something got lost in translation between teen and adult hair. All the comments and bone assignments stayed intact, so I don't know what to check next. Any ideas?

Meanwhile, I'm gonna go start writing that Tips and Tricks on Hair Meshing Article...

There already is a set of hair related articles in the infocenter, so if you write something to add to them, let me know and I'll add it.

My limited experience in the meshing stuff and age conversions is that i had to retain the names used *by the particular mesh I was replacing*. Not all hair meshes use the same naming convention for the groups. Everything has to match up regarding groups, names, names in the comments (so if you change the name you also have to fix the comment to match) and so on for the textures to link to the groups correctly.

As for the toddler, I would check transparency and.... the other part of the group - it'll say something like 'simskin' or something else. If it says simskin - it will alpha to *skin*

The toddler's hair curls are alpha-ing to skintone rather than transparent -

Possible causes - they are grouped into the "hair" group rather than an "alpha..." group

In the recolor .package, check material definition files -

the "hair" group should have:
stdMatAlphaBlendMode: none

all "alpha.." groups should have:
stdMatAlphaBlendMode: blend

Also check the cMaterialDefinition tab for each -

It should say SimStandardMaterial, not just StandardMaterial



In the mesh .package, check GMDC/Groups tab
Click on each group name and check it's Opacity setting

"hair" group should be 0xFFFFFFFF

"alpha" groups should be the same as the alpha group number (but in hex)

One of these should fix it.

The other one, I'm not sure. Since you do have a properly working version, the best thing is to compare the two and see what is different about them.

HOT D4MN! Thanks Dr. Pixel! The toddler mesh is now working perfectly. The one thing was set to "none" instead of "blend" and the cMaterialDefinition tab for all its groups was "SimSkin" (It was cloned from a 1 group hairstyle, so that makes sense). Now on to troubleshooting that adult mesh...

Just tried an old package that was before I combined all the ages into one. Same bug persists. I was starting to check my recolor package, but then thought that would make much sense either, because this same thing is happening to the YA and elder as well as the adult, so I'm thinking it has to be a problem in the mesh itself, or buggy in both mesh packages. Is there any place else it could be that would affect all three ages? Once it gets to the recolor package its called three different times, so that would be the place to look if one was bad and the others weren't. I'll go check out that mesh. Do bone assignments switch left to right between teen and adult? Cuz my hair bug kinda looks like that.

I just want to say I am SO enjoying this project in a vicarious sense.

I haven't seen this much enthusiasm for a project in some time, it reminds me so much of the learning-by-doing and tip sharing from 2 years ago and before.

<* Wes *>

Good to know that I'm not just wasting posting space. (is that possible on the internets?) I was afraid people were just putting up with me till I shut up again...

There is at least one thread archived on MTS2 that had a couple thousand posts in it. The end result is what is known as CEP.

I do not know that anything quite as detailed as that is happening here. But, if you keep your resolve up and create a Tips and Tricks document, then TWO good things will have come of it (number one being your new hair mesh creation).

I think if some were just tolerating you, the number of replies made and the response time to answer would be much lower. I do not feel that way, and I have been known to have a lower tolerance for stupidity than some others.

You have a right to be proud of what you did.

<* Wes *>

Coolies!!! That Tips article will definitely get written. I live off the tutorials here, so its the least I can do.

I have a feeling that I won't be the next Nouk, hair creation isn't my passion, never was, still isn't, but I like to know how to do everything, so I'm very glad I went through all this.

I'm generally very quick with picking things up, and I was shocked at how much difficulty I was having on this. That generally means a fault in the lesson, and in this case, there wasn't a complete overview big picture like tutorial that would have saved me from starting over atleast 2 of the 3 or 4 times that I did. I'm still new enough so I have the right perspective for helping out other noobs. I think I might write two things, the big picture one, and a troubleshooting one. I ran into more than my fair share of problems with this I'm sure. lol

The Next Day: Still have no idea whats wrong with that adult one, so if anyone has an epiphany about it later, please let me know!

Ok, I've been looking at everything. I've looked at both the mesh and the recolor packages, I can't seem to find anything different between the adult parts and the other ages. I tried replacing the old busted mesh with a fresh copy, but that didn't work, its still the same weird problem. Then I tried seeing if it was a problem with the joint assignments in the mesh itself. I noticed that SimPE didn't register any l_hair or r_hair assignments on any of the ages, and that was weird because I know I used them. The picture I included is what happens when some of the l_hair joints are made to be r_hair. They end up much higher than they should be, as shown by the teen hair next to it. Arg, what do I do now?

No, the joint assignments would not be reversed from the adult to the teen - in actual fact adults and teens share the same skeleton, the teen's is automatically pre-shrunk by the game just like you can do manually using the "stretch skeleton" cheat in the game.

A question - was the original adult hairstyle mesh that you cloned your .package from the same hair style as the teen's mesh?

Most of the time they are, but there are a few that are not.

The reason I ask is because those "_hair" joints don't always seem to work the same way in every mesh. It's something to do with the settings in the CRES, but there are so many settings in there for body and hair meshes I don't think anyone has ever worked out exactly what setting affects what...

If the adult mesh was in fact a different hairstyle than the teen's I would suggest you try assigning the adult mesh without using any of the "_hair" joints at all, to see if that fixes it.

I didn't really understand what you asked, so I will just try to explain everything I did for that part and hope some of it was what you were asking for.

I originally started with the flying pigtails because it had enough groups. Unfortunately, for all ages, part of the pigtails are in the hair mesh so instead of actually editing that one, I started with other hairstyles to get my hair group. Then I imported my completed child mesh on top and scaled it and move it, then deleted the hair group that came with that one, leaving the one that was originally an adult hair group, so I wouldn't have problems with gaps in random places. Fixed group names, comments, and bone assignments and called it good.

I'm going to go reassign everything in the adult mesh to head, and see what that does. That should be a decent diagnostic.

Later: CURSES!!! That 'fixed' it. I was SO hoping I wouldn't have to redo those bone assignments. So yes, now everything is displaying properly, and I just have to go back and fiddle with the animation bone assignments again...

Thanks everybody!

Short version -

Since the teen conversion worked correctly, my suggestion (instead of re-doing all the assignments):

(assuming it is an exact match of the teen hairstyle)
Clone the adult version of the same Maxis teen mesh that you used
Link it to the color .package
Import that into MilkShape
Import the working new teen hair mesh (with assignments and all)
Convert that one to the adult mesh.

Thats what I did originally. I'm almost done fixing the assignments anyways, its okay. Wait, maybe I didn't.... I used four random different meshes for each age to get my hair group, then just moved my working child hair to the other ages... Well, I'll know better next time!

Ok, I did redo it like you suggested Dr. Pixel. It works properly now.

THANKS EVERYONE!!!! I"M FINISHED!!!!

Both the final hair with all its recolors and the tutorial that I promised will get posted after I finish up my contest entry. Now SHIRLEY TEMPLE can have her Goldilocks curls, all thats to you all! YAY HURRAY!!!

Double Hurray! I've posted my 'tips'. lol, it ended up being a full-blown tutorial. Linky -> http://www.modthesims2.com/showthre...466#post1797466