Don't make me run

Rigging object meshes is hard, guys.  :(

cyanarosis said: You can actually remove the backfaces from a wholly grouped mesh? This would have spared me from some of the Sims 2 conversions I did. Hate resizing hairs to fit on the head so much.

Yep, you can! Super basic tutorial, with a ton of images, under the cut.

Read More

aidenscottsims asked: How do you fix those Skysims Hairs? When I try I mess up the mesh. Are there tutorials you follow or what are some of the tools and steps you take?

It’s basically a reconversion. Using milkshape, I deleted the backfaces, chopped the hair up into pieces so that each strand was in its own group, and then adjusted them individually. After that, I pretty much follow the steps in this tutorial - put the groups in the correct order, regroup, add the extra data, double check the bone assignments, add undersides, etc… I like to do it this way because it’s easier to edit the bone assignments, and I can reduce the poly count without creating any transparency issues.

If you want to make meshes less floaty without any regrouping, I would suggest using the soft modification tools in Maya or 3ds Max (you can download them for free from Autodesk’s website if you’re a student). That way you won’t end up with all those crunchy, sharp edges that usually turn up when reshaping hair meshes in milkshape.

I woke up early today, so I started fixing this mesh to kill time until hockey started.

If anyone has a link to this hair (Skysims 74) that they could send me, that would be awesome. I downloaded a retexture to get the mesh, but I’d like to have the original so I can take proper comparison pictures.

dynamicsims asked: Hey :) I've been retexturing for a while now and I think I can finally retexture and I was wondering if I ever wanna release my retextures maybe I use your control please...I will credit you :)

Yep, go ahead. As long as people aren’t using adf.ly or posting their retextures on paysites, they can do whatever they’d like with any of my textures, fixes, or meshes.

aidenscottsims asked: So I fixed and retextured a hair just to play around in Milkshape but do I need to do it to all the GEOMs or LODs? I used S3PE to extract the GEOM mesh. I only fixed the first GEOM. I assumed it was the high LOD

You should fix the two highest LODs, at least, since most people will see both of them while playing. The lower ones aren’t visible until you zoom pretty far out, so unless you’re making some major changes to the mesh, you can probably get away with leaving those as is.

The highest LOD is the one with the greatest polycount, and they aren’t always in order when you open up a package file. Extract all four GEOMs and compare them in your meshing program, and then fix the two with the largest polycounts.

Replies!

Read More