Hello. I was trying to edit a pair of ts4 boots to make lace-up tall boots for males. However, it exploded in CAS so I think I have to cap the mesh size at around 200 kb. My issue is it's impossible to decimate it that much without parts of it collapsing. I really like this mesh and would like to know if there's a way to make it work in ts3

In the meantime, I tried to frankenmesh two lower poly ts3 boots together to get the look I wanted, but the UV got all mixed together. How do I align the top half of the boots to the shoelace texture of the bottom half?

I've included both boots just in case, but I'd like to know which one I should stick to for the rest of the process.

While the high-poly ones are on the high end in terms of how unoptimised or appropriate for the game they would be, they're not so high that they're incompatible with morphs. If they were exploding, there was something wrong with your morphs or the IDs of the mesh.
Shoes can have 10k unique vertex IDs, and when I renumbered that mesh they only had 4576. The issue is elsewhere.

The vast majority of the polys are in those laces though. The boot itself is 3k, the laces are 5k- it's a bit absurd.
I would separate them (easy to do from the UV map) and either decimate them on their own, or delete them and make new 2D ones.

The UVs on the top half of the boot have already unwrapped themselves and broken from not being split first. There's no salvaging them from that state unless you have an older version of the file to roll back to- but if you do, I think both projects would be worthwhile. Both would teach you different skills, and you would get two creations to enjoy at the end

To salvage that mesh is some work, but your mesh can be done. To re- unwrap in Blender 2.9x (I'm using 3.6LTS), select all and merge by distance with sharp edges on, then in UV edit, seams from islands. On mesh side, select a seam, then use select similar seams. Then mesh, split faces by edges. That's the basics. If you export as object, convert and transfer bones in MTK, splitting is done automatically in MTK.

Next, select the edges that run along the back of the boot upper, and mark as seam, then split. Select all and unwrap.


If you want to split front and back of upper, you must use knife tool to cut a new edge, because of how much the boots were decimated.


Unsplit the seam on the back edge.

You can select just the boot upper, and unwrap.


Yes, laces are very high poly, and basic morphs from a transfer explode spectacularly in most cases. The morphs must be hand made, but it is a long and tedious process the way I do it. Sorry I never finished the tutorial I was working on.


An FYI regarding tall boots... you can have textures that cover the lower leg area, since the boots will hide the texture that will end up on the legs. BUT, you MUST keep the texture below where the leg needs to show skin texture. Stretching your texture a little will make it easier to then match the UV to it, which you must do manually, with texture imaging on.