Problem resolved !
Thanks SnowStorm

Hi there,

I've got a little problem with my first mesh !!

Show by yourself



When I open bodyshop, I've the "normal" pose : the neck isn't with the head, the body is like when pressing F6 touch....

F6 touch : all are good, but it's just a way to show under arm ... : it's not like that in the game !

I've asked Rosemat, a nice member of the same forum of me, and webmiss of Pronupsims too, told me that it's a problem which can appaired when it want, depend SimPe...

I beginning to search at the web, but if someone can help me , he/she is very nice !

Sorry for my limited english, I learn it for 4 years and in class we don't learn to practice for this situation !

Have a nice day, Gensis

Note : this thread is posted on Insimenator, MTS and SimplyElau forum

It looks like you've lost all your bone assignments. How did you create the mesh?

I opened the Maxis Mesh (.obj) with Milkshape and I moved vertex to extend fabric

You know it's my first use of Milkshape and making a mesh...

How did you get your mesh back into the package? Did you follow one of the existing tutorials? If not I suggest trying one of them. I recommend Beginning Milkshape and Unimesh.

I'm trying and... Look good ! Thanks a lot !

Yes, and be careful of the settings. It looks like you had smoothing on, which gave you those lines up the leg. Follow all the directions in the tutorial exactly.

Ah, sorry. I posted something earlier with exactly the same issue. I ran an experiment (it was going to be a series of experiments but the first one failed). I tried exporting the object from SimPE, opening it in GMAX, doing absolutely nothing with it, exporting it as an object, importing it straight back into SimPE. I still got this broken neck effect.

So, I've decided that it is probably caused by not importing via the independent Mesh Tool - i.e. not following the tutorial to the letter like we're supposed to. I'm sorry to say I ignored the part about the Mesh Tool because I assumed it could all be done by SimPE. I'm downloading updates of SimPE and the Meshtool now.


This was my original message which should have been here. I did a search for 'f6' in the headings and it came up with nothing. Probably because it should have been in the body of the message.

This hideously long process of recreating bone assignments, does anyone know if there's an explanation about how to do it somewhere? I tried Milkshape once, found it too different to what I was experienced with, so returned to the GMAX and Wings combination - importing object files directly into SimPE from Wings after smoothing. This is great for furniture but obviously not for clothing.

I couldn't make anything look good by just moving vertices around so, naively, I thought I could splice sections of different meshes together (specifically I took the boots and the ankles from the adult female belted coat, the skirt from the ruffled dress and the waistline from the slinky skirt and boots). I thought it might work because I wasn't slicing. I was locating the points at which the vertices, of the three meshes, coincided and removing the unwanted ones. I saved it over a copy of the slinky skirt.

No matter what I did with this new mesh there was a gap at the waist (in Bodyshop). I thought it was because I was using parts from afbodies to make a skirt, so I tried it as a dress - result: gap at the neck. Eventually I noticed (duh!) that the arms were always extended in bodyshop with the dress. Pressing F6 would make the gaps go but the arms were always extended. Presumably the same thing is happening with the skirt.

I expect this is because the vertices have lost their link to the bones. This is a real shame for me because splicing different meshes together is so fast and simple. I'm quite prepared for an arduous task of reassigning vertices to bones (possibly). Can this be done within SimPE? The new meshes look fine (without heads), they recolour easily (they aren't recognising their bump maps however!). GMAX (as it comes) can't do anything with SMD files. Besides, I have no idea what they are. Please, please, please could I have some advice.

what settings did you use when trying to import back into simpe? It did work at onetime, though I only tried it with obj from milkshape.

Settings? I didn't alter anything. I imported from the plugin view of the geometric data container. The only boxed ticked, in the Mesh Group Importer, was 'use in bounding mesh'. The action is set to 'add'. (Odd thing is, doing it this way rather than going via wings is that it imports as a 'SimPE Global'). I deleted the old body object and renamed the new one to 'body'. The problem is, I think, that I wasn't using the independent Mesh Tool and doing a right click and replace on the gmdc in the packed files window.

OBJ files have no bone assignments - Meshtool rebuilds a working gmdc with bone assignments by comparing the new obj and old - which is why you can only move vertices. So that won't work for this sort of 'body chopping' method.

Milkshape export from SimPE is not going to give you good body results, with one bone per vertex the shoulders will look odd, and the mesh will animate poorly - like crumpling when they bend at the waist instead of giving a smooth shape.

SMD export from SimPE is good, if you have a program (like XSI or Fragmotion) that will properly read in the 4 bone assignments.

Unimesh has evolved to the point (but you need to use milkshape) that you can do quite a bit of bodychopping different meshes together.

When merging body parts with either smd or unimesh (or some format that has full bone support):

You will need to work on the seams - you will need to make sure that the vertices meet exactly and have identical bone assignments. (yes, you will need to check those in pairs, one at a time) You will probably have to adjust the normals to get a smooth transition (there's a sticky for a milkshape gmdc set of plugins) Not all maxis outfits are uvmapped to identical locations, so your uvmap will need some touch up.

In summary, even 'body chopping' is not necessarily quick, depending on what you combine. You will need to deal with bone assignments, normals, and uvmapping, even once you get the stuff looking mated in your 3D editor.

The .smd mesh format (unlike the .obj format) supports bones and multiple vertex assignments which are needed for a body/hair/accessory mesh to work properly.

Although SimPE does allow you to edit the assignment information manually, that would be a nightmare since you would be working blind, just editing an endless series of numbers with no visual clue as to what part of the mesh they relate to.

Like it or not, if you want to do anything other than very simple body meshmaking (restricted to simply moving existing vertices), you are going to have to use either MilkShape or a 3d editor that has .smd file import/export.

Even if you are willing to completely re-do each vertex assignment after editing your mesh, you will still have to use MilkShape or a .smd file capable program to do that. Amd that would be a very time-consuming job indeed, since a standard Maxis body mesh has over 1200 vertices.

My best advice would be to take the trouble to learn to use MilkShape, XSImodTool, or FragMotion if you can't find a .smd importer/exporter for GMax.

Ah well, then I'm off to Turbosquid to see if there is such a plugin for GMAX. Do you think it would be possible to do the meshing in GMAX and then export it as an object file for Milkshape to finish off with the assignment of vertices? Possibly having the original unaltered meshes as reference? I'm not really moving any vertices much at all so the originals would make perfect references. Thanks for your advice guys.

It's my impression you might find smd import/export for gmax. I hope so.

1200 vertices. If you can't get full smd import/export so that you can just use the new SimPE smd import/export.... it'll be horrible. Some of them you'll be able to assign in small groups, but a bunch will be individual with multiple bone assignments on each one. That's a way to add hours of sweat to a project.

At that point, just buckle down and do it in milkshape to begin with. I also am not in love with Milkshape _at all_ yet I find it easier to wrestle with milkshape most of the time then go through import/export and other contortions.

You could go get xsi modtool. It's free. Much more powerful that Milkshape. It has smd import/export. I would not use the 'meshtool' smd import/export - it was created a year ago before this new stuff from skankyboy. But there is a tutorial to guide you around some of the basics in xsi - just use skankyboys' smd stuff instead of meshool's. xsi does have a comprehensive manual. An interface with a TON of stuff that we'll never use in it. But I figured out enough to be able to do basic mods with it, and then some.

Possible, yes. Practical? I'd say no, but that's up to you.

But if you are simply moving the vertices around a slight bit, you could just use the .obj format and the MeshTool and save having to do any re-assignments at all.

If you are adding, removing, or swapping parts around you'd be better off using MilkShape alone, or XSImodTool or FragMotion.

To do an actual mesh edit with added parts or parts from another mesh, all in MilkShape might take me an hour or two.

To correctly re-assign and weight every vertex, from scratch, would take me several weeks of spare time, including many test trips into the game to see if everything was working right - that is, if I didn't get frustrated and send the whole thing to the recycle bin (which I probably would)

Funnily enough. I started testing out the XSI modtool yesterday! Thanks for the tut Tigger. Also funny (but rather pathetic) is the fact that I just noticed, with the new SimPE, there are a whole range of export options now! It can do SMD XSI and 3ds. I had heaps of trouble with XSI yesterday.

I was trying to delete unwanted vertices, in XSI yesterday - because that's fundamental to what I'm trying to do. Certain vertices would not delete - probably because they were attached to either the root or very important bones. I was left with large polygons that I couldn't delete.
I decided on XSI because (a: It's free - obviously and b: from what I've gleaned it handles the bone assignments much better than anything else available).

I've decided to persevere with XSI. Also I should probably confine my queries to the XSI Mod Tool tutorial thread.

I need to find out how to completely remove all the vertices from the bones. If it's safe to delete the unused bones from a skirt mesh (ie. those that apply to the arms. I know how to delete all the bones from the vertices now. If I take a screen shot of the vertex numbers, their linked bones and weights (cntr E), for the vertices I want from a specific mesh, and I can get a denuded skeleton, I should be able to reasign the vertices and weights quite easily from the sections of two or three different maxis meshes. Then weld the sections together.

Thanks, you two, for all your help. The learning curve is extremely steep at the minute (I don't know whether I should be glad, or not, that I have this experience with GMAX) with a little lateral thinking XSI sort of makes sense. Apart from the extensive animation portion it's quite similar, in functionality, to GMAX. It just calls some of the functions by different names.

Thank you. If (more like when) I need more help I'll be in the XSI thread .

Do not delete any bones. DO save your mesh using whatever the check boxes were that we used with the Meshtool tutorial. I have used XSI to modify existing meshes - and I have gotten really good at using it to add vertices where I want, exactly how I want them - which is not something I've come to a happy place with milkshape with... I'm more likely to chop pieces of mesh in milkshape to build what I want vs. just adding the vertices I need in xsi. I have _not_ explored what it will take to get multiple mesh parts into it correctly all on once skeleton. What you see in that little xsi tutorial is what I managed to figure out at that time.

I've got a lot of projects lined up, and also some tutorials, which leaves me in a mixed place of wanting to get projects done quickly with methods that work, rather than battling with new tools - and at this point chopping meshes into bits and assembling them in Unimesh works pretty darned well, although I remember the bone tool in xsi is nice because it highlights the particular vertex that is selected. I worked to get a mesh from milkshape to xsi and back again (directly, not through the gdmc) and that was difficult and did not maintain bone assignments.

XSI has limited import and export -- in the past (with bodychop) what we had to do is read in 1 mesh with skeleton and then read in any other parts as obj (no vertices) and then merge them together and do the bone assignments, etc. XSI Modtool (the free version) does not support obj import (ugh). People seem to be able to move their work from unimesh into smd - once -- not back again into milkshape. You might find the best of both worlds is to do the basic chopping in milkshape, then pull your mesh into xsi for all the rest of the work.

Or if the problem is that you don't have a licensed milkshape, you might need to pick a base mesh that is closest to what you want, and then learn how to use xsi to add vertices to it and manipulate it into the new shape you want, if trying to merge different parts of meshes is not working well in XSI. Wes has done wonders with the Unimesh plugin, but I still find milkshape awkward to work with at times, so if it's just an issue of preferred programs, I understand trying a bunch of different things.

And it's better to start a new thread than to discuss in the XSI - MESHTOOL (which is not what we're using) tutorial. This isn't the correct thread nor is the tutorial the correct thread for this discussion. So start a new one and make it your own It's okay to do that. And who knows, if it's marked correctly, we might have some other smd users appear.

Perhaps also ask the question (how to merge two different skeleton'd smd files into one, with one common skeleton) on the xsi forums. Maybe someone there will have an answer.

. Hooray for the site being back! Thanks. I will start a new thread. I found out how to merge different parts of the mesh in XSI (and retain only one skeleton), and it's so simple! You just remove the vertices you don't want from the different parts. You can't weld at this stage because it's seeing different meshes. If you then export it as an SMD, start and new scene, import it back - it appears as one mesh with one skeleton and all the bone assigments are correct! They show up correctly in the SimPE preview when imported directly into SimPE. Then the vertices can be welded. I think I might have done it! Just a little bit more testing. Stupidly - I spent all day yesterday trying all sorts of things forgetting that I had an old backup of the package in my saved sims. The package and mesh (that were probably fine all day) were showing up wrong in Body Shop and CAS because the recolour was referencing the backup.