Adding a pregnant morph
Okay, now we're going to do a pregnant mesh. This example will use the game pregnant shape as a guide. The same shape can be used as a rough guide for pregnant morphs for males and teens. This example is a full-body mesh but it's the same process for tops and bottoms. If you want to make a top or bottom that that has to match the game shape exactly, for example a bare waistline or tucked shirt, that's a story for a future section in this tutorial.
Let's start with some basics on how morphing works in the game and what it's used for. There are four body morphs in the Sims 3: fat, fit, thin, and 'special', which is pregnant. These are changes which are applied to the base or normal body according to circumstances - the fatter the sim gets the more the fat morph is applied, the more fit they are the more the fit morph is applied, etc. All morphs can be combined except the fat and thin morphs, which show up in CAS as opposite ends of the same slider. There are morph meshes in the game files which are not actually complete meshes; instead of vertex locations they contain the differences between the locations of the vertices in the base mesh and in the fully morphed shape. (They also contain the differences in the normals, which we'll get to in a later section.) For this reason, morph meshes cannot be opened in Milkshape by themselves; they must be loaded 'over' their corresponding base mesh so that the importer can use the base information and the morph information to calculate where the vertices should be.
Just to complicate things further, the morph meshes themselves aren't used in the game. The morph information for all the lods for a piece of clothing (or a face, or hair) is compressed and coded into one file, a BGEO file. In order to make a new morph, we need to first make a new set of morph meshes and then make a new BGEO file from them.
In order to follow the tutorial, you'll need to download the adult female pregnant guide mesh attached at the bottom of this post. It's the pregnant morph of one of the game swimsuits, changed into a full mesh so you can load it by itself.
Okay, let's start with a nice dress for adult/YA females. I'm going to use the short flared dress, afBodyDressShortFlared_folds. It looks like it should be a maternity dress, but for some reason it has no pregnant morph in the game. Open up CTU, select Adult, Female, and Body, and find the dress in the dropdown list or the thumbnails. Click the Extract Meshes button and save the meshes in a work folder.
As in the first tutorial, we'll get three .simgeom files - we don't need the .vpxy file.
Open Milkshape, and import the lod1 mesh for the dress. (File\Import\Q-Mesh Sims 3 GEOM Importer... in case you forgot.) Again, ignore the 'Unable to locate bone file' message. You should now see the mesh in Milkshape.
Now we'll duplicate this mesh and change the copy into a morph mesh. First, click the Groups tab and click the Select button under Group. (Not the one under Smoothing Groups.) The entire mesh should turn red.
Click Edit in the menu bar, and Duplicate Selection. You should see white dots appear among the red, and a second entry should show up in the list right under the Groups tab.
Click on that second entry to make sure it's selected. Now look under the Groups tab, in the middle section under Group, and click the Comment button. A window should pop up with a long list of unintelligible information. This stuff is very important - it tells what type of mesh this is, what texture images it's associated with, among other things - but that's again an advanced topic. In this case, all we want is to change this mesh into a morph. Fortunately, that's very easy. Just erase all the information in the comment, then take the following text and paste it in, then click Okay to save.
FVFItems: 3
TableType: 0
References: 1
TGIRef00: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Next, we want to hide the original, base mesh so we don't accidentally change it. It's important that it's not changed because the GEOM exporter will use the information in it to calculate the morph data, and if you change both meshes your morph won't work. Click the top entry under the Groups tab to select it and then click the Hide button under Group. You should see the white dots disappear. And finally, import the guide adult female pregnant mesh you should have downloaded from this post.
First, let's name our meshes to avoid confusion. Click on the second entry in the list under the Groups tab, which should be named Duplicate01 at this point, and look for the Rename button under Group. Change the 'Duplicate01' next to it to 'PregMorph' and click the Rename button. Then do the same thing to rename the third entry, your guide mesh, to 'Guide'. As an aside, the Up and Down buttons will change the order of your meshes, which can be important since the morph mesh(es) must come directly under their base mesh. You can have multiple morphs under one base, as we'll get to in a future section.
Now for some meshing! First, select the Guide mesh under the Groups tab and click the Hide button again to hide it for now. Click the Model tab to get access to the meshing buttons and make sure the Select button is active. Using the techniques explained in the first tuturial, zoom in enough to be able to see the belly area in detail. Click back to the Groups tab and unhide the Guide mesh by clicking the Hide button again. This will show you the shape you're trying to get the PregMorph mesh into.
Hide the guide again, go back to the Model tab, and in the side projection select the whole front belly part of the mesh. You'll get part of the hands too - go to the top projection, press Shift, and drag around each of the hands to deselect them. Now, with the entire belly and front upper part of the skirt selected, click the Scale button. Change the number over the X to 1.01 and the number over the Z to 1.1. This will increase the scale of the selected vertices 1% in the side-to-side dimension and 10% in the front-to-back dimension. Click the second Scale button that's next to the numbers and you should see the vertices move slightly.
Click the Move button and use the mouse in the side projection to move the selected vertices forward slightly. Now, click the Select key and use the Shift key and right mouse button to deselect the top line of vertices and the bottom. Repeat the scale and the move forward. Repeat the entire process, reducing the area of vertices you have selected, until you have a nice round belly.
Go back to the Groups tab and unhide the guide. As you can see, it's a pretty good fit. (I selected the Guide mesh to make it easier to see.)
After hiding the guide mesh again, use the scale-and-move or just the Move button to smooth out the shape and the front of the skirt. You can recheck against the guide whenever you want, just hide it again before selecting vertices. Try to make your mesh as close as reasonably possible to the guide to reduce animation and object overlap problems in the game. But don't expect perfection, at least not on your first try!
As a finishing touch, I'm going to select the vertices of the breasts in the side view, scale them couple of times, and move them a tad forward and down so they're closer to the breasts of the guide.
And now, we'll export our new morph mesh. Click File on the menu bar, and Export, and Q-Mesh Sims 3 GEOM Exporter. You'll get a popup saying the GEOM format exports only one group per file. Click OK. It'll go through each of the meshes in your Groups, asking if you want to export. In this case, the only one we want to export is the second one, our PregMorph mesh. Click Yes for that one, and No for the others. Save the mesh in your work folder, and give it a descriptive name like "PregnantMesh_lod1.simgeom". If all has gone well, it'll be about half the size of the original mesh.
If you're going to make a pregnant morph to be used in the game, you should use the same process to make morph meshes for lod 2 and lod 3 also. They will probably come out looking lumpy, especially lod 3, because you have fewer vertices to work with. Just do the best you can. Close Milkshape when you're done.
Let's go back to CTU. If you closed it, select the DressShortFlared_folds again and click the Part Category tab. This screen will show you how the clothing is categorized. Under Extended Category, put a checkmark next to 'Valid for Maternity'. If you want this outfit to be able to be selected at random for maternity, also make sure 'Valid for Random' is checked. Click the Commit button.
Now for some more background - exactly how the game picks maternity clothing is still somewhat mysterious. Most of the time just enabling maternity and adding a morph isn't enough, although sometimes that seems to work, especially in the case of sims for which the game has no built-in maternity wear. (Males and teens.) The only method I've found to be reliable, and which allows you to pick what clothes you want your sim to wear during pregnancy, is the one I'm going to use here. Unfortunately it creates another item of clothing in CAS, but we're going to modify the appearance of the dress so we can identify our maternity-enabled clothing.
You should still be in CTU. Click on the Designs tab, just like we did in the first lesson. Click the Add New Design button, and select Copy All From Base. You should now see three Designs in the top design box. Select the first one. Click the Patterns tab under the design buttons, and you should get the patterns options shown in the picture below. This is where you can change the default colors and patterns that show up in the CAS thumbnails. We're going to make some changes so we can recognize our modified dress - also because I can't stand that hideous purple. (YMMV, of course.)
First take a look at the pulldown right next to where it says Patterns: - in the picture below it's clicked to show there are four patterns: Pattern A, Pattern B, Pattern C, and Pattern D. These are the recolorable areas of the clothing. In this case Pattern A is the skirt and Pattern B is the bodice. C and D appear not to be used in this dress. Click the Browse Patterns button, and you'll get a popup that lets you select from a collection of patterns. You can switch to other types of patterns using the pulldown at the top of that window. I'll select the dark gray small herringbone for Pattern A, and then switch to Pattern B, click Browse Patterns again, and choose the medium houndstooth. If you have 3D Preview enabled (checkbox on the upper right) you can see how your choices will look.
Notice how the Type: dropdown has changed to Pattern(HSV)? You can use patterns and you can also use solid colors. Let's go on and select Design #2 in the design box and use a solid color for it. Click the Colour box under Solid Colour Options at the bottom and a color selector will pop up. Choose a color for Pattern A, switch to Pattern B, and choose the same or a different color for it. If you want to match the colors exactly, look in the 'Hex color' box in that popup - copy the number there for the color you want, switch to the other pattern, and paste it back to get the same color.
You can also change Design #3 if you wish. I went for a flowery pattern in the bodice and a matching pastel violet-blue in the skirt.
Finally, click File from the menu bar, Save As, give it a descriptive name and save it in your work folder. You can close CTU.
And now start up MorphMaker. At the top of the window, fill in your project name - this should be the name of the clothing plus the specific morph you're working on. In this case, I'll put 'afBodyDressShortFlared_folds_special'. Click the arrow button next to it, and the program will generate an instance number for your morph and fill in the Instance ID field. Then click the Adult Female button on the left side, and select your morph mesh files for lod1, lod2, and lod3. (If you only did lod1, that's fine - just select that one.) Note you must use Adult - Young Adults use the Adult clothing.
Click the Clothing button under Make Morphs on the left. Click the Create BGEO button that will appear and save the .bgeo file in your work folder. Last, click the 'Add morphs to package' button and select the package you saved in CTU. Another screen will pop up to let you import your BGEO files. Click the Import BGEO button for the Special (pregnant) section and select the .bgeo file you just made. Click 'Save as a new package' and save it under a different name. This will be your final package, and you can delete the one made by
CTU if you wish.
You can close MorphMaker now, and at last we can install the package in our game and test it out. It should show as a separate clothing in CAS, probably just above or below the original.
Have your sim plan her outfits so she's wearing the dress for Everyday and/or Formal before she has her "OMG I'm pregnant!" moment. After is too late - the maternity outfits are set for the course of the pregnancy. She should keep wearing the dress in whichever category you've chosen.
Attached files:
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BasePregForms.zip (188.2 KB, 710 downloads)
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175916 05-22-10 15:26 af_lod1_fullbody_pregnant_base.simgeom
94472 05-22-10 15:28 af_lod2_fullbody_pregnant_base.simgeom
48976 05-22-10 15:30 af_lod3_fullbody_pregnant_base.simgeom
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Description: Pregnant guide meshes |