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Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#1 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 12:41 AM Last edited by CmarNYC : 25th Nov 2011 at 9:07 PM.
Default Clothing meshing for dummies
There are other custom clothing and meshing guides out there, but since I'm still a dummy when it comes to a lot of this stuff I thought I'd be qualified to write a tutorial that tries to be very beginner-friendly. Like you, I'll be learning some of this as I go along.

I'll be covering a lot of the same ground as an excellent series of tutorials by Wes Howe, but using some different and more recent tools. He goes into more detail and more advanced topics than I will, so I highly recommend going through his series also. http://customsims3.com/pedia/doku.p...ontent_creation

All lessons will cover making a custom clothing part start to finish. The topics I hope to cover eventually are:

1. A simple mesh alteration (beginner meshing)
2. Adding a pregnant morph (morphs)
3. Adding vertices and faces to a mesh (bones, vertex renumbering, morphs)
4. Adding a new part to a mesh (more on faces, UV mapping)
5. TBD
6. TBD

Definition of terms:

CAS : Create A Sim - the game tool for creating sims and picking clothes for them
CC : Custom Content - what we're trying to make here!
CTU : CAS Texture Unitool - Delphy's wonderful tool for extracting the parts you need for custom clothing and putting them back together in a usable package
Mesh : a geometry file describing a three dimensional shape made up of polygons
Milkshape : a shareware meshing tool that most Sims meshers use, by Mete Ciragan
MorphMaker : a tool for converting morph meshes into useable game content, by me
Package : a .package file that contains the files for an item of custom clothing
Postal : a lovely tool for package exploration and editing, by Echo
s3pe : Sims3 Package Editor - an indispensable tool for working with packages, by Peter and Inge Jones

Tools you'll need:

CTU - runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Requires .NET Framework 2.0 (included in 3.5 for Windows 7 users) and DirectX Runtime - if it won't run, you probably don't have one or both of those correctly installed. (I also found it wouldn't work in a Program Files folder, probably because of Windows 7 file protections.)

Milkshape 3D - 30-day trial, after which you pay $35 USD or 25 EUR which includes all future upgrades. If you're serious about meshing for Sims3 or a host of other games, it's well worth the price. Windows only.

Q-mesh plugins for Milkshape, by Wes Howe. You need these to import and export meshes to/from Milkshape, and for some other meshing tools.

MorphMaker - Windows only.

Postal - Java-based, runs on Windows and Mac
and/or
s3pe - Windows, and Mac/Linux with limitations.

You'll also need a way to extract .rar files to install the above. Personally I use 7-zip.
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Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#2 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 12:46 AM Last edited by CmarNYC : 29th Mar 2010 at 1:37 AM.
Default A simple mesh alteration
If you've just installed Milkshape you'll need to do a couple of things to get it ready for use with Sims3 meshes. First, install the Q-mesh plugins by opening the .rar file and copying or extracting the .dll files to C:\Program Files\MilkShape 3D 1.8.5\ or C:\Program Files (x86)\MilkShape 3D 1.8.5\ on a 64-bit system. If you've installed Milkshape in another folder you're presumably advanced enough to find it okay. If you can't extract or copy the files directly from the .rar, try putting them on your desktop first and then do a cut and paste into the Milkshape folder. (Folder protection may stop you from extracting directly.)

Then start Milkshape. Click on the Groups tab on the right side of the window, and clear the 'Auto Smooth' checkbox. Click 'File' on the menu and go to Preferences, click the Misc tab, and change the 'Joint Size' to something like 0.015. (If you get weird shading effects or if you open a mesh and see a mess of blue circles, you've forgotten to do one of these steps.) Optionally, you can click the Joints tab on the right side of the window and clear the 'Show Skeleton' checkbox, so you won't see the underlying skeleton while working with the mesh. (The examples will have the skeleton hidden.)



At this point would be a good time to make a folder for your work files. I'm going to call mine DummyMesh1.

Now let's get a mesh to work with. For this exercise we're going to take the adult male Muscle Shirt and make it longer so it goes over the hips. Open up CTU and select Adult for Age, Male for Gender, and Top for Type. Either select ShirtMuscle in the Mesh dropdown, or just look for its picture and click the thumbnail.



Click the 'Extract Meshes' button and find your work folder to extract the meshes into. If all goes well, you should end up with a .vpxy file which we won't need, and three .simgeom files. The .simgeom files are your meshes.



Why three meshes? One of the ways the game saves on resources and processing time is to use a highly detailed mesh for close views, less detail for medium distance, and still less for far distance like town views. Exactly which Level Of Detail is used at what distance depends on your video settings. There are four levels of detail in the game, but only three are used for clothing. They are called lod1, lod2, and lod3. (Lod0, very high detail, is used for faces and hair.) It's highly recommended to modify at least the lod2 mesh in addition to lod1, even for small changes, since in a game running on Low Sim Detail that lod2 is going to show up pretty close. However, in these exercises we'll only be working with lod1.

Now we're ready for the actual meshing. Start Milkshape if it isn't still open. Click File, Import, and 'Q-Mesh Sims 3 GEOM Importer V0.16 - by Wesley Howe'. (You can't use Open because that uses the default Milkshape format.) Find the folder with your .simgeom mesh files and select the one starting with 'amTopShirtMuscle_lod1'.



You'll get a popup message saying: 'Unable to locate bone file - default skeleton used'. Ignore that; all it means is that the importer plugin can't find the specific skeleton for that mesh and will use a default instead. With some meshes you may also get an error saying 'Hashed bone not in skeleton'. In most cases you can safely ignore that too.

Now you should have a screen that looks like this:



Note that the arms and hands are included in the mesh - it's not just the shirt, it's the entire top half of the body from neck to waist.

We'll mostly be using the Select and Move buttons. If the right side with the buttons doesn't look like the picture, make sure you have the 'Model' tab selected.

Click Select, and a 'Select Options' section should show up. Make sure Vertex is selected, and leave the Ignore Backfaces box unchecked. Take a look at the Milkshape screen - it's divided into four quarters showing different views of the mesh. You can change those views by right-clicking on a view and selecting a different projection. The bottom right view is the only one you can rotate freely.



To get a little more workable view, we need to zoom in and move the mesh around. Click on the top left (front projection) view and use your scroll wheel to zoom. Pressing shift will make it zoom faster. Then press Ctrl and use the mouse to drag the mesh into a better position. The lower right view works a little differently - moving the mouse will rotate the mesh in all three dimensions. Using the scroll wheel and shift-scroll work the same (except for me at least the zoom is in the opposite direction), and pressing Shift while moving the mouse up and down will give you a smooth zoom. As with the other views, Ctrl and mouse will let you drag the mesh to a better position. If you do something wrong and lose sight of the mesh (it happens!) right-click and click 'Reset view', then if needed zoom in until you see the mesh.

Okay, now we should be all zoomed in to where we can see the waist part of the mesh clearly from the front and side. The little dots you see in the wireframe (dots and lines) views are the vertices. The lines between them show how they're linked into faces. The entire mesh is made up of triangular faces.

The next step is to select the parts we want to move. Click on the front projection (top left), and drag a selection box with the mouse around the bottom of the shirt. All the vertices inside your selection box should turn red.



Check to make sure you've got only the bottom three rings of vertices selected in the waist part of the mesh. (It's easier to see in the side view.) If you need to de-select a vertex or several vertices, press the shift key and de-select them with the right mouse button. To add more vertices to the selection, press the shift key and select them with the left mouse button.

Now, go back to the right side of the Milkshape screen and click the Move button. In either the front or side views, drag with the mouse to move the selected vertices down a little. Try to move them straight down, using the grid lines as a guide.



Then go to the right side again and click Select. Click anywhere in the wireframe views to clear your vertex selection, and then select the bottom two circles. Click the move button and lower them a little again. (If you mess up at any point, Edit/Undo is a lifesaver.) Follow the same steps to select and lower only the bottom ring and the ring of the edge of the shirt just inside it. You should end up with it looking like this, with the bottom three rings of vertices nicely spaced out:



And let's expand the bottom of the shirt to make it fit over the hips and butt. Select the bottom two circles again, and this time click the Scale button on the right side of the window. Change the number over the X button to 1.05 and the Z button to 1.10. X is width, Z is depth (front to back), and Y is height, by the way. Click the Scale button next to the numbers and you should see those selected rows of vertices expand a little.

Switch to Move again, click in the side view, and move the vertices to the rear a little.



Now we're ready to save our work. Click File, Export, 'Q-Mesh Sims 3 GEOM Exporter V0.16 - by Wesley Howe'. Give your exported file a name - I'll call mine 'LongerMuscleShirt'. Now you should have an additional .simgeom mesh file in your work folder - LongerMuscleShirt.simgeom in my case.



All we have to do is package it up for the game. Go back to CTU. If you closed it or poked around with it, select the original ShirtMuscle again first. Then click the 'Designs' tab - we need to have a texture for the mesh to give it a design, colors, etc. Click the 'Add new Design' button and then 'Copy All From Base'. (If you want to change the default colors the shirt shows up with in CAS, You can do it in the Patterns tab. That's beyond the scope of this tutorial, though.)



Click the 'Meshes' tab, and look at the section under 'New Mesh'. Enter your name for your new mesh in the Mesh Name entry and find the space labeled "LOD1:". Click the '...' button next to it and select your new mesh.



What are the LOD1_1, etc., you ask? Some clothing consists of more than one mesh - usually the additional meshes are separate parts like a pocket, a decoration, or so on. That's what the additional entries are for. We'll only be using the main mesh entry for LOD1.

Now click 'Commit' next to the Mesh Name field. Click File in the menu bar and Save As. You'll be prompted for a package name - I'll use LongerMuscleShirt again. Save the package in your work folder.

You need to get the package into your game - if you use an installer you can use that, or copy it into your mods\packages folder. (If you have trouble with this part, please read the excellentInstalling Package Files section here on MTS.)

And here it is in CAS, with the original shirt right under it in the thumbnails.



Notes:

For a simple mesh modification like this, it's important NOT to add or remove any vertices or to create, remove, or reorder faces. If you do, the morphs will turn ugly. We'll get to that and how to get around it in the next couple of lessons.

Remember that we only did the lod1 mesh for this lesson. When you do meshing for real, you should also do at least lod2, and lod3 for anything more than a fairly minor change. Modify the meshes the same way as for lod1, and import all three meshes into CTU in the fields for LOD1, LOD2, and LOD3 just as shown above for LOD1. Then do your Save As and CTU will make a package with all three meshes.

Until next time, happy meshing!
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#3 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 12:48 AM Last edited by CmarNYC : 26th May 2010 at 3:22 AM.
Default 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:
File Type: zip  BasePregForms.zip (188.2 KB, 707 downloads) - View custom content
Description: Pregnant guide meshes
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#4 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 12:53 AM
Default Adding vertices and faces to a mesh
Reserved
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#5 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 12:55 AM
Default Adding a new part to a mesh
Reserved
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#6 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 12:59 AM
Default Tbd1
Reserved
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#7 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 1:03 AM
Default Tbd2
Reserved
Sockpuppet
#8 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 8:42 AM
This will be much appreciated!
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#9 Old 29th Mar 2010 at 1:34 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Base1980
This will be much appreciated!


Thanks - I see so many people who are eager to learn but don't know the basics you need to understand the more advanced and specialized tutorials - this is for them.
Test Subject
#10 Old 30th May 2010 at 4:18 AM
It really help !!! Thanks , just some i don;t understand (casue my English is not good) and do i have to use S3P can i use TSR workshop ???
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#11 Old 30th May 2010 at 1:03 PM
Nhut1000: I've never used TSR Workshop and don't know exactly what it can and can't do, but probably yes.
Lab Assistant
#12 Old 12th Jun 2010 at 5:20 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Nhut1000
It really help !!! Thanks , just some i don;t understand (casue my English is not good) and do i have to use S3P can i use TSR workshop ???




You can use TSRW, but some of the body meshes extracted with TSRW has a weird problem; It will WON'T import back! If this happens, you have no choice but to find a mesh that will import back.
Test Subject
#13 Old 14th Jun 2010 at 9:05 AM
How do I preview it without going into the game? after im done with it and everything?
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#14 Old 14th Jun 2010 at 12:12 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Aleesa666
How do I preview it without going into the game? after im done with it and everything?


I don't know of any easy way to preview - the only thing I can think of is to save the pregnant morph as a regular mesh and import it into CTU, but I've never done this.
Test Subject
#15 Old 15th Jun 2010 at 3:09 AM
I mean the clothing. I made a AF Shirt and i went into game and my game crashed when i went into cas screen. So i was hoping there was a way to preview the clothes without going into game.
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#16 Old 15th Jun 2010 at 11:37 AM
Use CTU to preview.
Banned
#17 Old 15th Jun 2010 at 4:05 PM Last edited by HugeLunatic : 15th Jun 2010 at 6:16 PM. Reason: please use edit button, do not double post
Quote: Originally posted by CmarNYC
Now, go back to the right side of the Milkshape screen and click the Move button. In either the front or side views, drag with the mouse to move the selected vertices down a little. Try to move them straight down, using the grid lines as a guide.


I am finding that using scale instead of move might actually work better than moving rows of vertices individually. You can limit the scaling to one dimension -- in this case the Y axis.

Another trick which is invaluable is the ability to hide vertices. When you have a trickier mesh, you can hide the vertices that get in the way of selecting the vertices you actually want to edit.

Quote: Originally posted by sims_reality
You can use TSRW, but some of the body meshes extracted with TSRW has a weird problem; It will WON'T import back! If this happens, you have no choice but to find a mesh that will import back.


I use TSRW all the time, but some outfits are a problem. When I look at the exported meshes, I find that the different morphs have a different number of vertices! Of course this will cause you all sorts of grief when you try to re-import the mesh. (Blasted fat morph is usually the problem!)

Sometimes I have experimented with exporting a mesh, then immediately re-importing the same mesh without any edits -- and getting an error message.

The nice thing about TSRW is that it is pretty slick and pretty easy to use. The bad thing is that it is still rather buggy. It's great for simple projects, however.
Test Subject
#18 Old 16th Jun 2010 at 4:37 AM
i do but it stays the same. im doin everything right. is there a specific place to export and save it? I made a folder, user/documents/MESHES. maybe ill try again and see if anything changes.
Lab Assistant
#19 Old 12th Jul 2010 at 5:22 PM


So, I tried making that tank top longer, but then this happened. How much did I need to, for lack of a better word, widen the vertices?
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
Original Poster
#20 Old 12th Jul 2010 at 9:27 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Sydlet

So, I tried making that tank top longer, but then this happened. How much did I need to, for lack of a better word, widen the vertices?


For the male tank top I used 1.05 for X (side to side) and 1.10 for Z (front to back). For the female version you should scale the X bigger, like maybe 1.15, and smooth it out a little at the waistline.

This whole process involves a fair amount of trial and error. One way to make it easier would be to import a bottom mesh so you can see how your lengthened shirt fits over it. Just be sure to move only the shirt vertices by hiding the bottom while you select and unhiding when you need to see it.
Field Researcher
#21 Old 14th Jul 2010 at 3:50 AM
i'm running CTU on my mac using mono. when i choose adult>female>top an annoying box pops up asking me to find my sims 3 root folder. on no other tutorials did i find this mentioned and i cant find my root folder because the only option i get is "desktop" and my root folder isnt located on my desktop.. i cant get passed this step even if i press cancel. does anyone have any experience with this?? maybe i'm posting this in the wrong place..
Screenshots
Sockpuppet
#22 Old 16th Jul 2010 at 4:41 PM
Quote: Originally posted by iheartcowcapoos
i'm running CTU on my mac using mono. when i choose adult>female>top an annoying box pops up asking me to find my sims 3 root folder. on no other tutorials did i find this mentioned and i cant find my root folder because the only option i get is "desktop" and my root folder isnt located on my desktop.. i cant get passed this step even if i press cancel. does anyone have any experience with this?? maybe i'm posting this in the wrong place..


My first thought was: click my computer and search your harddisk but i already read somewhere that it just brings you back to your desktop files eh?
Can you confirm that?
Test Subject
#23 Old 16th Jul 2010 at 4:51 PM
wow this is great. Finally someone willing to teach us beginners.
Test Subject
#24 Old 26th Jul 2010 at 1:11 PM Last edited by jemon : 26th Jul 2010 at 2:35 PM.
Wow, thanks!
I just tried to make a quick edit, but the mesh stays the same in CTU, if that's meant to happen, is there any way of previewing my new meshes without opening the game up?
Nope, I've fixed that, just open the .package up :P

Anyway, thanks I was expecting it to be a lot more complicated that it is :D

What if I want to convert something between ages, how hard is that?

And, I want to make a set of big bangles, I've got the meshes from the bangles from base TS3, but there's only three, will it work if I copy and move them? Or will the animations go funny?
Test Subject
#25 Old 8th Aug 2010 at 6:28 PM
Omg!!!!!!! i like love you now!!!! (not in a weird way :D)
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