Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 16th Aug 2021 at 6:23 PM Last edited by thornowl : 24th Sep 2022 at 4:13 PM.
Default Completely avoiding Milkshape (Blender 2.79-2.8+) / Manually editing bone assignments and morphs (Blender 2.8-2.9)
This post is sponsored by me struggling to select a vertex in Milkshape for like 20 minutes. Anyone who recommends MS to you in 2021 is either trolling or salty that they had to buy it back in the TS3 era.

This is mostly a collection of tips for making clothes (and maybe other CAS parts?) in Blender and TSRW. All of this information is probably obvious for the enlightened masters of the community, but considering that some people struggle to import an .obj into Blender, I think it could be useful to at least one beginner CC creator. Yours truly spent like a day trying to find this info on the Internet before giving up and figuring it out on my own.
I do have an actual question I'll ask in the end. Gotta justify posting it in this forum somehow.

Milkshape No More [Blender 2.79/2.8+]

My workflow is mostly copied from Lyralei's great Maxis Match tutorial with a few adjustments.
She uses Milkshape for five important steps: renaming the mesh to group_base, aligning normals, fixing seams, making lod2/3 and exporting as wso. Let's talk about how to do it all without Milkshape.

First, renaming the mesh. That one is easy. Just rename the mesh in Blender, duh.
Don't forget to change the name next to the white triangle, which you can see by clicking the plus button (2.79) or a small triangle pointing right (2.8+).

If MeshToolKit still refuses to see the mesh, make sure you exported it as an OBJ group rather than an OBJ object.

Next, normals. Even if we ignore our goal to ditch MS, its Align Normals function has let me down before. I use a method suggested by my friend miha97sr, which involves splitting sharp edges.
If you look at some EA meshes, you may notice that they seem to use it as well - that's why their meshes have so many double vertices. It's a common practice in games: Genshin Impact does that too, for example.
First, make sure you have disabled auto smoothing in object properties.

Next, select all edges/edge loops you want to be sharp (for example, the bottom edge of a skirt), press CTRL+E and click Mark Sharp. The edge should now become cyan.

Finally, add an Edge Split modifier and disable Edge Angle. Don't apply it, Blender will do that for you when you export the mesh. Just let it be.


! Be careful, however, if you're working with a relatively highpoly mesh, as splitting edges will increase your vertex count. You can temporarily apply the modifier to see the new vertex count, then Ctrl+Z to keep working. Make sure you're below the absolute maximum of 10k vertices for tops/5k for bottoms/15k for full body outfits, otherwise everything is going to break.

Before and after:



Next, seams. As Lyralei mentions, MeshToolKit has an option to fix seams, and personally I've never had it fail. You need to make sure that the seam loops are untouched, and if you happened to mess them up somehow, you can fix it with the snap tool. Add an EA mesh and snap those vertices back to where they belong.
Unless you added more vertices to that loop for some reason, you should be fine.



Seam Fixer seems to be partially broken in the latest version and doesn't work for toddlers, elders or female teens (other groups are fine). If you make clothes for those groups, get the 1.3 version as well.

! Skip the Seam Fixer for LOD2 and LOD3 if you don't wanna mentally scar yourself and your fans.

If you really don't want seams on your LODs, you can probably match seam vertices to EAxis positions and match normals with MTK. Maybe. I'm not deranged enough to try that.

Making LODs is easy with Blender's Decimate modifier, I think it works even better than Milkshape's. Drag the Ratio slider to the left to decrease the polycount. Just make sure it's first in the list before Edge Split, otherwise your LODs will have holes in them.


To be fair, some creators say that they prefer Milkshape's tools for LODs, but. I mean. You won't see those LODs up close during normal gameplay, and if you really care about quality, you might as well make them by hand. To me, it's not worth the hassle of using MS.

Finally, export it as .obj like usual, and make sure the export settings are correct.

Open MeshToolKit and run the OBJ to WSO conversion.

It tries to assign bones to the mesh, but the results can be a bit underwhelming. Just run it through all auto tools for WSO like usual.

Here we go, we prepared our mesh for TSRW without using Milkshape at all.



Editing bone assignments

Now, the fun part for deranged perfectionists like myself. Since my meshes are significantly different from any EA reference, bone assignments and morphs can get a bit wonky despite MTK's best efforts. All tutorials on fixing it I've found are done in Milkshape, and I don't understand why, since GEOM Tools exist.
I couldn't get them to work in 2.79, though. If 2.8+ crashes on launch for you because you're a proud owner of Intel HD Graphics, you can check Intel's website and get the latest driver for your GPU (Intel updated the drivers for old cards in like 2019 for some reason). It runs at 10-15 fps, but hey, better than nothing.

Editing bone assignments in Blender is fairly easy if you know what you're doing. Open your TSRW project, go to Edit > Project contents like when you export it as .package. Scroll down to the first GEOM in the list (for LOD1) and click Export.

Export is as a binary file.


Change its file extension from .bin to .simgeom.


Now open Blender with GEOM Tools installed and either go File > Import > Sims 3 GEOM as usual or switch to Scene properties and use the GEOM Tools panel there.


! When importing GEOMs, make sure that the "Preserve Normals" box is checked (it's in the import window on the right), or your mesh is gonna have seams.


Switch to Edit Mode, select a vertex and press N. Find Vertex Weights in the Item tab — that's the bone assignments for that vertex.


Open Viewport Overlays and enable Vertex Group Weights.


The mesh will turn blue. To see the weights of a specific bone on the model, just click on one of the names in the list.


Hopefully, you already know what to do with this setup. If you don't, check out this Blender tutorial.
Weight paint works fine, btw.

After you're done, you need to make it ready for the game. Sims 3 needs all vertices to have a combined weight influence of 1 (which likely won't be the case after you edited them) and be assigned to 4 or less vertex groups. If it's assigned to more than 4, GEOM Tools will yell "Stop right there, criminal scum" at you and refuse to export the mesh.
To fix it, go to Weight Paint > Weights, select Normalize All (which fixes the first problem) and then Limit Total, which will delete any excess vertex groups assigned by Normalize All.


Now you can export the mesh as .simgeom, change its extension to .bin and import it back to TSRW.

Editing morphs

Editing morphs is easier to do, but more tricky to set up for this workflow... Make sure you follow these instructions very carefully unless you 100% know what you're doing. This process is incredibly sensitive to user error, a tiny mistake will turn your beautiful creation into a flat blob on the floor or an eldritch abomination.

For some reason exporting BGEOs from TSRW doesn't work properly for me, so I used S3PE for this.
Export your CAS part as .package and open it in S3PE, then scroll down until you find four BGEOs. Those are your fat, fit, thin and special morphs (in that order).


Right click the morph you want to edit (I wanna edit the thin morph, so I'll click the third BGEO) and export it to file. If you want to rename it, make sure you don't delete the .blendgeom extension.

Tip: if S3PE has a stroke every time you click anything and takes years to load, switch Preview to Off at the bottom of the screen.


GEOM Tools don't support this file format, so we'll use MTK to convert it. Open Morph Tools > Convert to mesh, then select the BGEO and the base GEOM you extracted from TSRW (check the first part of "Editing bone assignments" if you haven't done that yet, or just export the GEOM from S3PE).


Import your base GEOM (the one you exported from TSRW/S3PE, not the one you just made with MTK) into Blender, then either go File > Import > Sims 3 Morph or navigate to GEOM Tools' panel in Scene Properties and click Import Morphs. If you don't see this button or see "Make Morph" instead, make sure the base mesh is selected. Import the morph GEOM you made with MTK.


! Again, when importing GEOMs, make sure that the "Preserve Normals" box is checked (it's in the import window on the right), or your mesh is gonna have seams.


Your morph should now appear as geom_MORPH_0, and you can edit it like a normal mesh.
Don't delete or add any vertices if you don't want to break your morph.
Tip: if you used Split Edge modifier for the mesh and now want to move a vertex that has a double, use proportional editing to keep them together.

When you're done, select the base GEOM mesh (not the morph) and export it as .simgeom. You'll see two files appear: one for the base mesh and the morph with a _MORPH_0 suffix.


Now we need to put it back in TSRW. First, if you didn't edit all 4 morphs, you'll need to export the rest of BGEOs from S3PE as well. Since I edited the thin mesh, for me that will be the first, second and fourth BGEO. Rename them while exporting so that you know which one is which.
When you're done, open MTK and go to Conversion Tools > GEOM to TSRW WSO. Select all the five meshes you just exported and click Convert to TSRW.

Now you can import this wso file into TSRW as usual.

I'm not exactly an expert on this, so if you know a way to do all of this more efficiently, please let me know.
Honestly, I don't know why tutorials for this stuff are nowhere to be found, since good Blender tools are there to use and it's much easier than editing in Milkshape imo.

For the actual question... One thing that bothers me is if there's a way to manually offset the hands from the body in an idle position, like when sims are wearing wide skirts.

You can achieve that by cloning a CAS part that already has that offset, like the base game hidden repairman outfit. But there aren't many options for guys, and I wanna make, like, REALLY wide skirts lmao

Edit: in case someone has the same question, you can export/import bonedeltas in TSRW (explained in LadySmoks's reply). There's also a bonedelta editor, but looking at it makes me wanna quit 3D.

Special thanks to Lyralei, CmarNYC, cmomoney and SmugTomato for making the masochistic experience of creating Sims 3 CC more tolerable
Research on bones/morphs editing was mostly done out of spite for a friend who said it's impossible
8 users say thanks for this. (Who?)
Advertisement
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#2 Old 24th Aug 2021 at 11:26 AM
Great tutorial!

I'lll admit, since Smugtomato released their Blender GEOM tool (See: https://modthesims.info/d/656413/bl...-2-8x-2-9x.html)

I've been entirely skipping Milkshape from my workflow too! Since forever I always thought it was a bit of a finicky program to work with (and, I think we all can agree that Blender just has gotten so comfortable to use, that Milkshape is just a nightmare to work with, especially with vertices and what not).

I actually hadn't thought of doing it the way you're doing it though! Personally, I just clone a CASpart with S3OC, then export the GEOM I need, import that into blender, make the changes/apply a whole new mesh over it, and voila! But your approach might be more favourable since you don't have to worry too much, when meshing an item from scratch, about the bones and the morphs :p

Regarding the question though, I really have to dive deep into that again. I know somewhere in either the BGEOM or the GEOM file there's something for that, but I honestly don't remember so I might edit my comment once I figure that one out again.
Forum Resident
#3 Old 12th Feb 2022 at 9:26 PM
Quote: Originally posted by thornowl
This post is sponsored by me struggling to select a vertex in Milkshape for like 20 minutes. Anyone who recommends MS to you in 2021 is either trolling or salty that they had to buy it back in the TS3 era.

But there aren't many options for guys, and I wanna make, like, REALLY wide skirts lmao

Special thanks to Lyralei, CmarNYC, cmomoney and SmugTomato for making the masochistic experience of creating Sims 3 CC more tolerable
Research on bones/morphs editing was mostly done out of spite for a friend who said it's impossible

Wonderful tutorial!!! You do several things differently than I, and present things I will need to try, and see how they work for me. Often, many roads from point A to B! A matter of finding best one. )))

I have never used Milkshape... $$$ Many use it and Blender, but I have always found ways to do all in Blender. As you mention with custom meshes, Tool Kit has limits. I still cannot live without it! I have alway fixed morphs by converting the morphed by Tool Kit .wso, convert to .obj, and importing them all to Blender as "split by group". Then to adjust each vertices in each mesh as necessary. Can be tedious! But, often must be done, especially fat morphs. ((( Then export as .obj and try to convert in Tool Kit to .wso, but something happens on export sometimes, and I must convert .obj to geom, then to .wso. Often, I only use this as a new reference and remorph my original mesh.

As to arms and wide skirts... There are several in various EPs. I forget which exactly, but Into The Future has a few which EA moved the arms out, as I believe mail carrier and repair woman. The mascot from University is ridiculously moved out. I will export the bondeltas as .bin and name 0 thru 4 as they correspond to morphs, base, fat, etc. My project in TSRW, I export and save the originals as back up, then import those bondeltas to my work. You can do the same in s3pe, but if you need to return to the TSRW file, you still have the old bonedeltas, and then have to switch again.
Test Subject
#4 Old 9th Sep 2022 at 8:02 AM
Dearest apologies. I am working in the newest version of blender and TSRW doesn't seem to be able to read "group_base". I renamed both triangles and MeshToolkit accepted the OBJ. It was exported under "Objects Groups". This is the error message TSRW gives me.

Found no base group, CASP mesh import requires one group named 'group_base'. Rename the groups and try again.

I'm having trouble figuring out my mistake.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 24th Sep 2022 at 4:17 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Blazinga
Dearest apologies. I am working in the newest version of blender and TSRW doesn't seem to be able to read "group_base". I renamed both triangles and MeshToolkit accepted the OBJ. It was exported under "Objects Groups". This is the error message TSRW gives me.

Found no base group, CASP mesh import requires one group named 'group_base'. Rename the groups and try again.

I'm having trouble figuring out my mistake.

idk if you lurk without logging in or something. i sent you a dm two weeks ago
Forum Resident
#6 Old 4th Oct 2022 at 2:30 PM
Quote: Originally posted by thornowl
This post is sponsored by me struggling to select a vertex in Milkshape for like 20 minutes. Anyone who recommends MS to you in 2021 is either trolling or salty that they had to buy it back in the TS3 era.

[/I]

I must thank you for this tutorial. Sure, I have been meshing for a few years, but certainly do not know EVERYTHING... and I learned a few things here. Thank you! I have downloaded MS several times, but never understood using it, and as trial expired, never saw a reason to pay for a program I cannot use... so it has been Blender all the way for me.

I have had a problem with waist seam on tf bottom nude replacement that has beat me up for a while. Whatever reason, MTK does not fix tf waist seams (for me), and as geom tools usually does, I always had visible seam on the nude bottom mesh... ankles were okay. I have Blender 2.80 as my primary, and recently added 2.93 on this laptop. I began getting familiar with it on my dead laptop. I saw "preserve normals" in your tutorial and recognized it from 2.93. THAT was key... not changing working normals on export. So, I imported my mesh, removed top 2 rows at waist. Imported Cmar's muscle fix mesh, separated top 2 rows and joined, and merged my mesh to the 2 rows, recalucalted ID's and exported.

As the normals of the waist were preserved, they perfectly match to tops in game. I will be uploading af and tf replacement tops and bottoms soon. Again, THANK YOU!!!
Field Researcher
#7 Old 20th Nov 2022 at 12:15 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Lyralei
make the changes/apply a whole new mesh over it



Lyralei, I know you posted this more than a year ago and it seems like I read somewhere where you explained what you mean by "apply a whole new mesh over it" but I can't find that explanation. Maybe I just imagined it. Anyway, could explain what you mean?

And I have a question about assigning bones, particularly assigning bones to hair. I'm coming from the TS4 world where you transfer weights in Blender from a reference mesh to your custom mesh but that's not how it's done in TS3. I really like the idea of doing everything in Blender but can't seem to find much documentation on how that simgeom addon works. Could I make my mesh in Blender, assign weights somehow, then export as a simgeom and import the completed simgeom to S3PE? Does that make sense?
Test Subject
Original Poster
#8 Old 21st Nov 2022 at 1:14 PM Last edited by thornowl : 21st Nov 2022 at 4:39 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by mirabellarose
Could I make my mesh in Blender, assign weights somehow, then export as a simgeom and import the completed simgeom to S3PE? Does that make sense?

i prefer using tsr workshop for my cc rather than S3PE only, so i'll focus on that workflow

hair meshes aren't fundamentally different from clothing. after finishing your mesh in blender, do all of the stuff i explained in the first part of this tutorial (rename to group_base, split edges (optional), make lods, export as .obj using the correct settings)
clone a hair in tsrw and export it as .wso — it will be your reference
in meshtool kit convert your .obj to .wso (also shown here), then go to the Auto tools for WSO tab. run your new .wso through Auto-assign Bones and Auto-create Morphs (skip Seam Fixer)
after that, your mesh is ready to be imported into tsrw

in case there are some weird minor issues with bone assignments and/or morphs, you can then refer to the second part of this tutorial and fix those using geom tools, but that's optional
as for documentation.. after looking for it while writing this tutorial, i believe this is as much documentation as you'll get lmao (i learned how to use them though my own experimentation). i'd be glad to be proven wrong tho

if you don't want to use tsrw for whatever reason, there are also auto tools for geom in meshtool kit, though i haven't used them much and can't give you directions for that workflow
if you have any more questions, i encourage you to join the creators cave discord server to get quick replies from other creators (i'm not affiliated with them, i just really like the server)

cast spell: summon lyralei
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#9 Old 21st Nov 2022 at 1:49 PM Last edited by Lyralei : 21st Nov 2022 at 6:20 PM. Reason: MIsspelled thornowl, fixed now :) Sorry!
Quote: Originally posted by mirabellarose
Lyralei, I know you posted this more than a year ago and it seems like I read somewhere where you explained what you mean by "apply a whole new mesh over it" but I can't find that explanation. Maybe I just imagined it. Anyway, could explain what you mean?


Hrm, not sure where I mentioned it, but I'm guessing I was probably doing 500 different things + writing that reply... I tend to get super vague then Sorry about that!

Though, I'm guessing I may have written this on a default replacement mesh thread? With that, I probably was talking about using your current reference mesh (So an EA mesh) and editing this mesh and import the GEOM back through S3PE (with the above steps done as well of course).

Or, for the "Apply a whole mesh over it", with that I guess I have talking about your own custom mesh, that you make in Blender or whatever you use, and then import that through s3pe, also explained in the tutorial.


Also seconding joining the server, I'm there as well and it's always a great place to hang out in!


EDIT: Okay I found the reply I was literally staring at it as I wrote the previous reply lol. Here it is again:

Quote: Originally posted by lyralei
actually hadn't thought of doing it the way you're doing it though! Personally, I just clone a CASpart with S3OC, then export the GEOM I need, import that into blender, make the changes/apply a whole new mesh over it, and voila! But your approach might be more favourable since you don't have to worry too much, when meshing an item from scratch, about the bones and the morphs :p


So here the applying part is actually more about making a Custom mesh. In a bit more "depth-like" way of explaining it, this is my personal way of doing it:
  1. In S3OC, find the CASpart you want to use as a reference, clone that.
  2. Open the package you just cloned in S3PE, find the high LOD Geom of the CASPart, then export the GEOM itself (Click entry > Right Click > Export). You don't need Cmomoney's plugin for S3PE for this though. SmugTomato's plugin can already read a generic SimGeom file perfectly fine (rather than needing to convert it to a s3m2b)
  3. Import the SimGeom in blender. This will be our reference mesh.

A quick note as to *why* I export a reference mesh for a custom mesh, is because I personally always make my garments by importing an obj file of the sim body first (see: https://modthesims.info/t/411795)

And, let's say, we were to entirely make our custom mesh from an .obj file, and once we're done with it, exporting it, SmugTomato's plugin actually lacks quite a bit of data, and could result into some weird in-game issues (like game crashes even). Which is entirely reasonable for the tool to miss, since SimGeoms are so dynamic in certain aspects, that the tool itself can't just generate some sort of placeholder data for us.

So! With that out of the way Let's continue on:
  1. Now also import the OBJ file of a sim body you need, in my case, I often go with an AFBody. Alternatively, if you're like me and sometimes make complicated dresses in MD, then import this instead. You can use the avatar of course instead, but I like to at least import the AFbody from Nysha's link and then load in the MD mesh over it.
  2. If you rather use Blender's cloth file, or making it from scratch with a more "pipeline modeling approach" then make sure to start doing that here (also, huge respect if you pipeline model your clothes!)
  3. After you're done, and if you hadn't (or if your end mesh is like 15k in faces), retopology your clothes first.
  4. Now, in the Blender hierarchy, you select first your reference mesh, and Shift + Click on your own mesh (assuming you've merged your avatar and clothes already into one mesh).
  5. Under the Sims 3 Geom Tools, in the Tool Panel, click "transfer Geom Data". Now we're sure that our new mesh will have all the references to our textures, actually has shader data, and will simply work in such a way that all our resources in S3PE will still have a working scenegraphic.
  6. Now, Don't delete your reference mesh, unless you've done all the bone assignments and stuff! Export your mesh and override that with the reference SimGeom we once exported in S3PE. (feel free to create a backup if necessary before doing this!)


Now, here thornowl's approach is basically the same as what i'm about to talk about. Except, that in my case, we don't have any WSO files at all. Instead, everything is pure GEOM files.
  • For Bone Assignment: - !!!Make sure you do this first, so that you don't have to do this constantly do this for each Lod and Morph!!!. Also the same as the tutorial, except that we have the luxury of not needing to export our reference mesh Instead, you should make sure that you still have that in your blender hierarchy! So feel free to follow this whole bit from after we've imported the SimGeom in thornowl's tutorial.
  • For Morphs: - Follow the whole "Editing morphs" part. This is pretty much how I do it as well Alternatively, you could go super chad mode and make them all in blender, but I'd advise against that MeshToolkit just simplifies these things.
  • For LODs: - Follow the tutorial LOD part, till you get to the 'export .obj" file part. Instead, you want to export it as a GEOM. For this, you also need to make sure you've exported all the Morphs, BGEOM and LODs from your package as well and transfer the geom data for the appropiate LOD you're making (i.e, for LOD 2, we want to get the GEOM data from our LOD2 reference mesh).

One more note on the Bone assignment I actually rarely do it in blender. That's due to a few reasons:

1. The bone hierarchy order seems to be incredibly important. I've had some issues where Blender is forcing the order to be alphabetical. Which is lovely of our darling blender to do, but not in this case! ;P While blender gives us an option to only copy the bone assignments to bones of the same name, in this case our bones list is going to be empty. And weirdly enough, it tends to reshuffle them when you edit the bones in a certain way (deleting unnecessary bones for example, like the feet bones, because let's face it, unless we're doing shoes, why are they here lol) This has even caused some issues where I had to redo the whole rigging on CASparts and sheep (yes, I know it's an object, but it happened :p)

2. The bone editing in blender can be powerful but also annoying as heck (like the strength of something, etc.) Blender 2.9+ and 3.0+ is pretty great at this so far, but I'm not sure if the GEOM tool supports the latest 2.92 version. Which I should probably check. This is why I actually only use it for if a bone seriously needs tweaking.

Now, you may wonder "how do you do it then?". For the record, there's absolutely nothing wrong with thornowl's way of doing it! I've just been doing it this way for a long while so old habits die hard lol.

But I actually just use Mesh toolkit for this. Again, under Auto-tools for Geom > Auto assign Bones, I add the reference Geom we had exported waaay beforehand, and then our GEOM mesh. I then rinse and repeat for all the LODs. Then, import those into the package and voila!



Sorry things got so detailed! I figured it's probably good to explain my approach in case people want to somehow boycott TSRW or something. Not that I do that on purpose, it just, well, happened In fact, if you get yourself into such a great understanding of a sim mesh scenegraphic (which, believe me, you do if you've written an SimGeom importer for unity lol, it's a confusing mess, and you may hate every second of it till it's done), then you may even like to try CTU. Although this is only needed if you want a preview, rather than loading your game.
Field Researcher
#10 Old 13th Dec 2022 at 9:10 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Lyralei
[s]Sorry things got so detailed! I figured it's probably good to explain my approach in case people want to somehow boycott TSRW or something. Not that I do that on purpose, it just, well, happened In fact, if you get yourself into such a great understanding of a sim mesh scenegraphic (which, believe me, you do if you've written an SimGeom importer for unity lol, it's a confusing mess, and you may hate every second of it till it's done), then you may even like to try CTU. Although this is only needed if you want a preview, rather than loading your game.


Oh my gosh, thank you so much! You answered a couple of questions I had about the Blender GEOM tools. Specifically, what's being transferred and can I do bone assignments in Blender. Lyralei, you cannot POSSIBLY be too detailed for my tastes. Any information I can get is highly valued!

@Thornowl I have a question about this part:

"Hopefully, you already know what to do with this setup. If you don't, check out this Blender tutorial.
Weight paint works fine, btw."

I'm assuming you're talking about manually weight painting, is that correct? I've said this so many times before that it's tiresome at this point, but my experience is with Sims 4 items. In the past, I've used this tutorial to manually adjust weight paint. The issue is the method requires that a skeleton/rig is in the Blender scene. I don't think the Blender GEOM tools will bring in a rig. How would I get a rig into Blender? Sorry for all my dumb questions. This is where I'm at in my head at the moment: full idiot-level idiocy.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#11 Old 13th Dec 2022 at 7:05 PM Last edited by thornowl : 13th Dec 2022 at 8:33 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by mirabellarose
I'm assuming you're talking about manually weight painting, is that correct?

i'm not 100% sure what you mean. on a basic level, that part of tutorial just shows you how to import/export geoms without losing vertex weights. how you edit them is irrelevant, you can use any regular methods blender offers: weight transfer (like what mtk does), weight paint, weight value edits (milkshape-style)
Quote: Originally posted by mirabellarose
I don't think the Blender GEOM tools will bring in a rig.

i mean..


select the age that you need, click "import rig" and geom tools will add a rig. from there, you just need to add an armature modifier to your geom


it even lets you import a rig right when you're importing a geom, though i've never done that and don't know how well it works lol

Quote: Originally posted by mirabellarose
Sorry for all my dumb questions.

no worries, i don't mind. i prefer it when people google stuff simply because they will get results faster that way, but information on ts3 cc creation is hard to find and geom tools documentation is straight up non-existent, so..
Test Subject
#12 Old 8th Apr 2023 at 3:28 AM
hello! I'm very glad to have stumbled upon this, so thank you. I had a question, when you go to rename the mesh, is the mesh supposed to include the body? At that point I have my mesh UV mapped, so when I join them together it changes the texture all over again. I'm just confused as to if I leave them unjoined, I'll have an hlod body with a demicated polycount mesh. Sorry if this was explained
Forum Resident
#13 Old 9th Apr 2023 at 1:22 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Lyralei
[s]Although this is only needed if you want a preview, rather than loading your game.


In Blender, press Z. In 2.80, it will have "look dev" as bottom option... in 2.93 (probably all 2.9x) it will say "material preview". Select whichever for your Blender. In the right side list, click the pink circle or ball, at the bottom. In the new window, click new. Go to "base color". 2.80, click circle to the right. 2.9x, click the yellow dot. From that list, choose image texture. Several new boxes appear. Click "open" and go to your folder with your textures and click the one you want to see on the model.

I use this often to align UV of my custom meshes to a texture, as I can see seam alignments in real time, instead of trying to align textures to the exported UV map...



Screenshots
Test Subject
Original Poster
#14 Old 11th Apr 2023 at 9:02 AM
Quote: Originally posted by elvgreen
hello! I'm very glad to have stumbled upon this, so thank you. I had a question, when you go to rename the mesh, is the mesh supposed to include the body? At that point I have my mesh UV mapped, so when I join them together it changes the texture all over again. I'm just confused as to if I leave them unjoined, I'll have an hlod body with a demicated polycount mesh. Sorry if this was explained

i'm not sure what you mean. the final mesh is supposed to be one single object in blender, including both the body and clothes

if the texture changes in blender, that's fine. the exported mesh won't have textures anyway, you'll only add them in tsrw — having textures on your mesh in blender is only useful for checking them
does your cas part look right when you import the mesh and the texture into tsrw? if yes, then there's no problem. and if you just wanna look at the texture in blender — well, add it again lol
if you're having issues with the project, send me the .wrk file, i'll look into it
Test Subject
#15 Old 13th Apr 2023 at 2:20 AM
Quote: Originally posted by thornowl
i'm not sure what you mean. the final mesh is supposed to be one single object in blender, including both the body and clothes

if the texture changes in blender, that's fine. the exported mesh won't have textures anyway, you'll only add them in tsrw — having textures on your mesh in blender is only useful for checking them
does your cas part look right when you import the mesh and the texture into tsrw? if yes, then there's no problem. and if you just wanna look at the texture in blender — well, add it again lol
if you're having issues with the project, send me the .wrk file, i'll look into it

thanks for replying!! and that's a good idea, i'll try that. i was just thinking that since i joined the two it might mess up the UV of my mesh. i can send you the project, but i wasn't able to follow your method with success. i still had to go in MS to align normals and then manually reassign them. the mlod also isn't good, since i tried the decimate modifier and it didn't have the greatest results. so far when i've been doing conversions i've just been aligning normals in MS and then fixing the seams manually with the extended edit. i just wasn't understanding the "running it through mesh toolkit like usual" but i see now. i'll definitely try this method again and see how it goes.
Attached files:
File Type: zip  kimi.zip (1.66 MB, 5 downloads)
Test Subject
Original Poster
#16 Old 16th Apr 2023 at 3:34 PM
Quote: Originally posted by elvgreen
thanks for replying!! and that's a good idea, i'll try that. i was just thinking that since i joined the two it might mess up the UV of my mesh. i can send you the project, but i wasn't able to follow your method with success. i still had to go in MS to align normals and then manually reassign them. the mlod also isn't good, since i tried the decimate modifier and it didn't have the greatest results. so far when i've been doing conversions i've just been aligning normals in MS and then fixing the seams manually with the extended edit. i just wasn't understanding the "running it through mesh toolkit like usual" but i see now. i'll definitely try this method again and see how it goes.

it looks great! the only real uv issue is that this tiny part of the shirt (in the bottom left corner of the uv map) is in the area designated for shoes, which then leads to overlapping textures with some shoes:





here's a uv space guide for ts3 children: https://i.imgur.com/ZxOZb34.jpg

you say that you couldn't figure out the part about splitting edges for better normals, but the mesh already has split edges — i assume because the original creator has already done that? or did you manually split them in milkshape?
it's very easy to tell the difference. here's the mesh as you sent me:



and here it is after i merged everything back together (no split edges):



if the original creator did that, great, you didn't need to split edges anyway. if you did that in milkshape but can't figure out how to do that in blender, here's a video example: https://youtu.be/_d4yw0Sopmk?t=258
watch from 4:20 (nice) to 5:30, you don't need the rest of the video

to fix seams in mesh toolkit, all you need to do is convert your mesh to wso, select the age, gender (for teens and older) and lod, select the mesh and press "match seams"



this must be done after assigning bones, but before generating morphs
those two are also pretty self-explanatory, you just need a reference mesh (a mesh with good bones/morphs that's as close as possible to yours)

to conclude, a workflow for converting meshes (excluding textures) would be:
1. open the mesh in blender
2. fit to the sims 3 body
3. edit uv
(you seem to know how to do these three steps)
4. extract a reference mesh as wso (in this case, any maxis or cc mesh
5. do everything i've explained in this tutorial (up until manually editing bones/morphs)
6. open auto tools for wso in mesh toolkit, do the three steps (bones, seams, morphs) in order
7. import the wso into tsrw
8. done

a few more things:

if edge split was done by the original creator and you don't have access to the original, then using decimate to create lods is likely to create holes. you have three options here:
1. just use decimate and leave it as is (if the mesh only looks a little distorted, that's completely fine)
2. merge edges (remove doubles in 2.79 or merge by distance in 2.8+), then use decimate (no holes, but really bad shading)
3. merge edges, add edge split, then use decimate (best results, but requires some manual work)

third option in more detail:
1. go to edit mode
2. switch to edge select
3. select all non-manifold (search for it or shift+ctrl+alt+m)
4. mark sharp
5. remove doubles/merge by distance
6. add edge split
7. decimate

the mesh also doesn't have morphs. i assume this is a work in progress, just don't forget to add them later

all swatches except the first one are non-recolorable. i'm pretty sure you know about this, but still, this isn't great. it would be a much better idea to cut the print out and add that as a stencil, without the rest of the texture:



Test Subject
#17 Old 16th Apr 2023 at 11:36 PM Last edited by elvgreen : 16th Apr 2023 at 11:46 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by thornowl
it looks great! the only real uv issue is that this tiny part of the shirt (in the bottom left corner of the uv map) is in the area designated for shoes, which then leads to overlapping textures with some shoes:





here's a uv space guide for ts3 children: https://i.imgur.com/ZxOZb34.jpg

you say that you couldn't figure out the part about splitting edges for better normals, but the mesh already has split edges — i assume because the original creator has already done that? or did you manually split them in milkshape?
it's very easy to tell the difference. here's the mesh as you sent me:



and here it is after i merged everything back together (no split edges):



if the original creator did that, great, you didn't need to split edges anyway. if you did that in milkshape but can't figure out how to do that in blender, here's a video example: https://youtu.be/_d4yw0Sopmk?t=258
watch from 4:20 (nice) to 5:30, you don't need the rest of the video

to fix seams in mesh toolkit, all you need to do is convert your mesh to wso, select the age, gender (for teens and older) and lod, select the mesh and press "match seams"



this must be done after assigning bones, but before generating morphs
those two are also pretty self-explanatory, you just need a reference mesh (a mesh with good bones/morphs that's as close as possible to yours)

to conclude, a workflow for converting meshes (excluding textures) would be:
1. open the mesh in blender
2. fit to the sims 3 body
3. edit uv
(you seem to know how to do these three steps)
4. extract a reference mesh as wso (in this case, any maxis or cc mesh
5. do everything i've explained in this tutorial (up until manually editing bones/morphs)
6. open auto tools for wso in mesh toolkit, do the three steps (bones, seams, morphs) in order
7. import the wso into tsrw
8. done

a few more things:

if edge split was done by the original creator and you don't have access to the original, then using decimate to create lods is likely to create holes. you have three options here:
1. just use decimate and leave it as is (if the mesh only looks a little distorted, that's completely fine)
2. merge edges (remove doubles in 2.79 or merge by distance in 2.8+), then use decimate (no holes, but really bad shading)
3. merge edges, add edge split, then use decimate (best results, but requires some manual work)

third option in more detail:
1. go to edit mode
2. switch to edge select
3. select all non-manifold (search for it or shift+ctrl+alt+m)
4. mark sharp
5. remove doubles/merge by distance
6. add edge split
7. decimate

the mesh also doesn't have morphs. i assume this is a work in progress, just don't forget to add them later

all swatches except the first one are non-recolorable. i'm pretty sure you know about this, but still, this isn't great. it would be a much better idea to cut the print out and add that as a stencil, without the rest of the texture:





OMG THANK YOU!!! first, i saw that part of the texture overlapping in CAS and couldn't figure it out. i had to use the adult UV map since i couldn't find the child one, so bless you for figuring it out it helps TREMENDOUSLY.

secondly, i did edge split just the mesh i believe, (it's been a couple days since i touched this project as i get frustrated and move on) as i was worried about the texture not being correct later on and then aligned normals and merged them in MS. and this was before your first reply to me, so i just decided to play it safe. i'm assuming that the second picture without the edges split in blender is you merging the body and mesh in blender and then edge splitting?

and then the three options you listed are for the lods, right? i'm assuming you saw how my mlod had those gaps in the skirt. so i could use one of those three options to fix that, closing those gaps?

something i also noticed after doing a couple other conversions, even this one, is that after i decimate and split parts of the clothes into groups, i go into MS and align normals, and it looks great except for the seams on the actual clothes. even after aligning the normals in all groups, i still have the usual seams along the back of the mesh, the shoulders, and sleeves. because of this, i've just been doing my mlod in MS, with that directx mesh tool.

i was somehow able to fix my issue of having to manually reassign every normal for my mlod after splitting parts of the mesh into groups. what i don't understand about your tutorial (and is why i've been using MS) is the picture of your mesh in tsrw, with the normals looking good. when i did follow your tutorial, the normals did not align for my mlod. if i'm correct, the seam fixer in mesh toolkit does this for the hlod, as it has the option to "fix normals." so since i was using your tutorial to make my mlod, i saw that you said to run it through mesh toolkit as usual. however, 1. mesh toolkit's recent version can't fix seams for mlod and llod since an error window pops up, and 2. you say in your tutorial not to use seam fixer for the mlod and llod anyway since it ends up all distorted and crazy, like the picture you showed. if this is wrong, please correct me! so my question is, how do you align the normals for the mlod and llod if you avoid MS and can't use the seam fixer? because i had the seams in tsrw when i followed your steps. i could have missed something. would you fix this by fixing the vertices in blender?

also, i do know about the nonrecolorable presets. if i'm being honest, it's been really difficult for me to select parts of the texture when making a mask without making it too pixelated or too soft ( like with details like buttons when making the mask). so since i had this struggle i knew that it would probably be even worse if i were to try and select the overlays from the textures and make it a stencil. for example i use the magic wand or the quick selection tool and it doesn't do a very accurate job of selecting the parts i need. so that's when i go in manually and select the pixels with the square selection tool, which causes the end product to be very blocky. but thank you for being honest and giving your feedback on this, i am glad to hear someone else's opinion! i was going to leave it, but now i'll try to redo that. i know that having a lot of presets isn't great either since the file size increases.

for the morph, thank you for pointing it out! i could've sworn i did them, i even have the files too. i'll definitely do them though. i've been using the bare child body as my reference, so it's been giving mixed results.

also, if you did or did not notice, i didn't include an llod. in your personal opinion, do you think i should? or is just having an mlod or llod ok?

i hope my questions and comments make sense because it's so hard for me to put it into words. sorry if you've explained any of this or if it was obvious! i really appreciate your help since i'm usually afraid to ask.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#18 Old 17th Apr 2023 at 4:47 PM Last edited by thornowl : 19th Apr 2023 at 12:06 PM.
don't be afraid to ask me about cc, i genuinely enjoy helping others learn/fix issues. hell, i usually have to go looking for struggling creators, so you coming directly to my thread is really convenient lmaoo

i won't have access to my pc for another day, so no pictures this time. hopefully text will be enough, but let me know if you need to see screenshots
also sorry for rambling, i'm writing this while busy with something else. feel free to ask more questions if it's still confusing

alright, i'm gonna go into as much detail about normals/lods as possible just in case

technically, you don't have to align normals/split edges/fix seams for the mesh to be completely functional (i've heard something about splitting edges at uv seams, but i have never done that and never encountered any issues — i assume either blender, mtk or tsrw do that for you, so you don't have to worry about it), but if we put the mesh in game as is, it will have ugly shading
let's assume we're working with a mesh that doesn't have any split edges, every single part of it is connected. we will have two issues: seams at the neck/waist/ankles and ugly shading around sharp corners of a mesh (for example, at the bottom edge of a skirt)
the first one appears because those edge loops are not connected to anything, so blender can't calculate those normals properly. mtk's seam fixer looks for vertices in the exact precise locations of the default ts3 body seams and assigns correct normals to them. what that means is that as long as the naked body parts are not modified, you don't have to worry about seams at all — just use seam fixer and everything will be fine
the second issue appears because of how smooth shading works. vertex normals are calculated as an average between connected vertices, which is completely fine in most cases, but leads to ugly blurry shading when the angle between those vertices is too extreme. when we split edges, we disconnect those verts, getting rid of the issue
i'm gonna be honest, i have no idea how milkshape's align normals plugin works. i have used it in the past and know it does *something*, but what exactly — i have no idea. and there's honestly absolutely no reason to use it if you just split edges in blender — if you do that right, you already have perfectly good normals, what's there to align? all you have to do after that is just use seam fixer, and your normals are good to go. no need for outdated 3d software with a ts2 plugin

about mesh groups. the project you sent only uses one mesh group in lod1, which is perfectly fine in most cases. some ea clothes have two because one group can only have 60 bones, but some clothes need more than that. i would say you don't really have to worry about it, it's rare for cc creators to use more than one. but if you wanted to have two for whatever reason, you would need to split a mesh into two separate objects and export them as two different .obj files. how you choose to split them (top/bottom, cut off one hand or one leg) is up to you. but again, that's advanced stuff and you shouldn't worry about it unless you're sure you need it
i read that wrong you were talking about different kind of group lol sorry

about lods (level of detail). cas parts use four of them: from lod0 (very high) to lod3 (low). clothes only use lod1, lod2 and lod3
mlod is a file type used in ts3 objects, the cas part alternative is geom. i advise against using mlod as "medium level of detail" because that would lead to confusion; say lod2 or medium lod
the reason why i didn't mention the lack of lod3 is because i assumed you haven't done lods at all. lod2 looked nearly identical to lod1 and with a similar polycount — but maybe i'm remembering wrong, i can't check rn
each lod should be half of the previous one. so, if lod1 is 6000 faces, lod2 should be 3000 or lower, and lod3 should be 1500 or lower
and here's the thing about lower lods: you don't need them to look great, since they're seen as a distance. you should make them, because players will see them, but don't worry about details like seams. i play at minimum graphic settings and i've never noticed seams on the lower lods i've made, and most people play at high/max, where that's even harder to notice
of course, you could fix them, but you would have to make sure the seams match the default ea positions for lod2/3 and either:
1. manually assign correct normals to each of them in milkshape
2. assign bones using specifically a lod2/3 wso ref, then use seam fixer (the lod will get distorted if it has bones that usually aren't used in lod2/3, like finger bones)
all of that work for something that players won't even notice. your choice tho

i didn't look closely at your lod2 and haven't noticed any holes, but that is the result of decimating a mesh with split edges, yes (the feature you used to make a lod2 in milkshape is pretty much the same as blender's decimate modifier, just, well, worse)
the benefit of using modifiers is that you can simply turn them off or change their order whenever you want. so you could split edges, then decrease the polycount, and as long as decimate is higher than edge split on the modifier list, there wouldn't be holes in your model
the options i've listed only apply if the mesh already had split edges before you started working on it. and they won't fix an already generated lod, they're for generating new ones

there's absolutely no issue with merging separate objects into one in blender, i have no idea why you did that in milkshape. uv's don't regenerate on their own unless you deliberately unwrap the mesh again. and, i mean, if it did cause issues with the uv map, you could just ctrl+z
edge splitting doesn't really change the uv's either
personally i would be much more scared of breaking something in milkshape than blender

i still don't understand what you meant by separating parts into groups — can you explain why you're doing that and show a screenshot? also, please show whatever that issue with "actual clothing seams" is
only interested if it happens in blender though. if that problem only appears in milkshape, the solution is simple: stop using milkshape

if the outline of a print is too rough/pixelated after you cut it out, just manually blur the edges a little bit
Test Subject
#19 Old 30th Apr 2023 at 9:15 PM
Quote: Originally posted by thornowl
don't be afraid to ask me about cc, i genuinely enjoy helping others learn/fix issues. hell, i usually have to go looking for struggling creators, so you coming directly to my thread is really convenient lmaoo

i won't have access to my pc for another day, so no pictures this time. hopefully text will be enough, but let me know if you need to see screenshots
also sorry for rambling, i'm writing this while busy with something else. feel free to ask more questions if it's still confusing

alright, i'm gonna go into as much detail about normals/lods as possible just in case

technically, you don't have to align normals/split edges/fix seams for the mesh to be completely functional (i've heard something about splitting edges at uv seams, but i have never done that and never encountered any issues — i assume either blender, mtk or tsrw do that for you, so you don't have to worry about it), but if we put the mesh in game as is, it will have ugly shading
let's assume we're working with a mesh that doesn't have any split edges, every single part of it is connected. we will have two issues: seams at the neck/waist/ankles and ugly shading around sharp corners of a mesh (for example, at the bottom edge of a skirt)
the first one appears because those edge loops are not connected to anything, so blender can't calculate those normals properly. mtk's seam fixer looks for vertices in the exact precise locations of the default ts3 body seams and assigns correct normals to them. what that means is that as long as the naked body parts are not modified, you don't have to worry about seams at all — just use seam fixer and everything will be fine
the second issue appears because of how smooth shading works. vertex normals are calculated as an average between connected vertices, which is completely fine in most cases, but leads to ugly blurry shading when the angle between those vertices is too extreme. when we split edges, we disconnect those verts, getting rid of the issue
i'm gonna be honest, i have no idea how milkshape's align normals plugin works. i have used it in the past and know it does *something*, but what exactly — i have no idea. and there's honestly absolutely no reason to use it if you just split edges in blender — if you do that right, you already have perfectly good normals, what's there to align? all you have to do after that is just use seam fixer, and your normals are good to go. no need for outdated 3d software with a ts2 plugin

about mesh groups. the project you sent only uses one mesh group in lod1, which is perfectly fine in most cases. some ea clothes have two because one group can only have 60 bones, but some clothes need more than that. i would say you don't really have to worry about it, it's rare for cc creators to use more than one. but if you wanted to have two for whatever reason, you would need to split a mesh into two separate objects and export them as two different .obj files. how you choose to split them (top/bottom, cut off one hand or one leg) is up to you. but again, that's advanced stuff and you shouldn't worry about it unless you're sure you need it
i read that wrong you were talking about different kind of group lol sorry

about lods (level of detail). cas parts use four of them: from lod0 (very high) to lod3 (low). clothes only use lod1, lod2 and lod3
mlod is a file type used in ts3 objects, the cas part alternative is geom. i advise against using mlod as "medium level of detail" because that would lead to confusion; say lod2 or medium lod
the reason why i didn't mention the lack of lod3 is because i assumed you haven't done lods at all. lod2 looked nearly identical to lod1 and with a similar polycount — but maybe i'm remembering wrong, i can't check rn
each lod should be half of the previous one. so, if lod1 is 6000 faces, lod2 should be 3000 or lower, and lod3 should be 1500 or lower
and here's the thing about lower lods: you don't need them to look great, since they're seen as a distance. you should make them, because players will see them, but don't worry about details like seams. i play at minimum graphic settings and i've never noticed seams on the lower lods i've made, and most people play at high/max, where that's even harder to notice
of course, you could fix them, but you would have to make sure the seams match the default ea positions for lod2/3 and either:
1. manually assign correct normals to each of them in milkshape
2. assign bones using specifically a lod2/3 wso ref, then use seam fixer (the lod will get distorted if it has bones that usually aren't used in lod2/3, like finger bones)
all of that work for something that players won't even notice. your choice tho

i didn't look closely at your lod2 and haven't noticed any holes, but that is the result of decimating a mesh with split edges, yes (the feature you used to make a lod2 in milkshape is pretty much the same as blender's decimate modifier, just, well, worse)
the benefit of using modifiers is that you can simply turn them off or change their order whenever you want. so you could split edges, then decrease the polycount, and as long as decimate is higher than edge split on the modifier list, there wouldn't be holes in your model
the options i've listed only apply if the mesh already had split edges before you started working on it. and they won't fix an already generated lod, they're for generating new ones

there's absolutely no issue with merging separate objects into one in blender, i have no idea why you did that in milkshape. uv's don't regenerate on their own unless you deliberately unwrap the mesh again. and, i mean, if it did cause issues with the uv map, you could just ctrl+z
edge splitting doesn't really change the uv's either
personally i would be much more scared of breaking something in milkshape than blender

i still don't understand what you meant by separating parts into groups — can you explain why you're doing that and show a screenshot? also, please show whatever that issue with "actual clothing seams" is
only interested if it happens in blender though. if that problem only appears in milkshape, the solution is simple: stop using milkshape

if the outline of a print is too rough/pixelated after you cut it out, just manually blur the edges a little bit

hi, i know it's been awhile ... (sorry) but trust that i did read this! i just haven't felt up to going back to the project and dealing with this complicated mess. but here are the screenshots. first are the seams i have after edge split in blender and then aligning normals in MS.

i think i had this issue in blender, but that's probably because blender doesn't align normals. i'm still lost on what i'm supposed to do after i export my edge split mesh, how do i align the normals? or does the issue of seams from unaligned normals resolve after edge splitting, as you said "disconnecting those vertices."
then the part of splitting my mesh into groups - i follow gruesim's tutorial on edge split and in order to get my normals to align well i do it per each part, because when i left the mesh as just the whole, aligning the normals did awful. here are pictures showing 2 of separated groups, excluding the skirt because i did not align normals for it.



ignore the fact that they have the same group and name on the sidebar i think the pictures were taken at different times or something, rest assured that they are split into their own groups. but anyways by separating these in blender, i was able to align normals in MS and avoid the issue of reassigning them with the extended manual edit.

also, i'm just torn, should i leave my lod2 as is? i don't feel that confident connecting them or fixing it like you mentioned in blender. and what confuses me is i thought that lod2/3 are for players who have their clothes texture set to low or medium in the settings panel in game? or is this unrelated? my preconcieved notion was making me putting in all the extra work for lod2 because i didn't want to be one of thosee people who only make lod1 meshes, like for HQ only. i know that i split my mesh into groups in blender, and then i decimated each part of the mesh by itself, so i could avoid that issue of the vertices unconnecting for the lod2. that's probably an issue in itself but...

and for the morphs, i know you mentioned i didn't have any, i finally figured out why. everytime i exported my project from tsrw i was renumbering the second instance ID. i had no idea i wasn't supposed to do that sorry if i didn't answer your questions.
manually assigning normals from an ea mesh hasn't been working out great for me, as seen here with the ankles and then the waist:


and this is for the lo1!!! i had this issue with another mesh and i can't fix it for the life of me. i'll try seam fixer again but i'm assuming the solution would be fixing the vertices in blender like you did in your tutorial right?
Screenshots
Test Subject
Original Poster
#20 Old 1st May 2023 at 3:42 AM
you don't need to align normals at all. there's no way to do it in blender because it doesn't do anything useful (at least for ts3 cc; that plugin was made for ts2, so maybe it is useful for that game). if your normals look good in blender, they'll look good in game
even splitting seams isn't actually required, but we do it to make meshes look better
whoever convinced ts3 creators that they have to use a ts2 plugin for their cc deserves jail time

you don't have to split your mesh into different groups/objects either. i mean, sometimes that makes work easier, but unless you know why you're doing it..
it'll all be merged into one group/object in the end anyway
as far as i can tell, you were mostly only doing that because you thought you had to align normals, but doing that made your pretty mesh an ugly mess, so you split each part into different groups in ms to align normals on each one separately. i'm sorry, but you were wasting your time. you had good normals, then you used an old weird plugin that ruined your normals, and did a ton more work to fix that.. when the real solution is to just stop using the plugin that doesn't do anything except ruin your normals
just don't use align normals. that's it

i guess i didn't explain lods in depth lol
here's how they work (both in ts3 and in other, even non-sims, games). when you look at an object (a sim is considered an object in this context) up close, the game loads lod0 — a nice detailed mesh. when you zoom out a little bit, the game replaces it with lod1, which has less detail, but you won't really notice that from a distance. when you zoom out more, it loads lod2, and if you zoom out really far — lod3, the lowest one. lod3 is generally really simple and ugly, but you don't notice that because it only appears at a distance where the object looks like a few pixels on your screen
i play on minimum settings, and i see lod1 all the time (clothes never have lod0). graphics settings only determine how much you have to zoom out for each lod to load in (on high settings you have to zoom out more) and whether or not the player ever sees lod0 (for objects that do have it, like hair and some accessories)
so no, you don't have to worry about making lod2/3 look amazing. even players like me won't notice seams and imperfections on them since we only see them at a significant distance

having no morphs has little to do with exporting from tsrw. i looked at your mesh *in* tsrw without exporting it, and it didn't have morphs. that's easy to check by going to the mesh tab and dragging the normal/fit and thin/fat sliders. if nothing happens, you don't have morphs

the seams you showed in your last two pictures are also caused by the lack of morphs. if you make them, that problem should go away
if it doesn't, send me the .wrk file
Forum Resident
#21 Old 1st May 2023 at 3:57 PM
Quote: Originally posted by elvgreen
i had this issue with another mesh and i can't fix it for the life of me. i'll try seam fixer again but i'm assuming the solution would be fixing the vertices in blender like you did in your tutorial right?


One major problem you appear to have, is that you are stuck on Milkshape. @Thornowl's tutorial is all about avoiding that mess completely.

I guess a question would be, which version of Blender are you using? I mostly use 2.80, and I believe Thornowl uses 2.9x, which the tutorial is based on. Smug Tomato's tool differ between 2.8x and 2.9x, so it matters. Having the same version as the person showing you things can make a huge difference! While learning, I was using 2.79, and my mentor was using 2.80. I simply didn't understand a lot, until I moved up to the same Blender that he used. Then, setting up various plugins, or making sure plugins you need, that came with Blender, are turned on.

I believe 2.9x uses "preserve normals, which keep neck, waist and ankle seams. 2.8x has a seam fixer on export.

You should only need to create a 2 group mesh, if it is a full body mesh with more than 60 bones, or you are using a second shader for transparency, or extra shine, etc. AF tops can be 51 to 53ish bones, and bottoms 14 to 17 bones. If combining top and bottom to make an outfit, 2 mesh groups may become necessary.

As Thornowl said, the seams you have are no morph seams. I know that morphs can be created with Morph Maker tool, but I generally prefer MTK. The closer the reference mesh is to the one you are working on, the better. Mine are crazy meshes, so I usually have to adjust morphs back in Blender, but your meshes look fairly close to EA, so should work okay.
Test Subject
Original Poster
#22 Old 1st May 2023 at 10:34 PM
i use 2.79 pretty much exclusively because my laptop can barely run versions after 2.8
if i really need to use geom tools, i use 2.93 for that, but i'm not really familiar or comfortable with 2.8+ versions

either way, i don't think this is relevant. from what i can tell, elvgreen doesn't use geom tools, and you don't really have to use them. most of my cc is made purely in 2.79 without them
Forum Resident
#23 Old 1st May 2023 at 11:54 PM
Quote: Originally posted by thornowl
i use 2.79 pretty much exclusively because my laptop can barely run versions after 2.8
if i really need to use geom tools, i use 2.93 for that, but i'm not really familiar or comfortable with 2.8+ versions

either way, i don't think this is relevant. from what i can tell, elvgreen doesn't use geom tools, and you don't really have to use them. most of my cc is made purely in 2.79 without them


Ah! You are using 2.79? I have not used it in perhaps 4 years or so, except for a few animation fixes and poses. Honestly, I would probably still be using it, except JoshQ started using 2.8, and everything he was trying to show me was done on that version... The layout was so different to me. Using it was the only way I could follow his instructions. )))

I also have 2.93, and geom tools for that, but am simply too comfortable with 2.8 at this point. Only a couple of things I needed to use it for.

When you say you don't use geom tools... not even the originals by cmo? And I think someone else did the update for 2.79???
Test Subject
#24 Old 5th May 2023 at 11:57 PM
Quote: Originally posted by thornowl
you don't need to align normals at all. there's no way to do it in blender because it doesn't do anything useful (at least for ts3 cc; that plugin was made for ts2, so maybe it is useful for that game). if your normals look good in blender, they'll look good in game
even splitting seams isn't actually required, but we do it to make meshes look better
whoever convinced ts3 creators that they have to use a ts2 plugin for their cc deserves jail time

you don't have to split your mesh into different groups/objects either. i mean, sometimes that makes work easier, but unless you know why you're doing it..
it'll all be merged into one group/object in the end anyway
as far as i can tell, you were mostly only doing that because you thought you had to align normals, but doing that made your pretty mesh an ugly mess, so you split each part into different groups in ms to align normals on each one separately. i'm sorry, but you were wasting your time. you had good normals, then you used an old weird plugin that ruined your normals, and did a ton more work to fix that.. when the real solution is to just stop using the plugin that doesn't do anything except ruin your normals
just don't use align normals. that's it

i guess i didn't explain lods in depth lol
here's how they work (both in ts3 and in other, even non-sims, games). when you look at an object (a sim is considered an object in this context) up close, the game loads lod0 — a nice detailed mesh. when you zoom out a little bit, the game replaces it with lod1, which has less detail, but you won't really notice that from a distance. when you zoom out more, it loads lod2, and if you zoom out really far — lod3, the lowest one. lod3 is generally really simple and ugly, but you don't notice that because it only appears at a distance where the object looks like a few pixels on your screen
i play on minimum settings, and i see lod1 all the time (clothes never have lod0). graphics settings only determine how much you have to zoom out for each lod to load in (on high settings you have to zoom out more) and whether or not the player ever sees lod0 (for objects that do have it, like hair and some accessories)
so no, you don't have to worry about making lod2/3 look amazing. even players like me won't notice seams and imperfections on them since we only see them at a significant distance

having no morphs has little to do with exporting from tsrw. i looked at your mesh *in* tsrw without exporting it, and it didn't have morphs. that's easy to check by going to the mesh tab and dragging the normal/fit and thin/fat sliders. if nothing happens, you don't have morphs

the seams you showed in your last two pictures are also caused by the lack of morphs. if you make them, that problem should go away
if it doesn't, send me the .wrk file

LMAO you are so right. thank you for being so honest it was reallyyyyyy time consuming! even before i split my mesh into groups the manual reassigning took me 3 hours by itself. it’s a bummer i wasted my time on all this. and you’re right i was edge splitting because i thought i had to align normals. the seams stressed me out so i watched a few? tutorials that explained edge splitting will remove seams and then to divide the parts into separate groups. i’ll definitely go back in and redo it since i have to edit the UV map anyways. i hope this isn’t too bothersome to you, i really enjoy having someone to talk to ME rather than a general audience through a tutorial. if it gets to that point i will send the wrk. files to you. do you mind me continuing to update you? because otherwise you have helped me tremendously!
Test Subject
#25 Old 6th May 2023 at 12:02 AM Last edited by elvgreen : 6th May 2023 at 1:39 AM.
Quote: Originally posted by LadySmoks
One major problem you appear to have, is that you are stuck on Milkshape. @Thornowl's tutorial is all about avoiding that mess completely.

I guess a question would be, which version of Blender are you using? I mostly use 2.80, and I believe Thornowl uses 2.9x, which the tutorial is based on. Smug Tomato's tool differ between 2.8x and 2.9x, so it matters. Having the same version as the person showing you things can make a huge difference! While learning, I was using 2.79, and my mentor was using 2.80. I simply didn't understand a lot, until I moved up to the same Blender that he used. Then, setting up various plugins, or making sure plugins you need, that came with Blender, are turned on.

I believe 2.9x uses "preserve normals, which keep neck, waist and ankle seams. 2.8x has a seam fixer on export.

You should only need to create a 2 group mesh, if it is a full body mesh with more than 60 bones, or you are using a second shader for transparency, or extra shine, etc. AF tops can be 51 to 53ish bones, and bottoms 14 to 17 bones. If combining top and bottom to make an outfit, 2 mesh groups may become necessary.

As Thornowl said, the seams you have are no morph seams. I know that morphs can be created with Morph Maker tool, but I generally prefer MTK. The closer the reference mesh is to the one you are working on, the better. Mine are crazy meshes, so I usually have to adjust morphs back in Blender, but your meshes look fairly close to EA, so should work okay.

thank you for your input!! i did not even consider that. i’ll definitely go check and see. but from what i know it should be 2.79. if i were to use 2.8x for the seam fixer option upon exporting, do you suggest using it? i’m curious if it would do a good job. and thank you for confirming that it was an issue with morphs, i was going back into milkshape to align the normals of the mesh to the waist and it didn’t change anything. i was getting so frustrated because i thought i would be successful another thing i’ve seen from tutorials is that people use the sims 3 naked body as a reference mesh. is this ok to do? this is what i’ve been doing because finding a mesh that’s the same length as mine is too tedious. it’s worked for the most part.
UPDATE: i was on 2.78 so i'll change it to 2.79 and see if it helps the process
Page 1 of 2
Back to top