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Quote: Originally posted by SnowThatIsntYellow
I tried looking at the guide included on Career Creator 3 but I still don't get how to change the job outfit. I want to change the outfit to a male swimsuit.
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Clothing in The Sims usually gives a gender along with it -- M or F -- and a skin color -- drk, lgt, or med -- and a body type -- fat, fit, or skn. You don't want to have to specify all of that for the career outfits, because that would be EIGHTEEN outfit names.
So there's a shorthand. You only specify the part that DOESN'T include skin color or body type, then use wild cards to tell the game to fill in the skin color and body type of the specific sim in the job.
So, here's an example:
This is from level 3 of the Science career. Under "Male Mesh," you can see that the mesh is listed as Science$g$b_01. That means that the mesh is Science, with $g substituting for the gender and $b substituting for the body type.
The texture is listed as Science$g$c_01, which again means that you use the Science texture with $g again substituting for the gender and $c for the color.
I made a Starfleet career -- from Star Trek -- for my game, and here's a sample of how that's specified:
Since my Male Mesh is listed as B003$gA$b_01, you can see that I used a mesh that's already in the game. I used mesh B003, then gave $gA for wild card gender adult and $b for wild card body type. I added the _01 because all of the other career meshes used it, so I thought it might help. :-)
For the texture, I have CStarR$g$c_01. Where'd I get THAT from? I made up the first part. C is for my name -- Corylea -- Star is because this is the Starfleet career, and R is because this is the red version, not the blue or gold version that I'll need for other career levels. I could have used any short string, as long as that string was exactly the same as the name of the textures I'd made. Then $g for gender again, $c for color again, and _01. This should be starting to look familiar now!
Because the neck and arms and legs are included in the texture file, you must have one for every skin color in the game. So you tell the Career Creator program to use wild cards for the textures, but in the Skins folder, you actually need textures for all three skin colors. However, you DON'T need to specify body types in the textures, because the game will stretch whichever texture you give it around whichever mesh is required. My Starfleet skins, for example come in six files just for the red version, with six more for blue, six for gold, and six for white, like this:
Does it work? Yes! It works:
The documentation that comes with Career Creator says this, and I find it pretty straightforward:
Male/female mesh: This is where you choose the body mesh. There is a special way to name these, so pay attention. There is a coding system in The Sims, that automatically translates three things: it translates $b to the body type of the sim, like Fat, Fit and Skn (Skinny). Then, we have $c which is translated to Lgt (Light), Med (Medium) or Drk (Dark). Finally there is $g which is translated to M (male) or F (female). This way The Sims can select the optimal mesh for your sim, based on body type, gender and skin color. Usually you don't need to use $c and because you can input a mesh name for a male and for a female sim, you wouldn't need gender either. Maxis sometimes uses $g and leaves the Female mesh field empty, and sometimes they don't. Just take a look at how they did it. Warning: you must be very precise in what you type. If you type B002MA$b_01 here, there must be a B002MAFit_01.cmx, a B002MAFat_01.cmx and a B002MASkn_01.cmx file or The Sims might crash. (If you use Windows, it's not case sensitive, fortunately.)
Skin/Texture: This is where you choose the so-called skin (texture). It uses the same coding as the mesh field so read that part well. The skin or texture files are usually named something like Pilot$g$c_01, which means there should be files like PilotMlgt_01.bmp (male light) and PilotFmed_01.bmp (female medium) etc.
Good luck!
I've made some mods for The Sims 1 -- yes, The Sims ONE :-) -- which you can find at
http://corylea.com/Sims1ModsByCorylea.html