Tiggerypum, first of all I want to say a great huge THANK YOU for this and all your other tutorials. I never, ever thought I could learn how to make even the slightest modification to a TS2 mesh, but you have shown me that it's actually possible. On top of that, you're a great teacher, and just generally brilliant.

Unfortunately, I'm obviously not quite as brilliant. I thought I was following this tut to the letter - at least everything looked like in your screenshots and all descriptions of what was happening fit - but when I got to step 61 and was going to check out my new mesh in Body Shop, it looked like the screenshot. The UV map looks OK and I haven't even touched the skin or alpha... so obviously, I went terribly wrong with the mesh somewhere - but I have absolutely no idea where. Do you have any idea what I've done? And how I can correct it? (I have a nagging suspicion the solution might be just to start all over, but before I do that I'm curious to know what I did so I can avoid doing it again.)

Addendum: I tried it all again, on a completely different mesh. This time everything worked perfectly, so maybe there's hope for me after all. But I still have no idea where I went wrong the first time, so any imput you - or anybody else - might have is greatly appreciated!

Again, THANK YOU for this tutorial! You are awesomely awesome! :D

mookie - shutting down like that must be a milkshape error. I haven't heard of it in a while, I remember it being mentioned in the unimesh thread. Make sure you have the newest unimesh installed. If that doesn't help, check at the milkshape site, I believe there was something you can download there if you're having crashing problems that's an alternative way for it to do some functions.

Nixnivis, I'm glad you got it working! And to be honest, it looks like your uvmap got damaged and I have no idea how. If that happens _again_ maybe you should upload the project to a new thread (with manage attachments) so people can have a look at it.

Tiggerypum, thanks a lot for the great tutorials. I followed everything in the guide, but I have a couple of problems with my mesh. I circled the problems in the picture. I've done everything I can think of to fix it: using the alignment tool to smooth out the faces, snapping vertices together instead of the extend tool, and fixing up the uv map. Unfortunately, nothing worked.

The two meshes I used was the afbottomslinkyskirtboots and afbottomshortskirtshoes. I replaced the waistline and shoes of the short skirt with the parts from the slinky skirt.

Well, first, on the waistline - the difference in color (assuming you stayed away from changing the normals or touching the rows of vertices right near the waistline) is because unimesh doesn't have bumpmaps and maxis outfits do. So... if you did change things on the waistline, you probably want to re-do that part of the mesh. You can then later try and add bumpmaps back with smd format, but it's likely not going to be perfect, although it should be close.

The 'seam on back' looks like a uvmap problem. When you look at your uvmap, are some parts of it overlapping? Looks like part of the gray area is repeating, is that the issue? Or if your uvmap looks perfect, go look again at your alpha and make sure it lines up with your uvmap.

The shoe/boot - same thing. Look at your alpha and texture and uvmap.

The other thing is that maybe what you're getting is a gap/separation on the mesh. If you've snapped the vertices and it looks perfect in milkshape, then the issue is the bone assignments. Select each vertice (which is actually several) and use the unimesh bone tool and make sure they have _identical_ assignments. Ankles have complex assignments, as do buttocks - and those assignments will vary slightly from one mesh to the next - so when you combine meshes you will need to pick assignments from one of the two meshes (or average them) but do an 'apply all' 'commit all' to each vertex group in order to have them then animate as one.

Thanks, your advice really helped. The seams were taken care of when I did the bone assignment. And it took me forever to figure out that I could switch between groups on the texture editor. I thought the texture for the fat body was it, so nothing I did helped. Thanks a lot! :D

P.S. For the top mesh, I think I'll just cut the waist off a swimsuit mesh and stick it on instead.

Aww, i thought i had to weld all vertices together when adding a new part, this is gonna save me alot off time on my next project....ty

bLURR,

There were changes made to Milkshape at Wes' request so that the original normals as assigned by Maxis would be better preserved.... as such Welding is now mostly a bad idea if you have body meshes loaded - and not necessary even if you don't.

Snap the vertices (or edit the vertices to have the same x y z values)
Make sure bone assignments are identical
Use Demon's tools (which has a special align normals command) to smooth the normals

The wonderful thing about Demon's tool is that you can select vertices and it will only align the normals at that spot, it won't redo the whole mesh on you!

thank you

PFIOUUU

thank you!! That was incredible again! I can't imagine how many time you spent on this tutorial, since me, who only had to follow it.. spent half a day to finish it...

What I like in this tutorial is you never conclude things are okay for us, you're always going back on steps we might have missed, even if you don't need it.
You would be a good teacher!!!

Never noticed these new tutorials before. Incidentally, I've been combining mesh parts before and glad to find out I've been doing them right (and indeed they work in the game) :D

Your tutorials are really well-written. Thanks for ALL your help!

I do have a question though. Is there a faster way to copy rows of data in Extended Manual Edit plugin? I mean, instead of copying the values field by field (X, Y, Z, bones, etc.)? I always had the impression I've been doing it the hard way. In any case, this task takes up a considerable amount of meshing time.

It takes up a lot of time, and no... I believe it was requested of the author of the tools, but the changes were never implemented to my knowledge. Yeah, very fiddly work, very repetitious.

Hi firstly I'd like to say thank you for all your tutorials, they are easy to follow.
I used this tutorial to edit a top part of a mesh to a bottom part of a different mesh but in body shop and in game there is a gap between the two, it looks fine in milkshape.
For part 3 I used vertex - snap together. On milkshape I can't find extended manual edit I can only find manual edit. How can I fix this problem with my mesh? its as if I havent snaped them together.

Extended manual edit (and the normals fixer) is with DEMON'S TOOLS (stickied in the top of the main forum). They're listed in 'you will need'. Perhaps you downloaded them but didn't install them into your milkshape folder?

If a thin gap appears where your two mesh parts join, it's because the bone assignments are not identical on the vertices - and thus they're being pulled apart. You can use extended manual edit or you can just select the vertices and use the Unimesh bone tool and make sure they have absolutely identical values and that they add up to exactly 100%.

Yeah, I found my problem, I'd check that they all added up to 100% and they did but they had different values that added up to 100% I changed that and now it works thanks

Do you know if anyones going to make a tutorial on how yo make your own shoes as I would like to try this? Ive search MTS2 but cant find one.
Ive D/L als shoes but would like to learn how to make my own.

Christina, well there is both a simple modifying your mesh to have heels and dr pixel's tutorial that covers uvmapping shoes (which is part of the task if you make new parts). You can go far by just changing the shape of the sim's foot.

It is unlikely there will ever be a tutorial to take one step by step through making a shoe from scratch, because what you need to learn still is not sim-specific - you can learn with the generic milkshape tutorials on their site or the web. Learn how to make new shapes with it and edit them.

As this topic is departing wildly from this tutorial, if you do have more questions about making shoes, please start a new thread in the main bodyshop meshing area, thanks

Wow!!!
you are fantastic!!!!

I just tried doing this tutorial several times, but I'm always running into the same problem: Everything seems to work fine at first, but when I get to step 61 (checking the edited mesh in Bodyshop) and open the page with the female teen everyday clothes, my bodyshop crashed (error message: The application has crashed. The application will now terminate.)

Does anyone know what could cause this?

cloudlessnights - and you've done tutorial #1 and #2 and this has never happened before? You're doing this project as written it sounds like...

Well, I have done the first two tutorials without problems, but that was several weeks and one or two re-installs ago, so I'm not sure how much use that's going to be. However, I did make a mesh with some simple edits to both the mesh itself and the UV map recently (so basically, the same stuff described in tutorial 2), and it didn't cause any problems.

And yes, I'm doing the tutorial as it's written here.

Hmm. So, you run bodyshop and you can see the teen clothing? But then you do this tutorial, and then bodyshop crashes? And you delete the file from saved sims and bodyshop works again?

If that's the case, then there must be something in the linking that isn't working right. Are you using the SimPE that is good for your current expansion pack level? Otherwise, I would simply make a fresh recolor and do the part where you link the modified shape and cres in.

OR, as long as you're working with Maxis meshes, go take a look at the new tools by Inge and Peter : http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=187761 They come with the newest simpe, and if you read the directions, you can quickly extract your original mesh parts (and then do fix integrity) and you can also use it to link your new mesh to a recolor -- look at the directions they provide.

I'm an idiot ... *headdesks*

I know what was wrong now - I replaced the gmnd instead of the gmdc when I imported the edited mesh back into SimPE, so of course it couln't work - though why I did it right when I was simply editing meshes but managed to screw it up every single time I tried combining mesh parts I'll never know.

Sorry to needlessly bother you!

... the automated mesh extractor is very useful, though - so thanks for the link!

I'm glad you found it, and I forgot that it will make things go boom in bad ways! I did that once too, you're not alone.

This tutorial has been a HUGE help and I've been able to glide through my mesh editing without any problems... up until now. Somewhere along the way, something went wrong and I have absolutely no idea what it is, and it's not allowing me to export correctly. After I put in the filename and click save, an error pops up saying "ERR: No quaternion values stored." The resulting file does have data in it, but it's smaller than the previous version I had exported (the version I'm trying to export has many more vertices).
I know what quaternions are, but I'm not quite sure how they relate to just a mesh object with no position settings. o_O I did use Lithunwrap to do some remapping directly to the MS3D file, but I don't know if that's a cause of a problem here, it really shouldn't be... any ideas?

I am pretty sure that is your problem, the use of lithunwrap. It sounds to me like you lost some of the morph data on your mesh.

Milkshape in and of itself doesn't support morphs or mulitple bone assignments. The Unimesh plugins (in conjunction with changes that were made to milkshape) allow for extra data to be stored that is then translated into the correct format upon unimesh export. If lithunwrap supports milkshape files, it would be in the old format, and thus a bunch of the data (comments, secondary bone assignments, groups) might have been blown away.