Hi guys,

I've got a question, I'm trying to convert a Sims 4 hair to Sims 2 and the hair texture appears to not be smooth. It happens to all the hairs I try to convert and it doesn't dissapear after recolouring it or in game. I don't know what's causing this as the texture itself looks fine to me.

So, does anyone know what's causing this and how I can fix it?

Thanks in advance!

If the issues look like sharp lines that change shadows depending on which angle you look at them from, it's most lkely mesh/normal issues, and that's something that needs to be fixed on the mesh. It's very common on 4t2 meshes because Blender deals a little differently with normals and split edges than TS2 and Milkshape. Meshes extracted from TS4 (or TS2) get all their split but smoothed edges un-smoothed in Blender.

Hi,

Thank you for your quick reply. Do you mean by switching out the textures after making a file in Bodyshop, making a copy (new file) and replacing the now 256x256 hairtextures in SimPE for the original 512x512 textures? Because I did that, and it sadly didn't seem to change anything (reply to your reply before it was edited I now see).

I think I've edited my post after you posted - I realized you asked about something else than what I was answering at first. You may want to re-read the post above.

I don't think it are those type of texture issues, as when I'm rotating my sim in cas the shadow on the weird parts does stay the same. I used CAS-Tools to convert the geometry-files from Sims 4 to Sims 3 so I could open them in Milkshape. To get the geometry-files in Sims 4 Studio I exported the mesh and then directly imported it back in (which makes the geometry files appear), without changing anything in Blender.

The issues do look like what's called "normal" issues to me - these cause sharp lines and creases (I've circled the creases I mean). If not, it could be an artefact in the TS4 texture (I can't spot any), but if so those are almost impossible to remap. Normal issues aren't too difficult to fix, though. The easiest is to fix them in Blender before you start putting them into TS2, but they can usually be fixed in Milkshape, too.

The ones in the side picture look like you may have put the hair texture on the "hair" group (where the skin is supposed to be). Perhaps check that? If you did, make sure you put a blank texture there instead (in SimPE: Blank PNG. In Bodyshop: black or white texture, black alpha), and it will look better. When you convert hairs 3t2 or 4t2, hair texture goes on the "Hair_alpha" groups, not on the "hair" groups.

Hi, I tried to fix the side parts by replacing the "hair" alpha texture with all black, but when I did that and reloaded Body Shop, the whole hair dissapeared. What is weird is that I had already put in a transparant scalp texture via Simpe, so I thought that couldn't be it.

Even though you say the stripes on the hair is a normal issue (which I'm happy about, because it'll be probably easier to fix then?) I apparently haven't had enough experience with meshing yet to know how to fix it.

You probably have just one texture - I'm guessing the same issue you had here: https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=652059 - The textures need to be separate.

If you go back to the hair you had, then make a recolor in Bodyshop where you do black floodfill for the "hair" (the alpha AND texture!) and textured for "hairalpha3" or "hairalpha5" or whatever these are called (don't touch the belonging alphas!) for all the textures, you should get a correct set of textures. It's much easier to fix it in Bodyshop. You can import better quality textures in SimPE afterward.

I probably confused you a bit. "Normals" is a word used in 3D graphics. Simply put it has to do with how light and shadows are calculated along surfaces.

There are a few tutorials that show how to fix normals, but I'm not sure if they are easily used with this particular mesh. If you can manage to just mark the single vertices in the problem areas, you can try to one by one use "Vertex --> align normals" on them. The "Sims 2 Unimesh Normal Data Merge" could maybe work. The "Extended Manual Edit" too, but that one is a lot more work. Make sure you only have one visible vertex (a pair, really) selected.

Save your mesh file before you start on this work. If you get any weird black lines or anything that doesn't look right, don't save it. Sometimes trying to fix the normal issues can cause more issues. Usually not, but some meshes can be quite problematic.

The Body Shop "hair" floodfill worked and got rid of the scalp issue. The " The Sims 2 Unimesh Normal Data Merge" in Milkshape didn't work, as it made the hair differ from textured to black depending on the way you looked at it (and I don't think that's good). What did work pretty well was the "Align normals" function on specific verticies. So that's good (it's a bit tedious, so if there's a way to do it faster/more handy, please tell me).

Do you mean with importing better quality textures afterward (after making the "hair" textures black) via Simpe, importing a transparant blank texture? Because I did that already, as you advised me to in a previous post of mine.

Make sure you only do the normal fix on the line of vertices you want to fix, not on the entire mesh. I don't think there's a lot of faster methods in Milkshape. If it does work, you can mark all the vertices you want to fix and then do "align normals" (usually works, occasionally doesn't).

If you see any of these issues on meshes in Blender, you can select the areas with "L" (or manually if that doesn't select the proper areas) and do "Remove doubles" (it's in one of the menus to the left). It's easier and faster to fix them there before exporting.

In SimPE you should now have blank textures for the head and hair textures for the hair, and the TXMTs should be pointing to the proper textures. If you have a lower number of textures than you expect (maybe just one blank texture) that's just Bodyshop compressing the textures into one TXTR file because they're identical.

Don't touch the "Hair" textures (for the head) - they should now show up blank in SimPE, while the actual hair textures should show up as hair texture. If you want to, you can replace the hair textures with better quality ones if you want (maybe after making recolors in Bodyshop?).

Hi, aligning the normals worked and I fixed the "normal" issues. The weird thing that happened though, is that after I went to recolour it and reloaded the project, there appeared black spots and lines on the face and neck. I had seen them once before, but they disappeared very quickly after that. Because of that, I thought it was a Body Shop issue, but then it appeared again after recolouring and it didn't dissapear, it even appeared in game, so it seems to not be a Body Shop issue. I just don't know how and why they suddenly appeared.

As is also seen in the screenshots, is that there is a grey line of hair (probably from the original mesh) still showing after the recolour. I recoloured the textures by pasting the Sims 4 textures over the original mesh (I had no issues with that previously with other hairs), but I can imagine that that's not always a very good way to recolour stuff, I just want the hair to look as closely to its Sims 4 counterpart as possible and figured pasting the textures on top of the mesh would be a good way. Apparently it's not, as I checked the textures of the recolour I made and there were still some texture parts from the original mesh showing. Even though I made the recolour texture the exact size of the texture of the original mesh, so they would fit perfectly over each other. Body shop also made the recolour textures extremely small for some reason, to the point that it's pixelated even when zooming in.

Sorry for updating this thread so late btw, I had a busy past few days.

Fix for Bodyshop: https://modthesims.info/wiki.php?ti...y_Shop_Projects

You should also be able to fix the textures (the hair textures, don't touch the blank ones!) by importing them as DXT3 or 5 with SimPE as the correct sizes. I'm pretty sure the lines are just a texture artefact from the alpha having been shrunken down, since the original grey texture looks fine.

Hi, thank you so much for your help, I successfully finished the hair and I personally think it looks pretty good !

I have two questions though: 1. I have two elder hairs in the grey category that are brownish/grey and blackish/grey. I tried to link them to only the black and only the brown hair via a hair binner, but apparently it didn't work, as the two hairs appear for all hair colours instead for the black one appearing only in the black hair category and the brown one only for the brown hair category. I was curious to know if you maybe know how to fix this issue (although it's a bit of topic, I know)?

2. What is the difference between DXT3 and DXT5 textures? I personally think that DXT5 is higher quality, so I put my textures at that format, but after I checked later it was set back to DXT3 format?

Again, thank you so much for your help! I appreciate it very much!

DXT3 and DXT5 are similar in texture quality, but DXT5 handles alphas with varying degrees of greytone alphas better, especially if you use transparent PNGs. For simple black/white alphas, they're more or less the same. Textures imported with Bodyshop will show as DXT3.

Hair binning depends what kind of result you want:
- same hair color for adults and elder (colored hair for elders, you can have variants with greying hair)
- elders go grey, all hair colors have individual greys (this causes a lot of clutter in the grey bin)
- elders go grey, one hair in each family bin has the grey hair (less clutter, but you have to keep the file with the grey hair)
- Separate grey file (several variants, sometimes combined with the ones above)

If you want those two hairs for only elders(?) it's easier to set them up as separate hairs and remove ages, for instance set them as only adult and elder (so younger ages don't get them randomly). Another alternative is to use the textures for the elder stages of the black and brown hairs.

Oh, and when binning the hairs, ALWAYS keep the original non-binned files (at least until you're happy with the result), because it's easy to make mistakes.

The hairs as pictured in the screenshots are the greying variants of the brown and the black hair. I also have a normal black and brown hair available to adults and teens. What I want to do is if an adult Sim has black hair for example and ages up to an elder, there's a chance that it will be the black greying hair as pictured in the screenshot. The same goes if the Sim has brown hair that there will be a chance that the Sim gets the brown greying version as an elder (I have also made a white and grey hair for elders available to all colours, so that's why I say "chance" in case of the dark brown and black hair. My question is, how I can link the brown greying one to only be available for Sims with originally brown hair and the black greying one only for Sims with originally black hair when they age up to elders? I could do what you suggested, but I think that they would be standalone grey hairs then, without any link to the adult versions of it (sorry if I got that wrong).

You can't have the "chance" kind of hair you're describing, as hair doesn't work like that. It's either/or.

You can make two different brown and two black hairs, where one of each has the greying hair and another has the full grey hair. The different ages for each hair can have different textures, so if you want one with regular hair for teen and YA, greying hair for adults, and full grey for elder, that's an option, too.

(Do the texture replacement first in the Bodyshop project, so you get the texture maps you need in SimPE, and know which ones you'll need to replace if you still have issues with small Bodyshop textures).

Ah, I thought that could be a possibility yeah. That the "chance" thing wouldn't work, but I decided to ask anyway.

I had already done sort of what you suggested, but despite that the brown/grey and black texture still appeared for all colours.

The steps I took were (on the brown file as an example, also applied to the black hair file):
1. Normal brown hair for teen, ya and adult and greying brown for elder (all in the same body shop project/file).
2. Edited it with the hair binner made by CatofEvilGenius. ( https://modthesims.info/d/434016/qu...11-v1-1-02.html )
2.1. Getting rid of child and toddler ages for the hair.
2.2. Selecting brown as the colour for the elder hair to be linked with (deleted all the elder hairs for all other colours manually via SimPE, so the brown grey wouldn't attach to them, or so I thought).
2.4. Unselecting the "1 grey for all elders" option.
2.5. Bin and reload in Body Shop after putting the new files in my Downloads folder (replacing the old ones).

I thought this would do the trick, but apparently it didn't, as you could see in a previous reply of mine on this thread.

I don't know if you are familiar with this particular hair binner and I know that there are other ways to bin hair. I just started doing this method as it is a very handy tool to do it with.

Already binned files might not be easily re-binnable, and you might get some strange results, so if you want to re-test, use unbinned files when binning hairs. You have ticked "make backup files" so you should have backup files in case you need them.

So... Just a question, but do you want one greying variant and one that goes grey of the brown and black? Or just one brown and one black and that's it?

If you want just one of each color, where the brown and black go through a greying stage and then go fully grey,
- Tick "Same family" but NOT "1 grey"
- Make sure you've colored them properly in Bodyshop

If you want "adults stay colored/elders go grey" + extra hairs with an additional greying effect

You'll want to do this for the regular hairs:
- "Same family"
- EITHER tick the "1 grey hair for all 4 colors" so you get just one grey hair for all of them
- OR don't tick it and get 4 greys (creates some clutter)
THEN
Have a brown and a black hair with the greying hairs, SEPARATE from the ones above.
- Don't tick "same family" or "1 grey" for these. You'll want them to be entirely separate from the others.

Just a FYI, but the grey bin isn't entirely trustworthy in CAS and Bodyshop. It shows all the hairs binned into it, and doesn't distinguish between colors, so you see all the available greys instead of just the "blonde greys" or "red greys" or some such. If you for instance have a brown and a black elder hair, they'll both show up in this bin, so it can get a bit confusing. Ingame, the elder hairs follow the hair bin and family they were put into from the younger ages, so as long as they're binned correctly they should show up properly.

I wrote a description by each screenshot to explain how I want them linked (to answer your question).

For the greys, you can only link them to one hair color/family each - or you can for instance have one of the greys for blonde, one for red, and the brown and black for each of those hairs.

Then you can bin them in the same family but with separate greys. The hairs will be available for elders, so you can change their color if you want. That way you don't get any duplicate hairs in the grey bin.

Hi, I did what you suggested here. Everything worked well until I came to the brown/grey and black/grey step. You suggest to have them entirely seperate from the other hairs. But this causes there to be two versions of the hairs in the adult, ya and teen stages, even in game. So, is there a way I can avoid this issue while still having the greying versions of the black and brown hairs?

You can either
- remove the teen/adult/YA stages (only elders get the greying hair, but you have no way of applying it until they get to the elder stage)
- Remove the teen/YA stages, and have one with greying hair for adult/elder (you can apply it just before they turn elder)
- Have 2 hairs for each of the colors with different elder stages (if you want the "random" effect).

I want to make the black/greying and brown/greying hair only available to elders and not to adults. So I decided to create an additional SavedSims file for the black and brown hair including the greying variant of the hairs in the elder stage. I then deleted the age categories except elder via SimPE. I then binned them via the hair binner without having "1 grey for all hairs" and "same familly for all hairs" selected (check the screenshots for the complete set of settings I used) and applied that to both files with the greying elder hairs. Somehow, they still appear in the hair bin of the other colours (red and blonde), even in game.

So, did I do something wrong here or is this just CAS playing games on me (as you said CAS can be a bit iffy sometimes with not showing things correctly)?

Thank you for all the help you've given me with my meshing and recolouring project btw! I know I ask a lot of questions. I just want to become better at this stuff. And you've helped me a ton! So thank you!

Are you re.binning already binned hairs? Or binning hairs where you've removed resource files or ages in SimPE? That could be the problem.

For best results, try to bin hairs that haven't been binned or tinkered with before (other than texture edits). The hair binner deletes certain resource files, so trying to rebin or bin with resources that don't exist might not get you the result you want.

If the first picture is from the elder category, keep in mind that elder hair is binned in a separate category, so all elder hairs will show in the grey bin, regardless of color. Sims do technically have their original hair color, so they'll get the proper hair color with the proper age if the hair is binned properly. That bin shows all "grey" elder hairs, whether they are grey, brown, black, blonde, red, purple, green, yellow or rainbow colored, though. As long as they're binned as "grey" they show up in the "grey" bin. That bin does get cluttered.

If you're unsure whether the hairs are binned properly, I can check them for you if you upload them.

I binned the unbinned files and removed the age files after that via SimPE (The first time around I made the mistake of doing it the other way around). Although the elder hairs do still show up in the wrong hair colour bins in game, but I do think they're binned correctly this time. I included screenshots from the brown hair file with the greying brown hair from SimPE. The brown greying hair is not shown in any other hair file in SimPE. That's why I think they're binned correctly.