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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 18th Jan 2023 at 3:55 AM
Default Hair Animation Bones Distorts Mesh
I've assigned l_hair and r_hair bones to the buns. f_hair to bangs. This caused the buns to look droopy/squished in the game. The bangs curled inside the forehead. This doesn't just happen when the hair is moving/wiggling, the screenshot shows its neutral state.

I attached images showing how it looks in Blender, game and head bone assignment in MS3D. (Ignore the transparency issues in the game, I took it b4 fixing.)

I can fix the bangs by rotating them outwards but buns just don't look right whatever I try.
I examined the maxis pigtails hair and it's just rigged the same way but it doesn't go through any distortions in the game.
Screenshots
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 18th Jan 2023 at 7:02 AM
Have you had a look at similar hairs in Milkshape andn how they're assigned? Could be you need to assign some of the hair closest to the head to the head joint, and keep the animation for the parts a bit further away, like the buns and down the back. Maybe you also need to blend the bones a bit with the hair joint.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 18th Jan 2023 at 8:22 AM
Quote: Originally posted by simmer22
Have you had a look at similar hairs in Milkshape andn how they're assigned? Could be you need to assign some of the hair closest to the head to the head joint, and keep the animation for the parts a bit further away, like the buns and down the back. Maybe you also need to blend the bones a bit with the hair joint.

Yeah I checked the pigtails hair, it's pretty similar. It actually has even stronger weights. And we know that it doesn't get droopy in the game.


I did attach an image showing the head bone in MS before but now I'm adding two more shots from different angles in Blender. The anim bones are at tip and the transition is smooth:
Screenshots
Mad Poster
#4 Old 18th Jan 2023 at 2:17 PM Last edited by simmer22 : 18th Jan 2023 at 2:31 PM.
Not too familiar with how things look like in Blender, and can't check how it actually looks like on your mesh withot having the mesh file in front of me, but using the pigtail mesh as a rough example you can see that the parts closest to the head (minus a line in the neck, which usually is 50/50 head/neck) are 100% assigned to the head, and any animated parts like pigtails, buns, etc. need to be "grounded" to the head first. The closer to the head it is, the more "grounded" it needs to be (if it's fringes, you can't have it 100% to one of the hair bones, or it will move into the head).

If you have one bun on each side, you may want to assign one partially to the R_hair and the other partially to the L_hair joint. I think there are some bun hairs ingame you can check out, too.

(This is with "draw vertices with bone colors" activated in the "Joints" tab in Milkshape)
Screenshots
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#5 Old 18th Jan 2023 at 10:37 PM
@simmer22 Ok I've attached the package, in case you would like to check it out. I think my assignments are pretty much like you described. The bun hairstyles in the game are not animated so I didn't check them.
Note: Only the adult mesh has my edit btw, you can ignore the other ages.
Attached files:
File Type: zip  Amidalasims_LeahLillith_Nefarious_4t2_slmyyTest.zip (2.91 MB, 1 downloads)
Mad Poster
#6 Old 19th Jan 2023 at 1:11 AM
It's possible there are some underweighted bones (did you fix those? It's a tick box in Milkshape when you import in a mesh). I also get some strange weight readings from the "show vertex weight" option when clicking on the "spine2" and "head" joints, as if they're assigned to areas they probably shouldn't be, but when I check the vertices they aren't assigned (those two issues could potentially be linked). There were a few vertices around the ear area that did show assigned to the spine.


Anyway, fixing the issues might just require some fine-tuning of the weights.

For the fringes, these EAxis hairs might help for figuring out the weighting:
afHairMeg
afHairPagePunk
afHairPixie

They look to be more of a 50/50 head/f_hair toward the middle.

And the "afHairLeafy" hair (plantsim hair) has some sticky-uppy bits that might help with the buns.

I'd think the trick is to let the upper part of the bun be 100% assigned to the R/L hair joint (but you can also try if the center joint works better), and from about mid-bun gradually go down toward 100% head joint.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#7 Old 20th Jan 2023 at 1:10 AM
@simmer22 Yeah I noticed that weight discrepancy in MilkShape as well. Also when I import the mesh in SimPe, it doesn't show the skeleton and the joints tab is empty. But it all looks fine in Blender and other than the buns and bangs, animations are fine in-game.
I made sure to normalize all weights in Blender and limited total per vertex to 4.
Checked other EA hairs for bangs as well, they're assigned similary.
I think I'll just give up on the hair bones, everything works fine in game when I remove them.
Mad Poster
#8 Old 20th Jan 2023 at 3:28 AM
The issue with the skeleton not showing could have a few different reasons behind it. Most likely, something happened before or during the export/import into SimPE that made the skeleton disappear.

If there's something wrong with the skeleton (or CRES), SimPE will usually throw an error. In your case that doesn't seem to be it, so when I exported the mesh, it did export with a working skeleton.

Still, there could be issues tied to the skeleton - I usually fix that by (in an empty Milkshape window) importing a mesh of the same gender and age (in this case I'd probably go for the "afhairbald" mesh, because I always have that one ready to go), then importing over the mesh I want to fix, making sure to answer the Milkshape import questions properly (in a few cases you might get questions about importing another skeleton - if so, click "no" - but usually you shouldn't get that one. An update to the plugins quite a few years back fixed this).
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#9 Old 20th Jan 2023 at 7:34 AM
Thank you so much @simmer22 !! Importing it over a maxis hair fixed it. Bald hair didn't work so I used punkFlip which has left, right and front hair bones assigned; it fixed both the skeleton disappearing in SimPE and the distorted buns and fringes.
I was reluctant to export from MilkShape before since the weights looked weird. But as you said, when selecting individual vertices the weight readings were actually ok.
Mad Poster
#10 Old 20th Jan 2023 at 1:46 PM
According to a tutorial I came across recently by Redsimmer (I had a look at it again), they recommended the "HairMessy" (or "afHairMessy" when it's for adults) mesh when using the hair bones. Might be something off for the hair bones in some of the other meshes.

I'd think other meshes with animated parts could work, though.

Around 12:30 and out in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL2v7MjaM3M
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