Hi excuse me will blender work for this because milkshape wont work on my pc and I cant afford it!

All of the same principles apply, but the tools and interface in Blender are rather different. The step-by-step instructions and pictures in these tutorials will only work in Milkshape but you can do the same things in Blender. I know there are import/export plugins for Blender too but don't know details of how they work.

Does anyone know if there's a way to get Maya to recognise and/or import the mesh files? I'd really prefer to use the 3D software I've already paid for, with which I'm proficient, than pay for something new that I've never used before.

Hey I really want to thank you for your tutorial!

I successfully (kind of ) made the male hoddie longer, yay~
but then I tried it in game and something's not right with the skin on the neck...It doesn't happen with the original hoodie or any other clothings though...is there any way to fix it?

Thankssss !



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Did you forget to uncheck Auto Smooth when you set up Milkshape? That could cause the seam effect at the neck. If so, you'll have to start over and do the mesh again.

If it's not Auto Smooth, did you do anything to the vertices at the neck?

arhh~~~the box has been checked again somehow
repeated the procedures and it worked great!
thankyou sooooo much! =D
now looking into UV mapping to fix the texture
lol can't wait to have my first work done thanks thanks~~

Glad to help!

I just want to say that you're fabulous!!!
I thought meshing was going to be many times harder than it is.
I suppose it will be for changing something completely but now I can actually practice!!!
Thank you.!!!!!

I have a question......or 2.
I wanted to make a sims3 long dress to flow out.
I changed the lod1, 2,&3 meshes as close to each other as possible by counting exactly how many times I scaled, moved etc.
I used the same base textures too.
The only thing is, when i try to open the file with TSRW, I get an error and the project won't load properly.
If I export the meshes as obj files, I can import them into TSRW that way.
My meshes look ok in CTU but not in TSRW.
Am I doing anything wrong?

Also if I want to put a pattern on my new item, it's all stretched out.
Is there a way to fix this?


Sorry for the questions!!!

I'm sorry but I've never used TSRW and can't answer that part of your question. Since TSRW works with the base mesh and the morph meshes together, my guess is that you have to use it for the entire process - export the meshes with it, work with them in Milkshape, and import. If you don't want to do that, stick with CTU for this project.

The reason your pattern is stretched out is that the vertices of the mesh are mapped to the texture. You've moved the vertices farther apart, so the texture is stretched to fit. What you need to do is change the texture mapping to get better proportions. I'll get to that in a future section of this tutorial, but here's a quickie using Milkshape:

Click the Materials tab in the right-hand section
In the bottom group of buttons, click New
In the middle group of buttons, click the top <none> button
Navigate to your texture image and select it
Right-click in the bottom right view (the solid view of the mesh) and click 'Textured'
Go to the Groups tab and click the Select button to select the entire mesh
Back to the Materials tab and in the bottom group of buttons click Assign
You should now see the texture drawn on the mesh.
Now go to the menus across the top and click Window, then Texture Coordinate Editor
You should see your mesh mapped on the texture in the window that pops up.

You can use the buttons on the right of this window to select and move the vertices to get a better mapping. I have to warn you, though, that the game maps specific areas of the body onto specific parts of the textures, and if you try spreading the skirt to the sides you may find something like the shoes textures showing up on the skirt. A really wide skirt may simply have to use a solid color. If you look around, there are various threads where people like Bloom have posted a map of the texturing areas, so you could see what the potential overlaps would be.

Hope this helps!

I will try this out.
Thank you so much!!

Just one more teeny question!!!
If the item I've changed originally had straps and I don't want them.
I jst get rid of them in the multiplier and specular.
They can still be seen on the skin as if the skin is raised.
I've read that this is a 'bump map'
How do I get rid of this or change it?

:D

Daluved1 did an excellent video tutorial on flattening bump maps, which is what you need to do to get rid of that raised effect. You can either flatten the whole normal as in the tut or just the straps. Here: http://thesimsupply.com/showthread.php?tid=244

She uses Photoshop. If you need to see how to edit the alpha in GIMP, I'm thinking of doing a mini-tutorial on alphas in GIMP since it comes up so much. I've talked about it in my tattoos tutorial so you could look it up there.

Thank you so much for this Cmar!!!!
You have been a great help!

I do have Gimp as I find it easy to use.
I also have your tattooinator.

Glad to help!! :D

I'll admit I'm completely new to the whole meshing thing. I've followed Tutorial II all the way to the end on several occasions now, but when I get to the "Create BGEO" part. The file either doesn't work (It won't let me make the file), or it says I don't have a morph mesh, or simply stops working entirely. I simply don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I'm following everything to the letter.

I know this probably isn't very helpful, but I'm confused as to what I'm doing wrong. I've redone this tutorial six times now, in an effort to get it to work. Since it seems simple enough, anyway. But alas, I can't get past the final part. Is there any advice or suggestions you might be able to give me?

I'll need the exact error messages you're getting, with a screen shot showing the MorphMaker screen with your files selected if possible. Also can you post your morph mesh and the base mesh if it's not game clothing?

Actually I did manage to get it to ultimately work, and since I got one working I should be okay with fooling around with other types of changes.

As for the error(s), I never received a popup beyond "(insert file path directory.geom) is not a morph mesh." When attempting to create the BGEO file when the button actually progressed further than simply stopping at the point of clicking on it.

To elaborate on the won't allow me to make the file problem, it simply wouldn't process beyond after I clicked the "Create BGEO" button. After several minutes, it simply wouldn't progress and I thought I'd have to start over from the previous step. Which lead to the "stop working entirely" comment. I'm sorry if that's not descriptive enough, as far as I know it seemed I was just importing the wrong files (over and over).

The 'not a morph mesh' does indicate that you were probably importing the base mesh instead of the morph.

The freezing problem seems to be a bug in the platform I use to make these programs, or maybe an incompatibility with Windows 7. Most, maybe all people using Win 7 get the same thing. If you wait a minute it should start working again.

Hi, I'm not getting the 'Q-Mesh Sims 3 GEOM Importer V0.16 - by Wesley Howe' in the import menu, and I have installed the .dll files in the correct MilkShape directory. Have any clue why this might be?

No - all I can suggest is that you double-check that they're in the right directory, and restart Milkshape.

If I wanted to make a shirt shorter how do I do that without making the body underneath disappear too?

That's a much bigger project - you would have to do what we call a Frankenstein: combining parts of two meshes. You'd have to take the shirt mesh and chop off the lower part, take a nude mesh and chop off the arms and upper part, and fit them together. Then you'd have to rebuild all the morphs.

There are now tools to do all that fairly quickly and easily although it's not a beginner project. I do intend to continue this series of tutorials with a section on Frankensteining, especially now that you've asked about it.

Here's a good guide to using CTU that should tell you what you want to know about custom patterns, among other things: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title...igning#Patterns

It's tempting to think of the clothing meshes as parts that go over a sim body, but that's not the case. Each clothing mesh IS the body, shaped to look like the clothing. It's all hollow inside, with no separate body underneath. This is why when you cut off part of the skirt you get a hole - there's nothing there to replace the part that's gone. If you want to make any mesh reveal more of the body you have to supply those body parts. If you want to make a skirt shorter the best way is to cut it just below the length you want, take a nude mesh and cut the hips off, and join the two by bending the last row of vertices of the skirt inside and up to meet the tops of the legs. (A little hard to visualize, but look under the skirt of a game skirt mesh to see what I mean.) As I said above, you then have to rebuild all your morphs.

You can extract the nude meshes using CTU like any other mesh. There's a top nude and a bottom nude for each gender.

In the case above, you'd modify your meshes as described and import them into CTU as lod 1 and lod 1_1. Repeat the chopping and joining for lod 2 and import as lod 2 and lod 2_2. Unfortunately at this point there's only one slot for lod 3, so you could try just shaping the mesh to make the skirt shorter and the legs longer. You can also manually edit your package to add another mesh for lod 3 - here's the tutorial if you want to try it: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=445332

First of all, thanks SO much for posting such a simple and easy to understand tutorial for beginners like me. I figured a pregnant morph would be an easy place to start with customizing content for my game, so I have been practicing away, making pregnant morphs for a number of expansion pack items that were not enabled for pregnancy. I was pretty successful at first, and had lots of fun seeing things I did show up in game. However, I've since run into a problem and I cannot figure out what's wrong, despite my best efforts at reading through everything I can find about morphs.

For some of the items I've created with this tutorial, everything works fine (well, except for some weird clipping issues on the tops and bottoms that are purely the result of my novice meshing skills -- but now that I've read through everything I can find about morphs, I know how to fix that!)

Anyway, for some of the items I have created, following the same instructions, the clothing shows up in CAS with my new color schemes, I can select it with no problem, and it stays on the Sim as maternity wear, but the morph never shows up. The Sim just stays flat-stomached until birth. I've verified (as far as I can tell) that the CASP file points to the right Blend file which points to the right BGEO file in my package, and I've re-done some of the items two or three times to make sure I haven't inadvertantly left out a step somewhere, but each time I have the same problem...

The only thing I can think of (again, as a COMPLETE novice) is that I am mistakenly using the lod2 mesh as lod1 or something, because the GEOM files are not easily labeled when I extract them. (I have been using S3PE to extract the CASP file for each garment as a package, following the instructions here: http://www.sexysims2.com/wiki.php?t...ontent_with_CTU , and then opening that package in CTU to extract the meshes.) After I open each of the GEOMs in Milkshape, though, I check the number of vertices, and assume that the one with the most vertices must be lod1, etc.

Any suggestions? Is this a common problem that other people have had, or am I just borking things up with my newbie's touch?

If you have a chance to answer, I'll really appreciate it. Thanks again for the great tutorial!