I’ve done two requests for these now, and I’m not in a mood to do any more, so I thought I’d make a quick tutorial.

Let’s start with explaining what we’re going to do:
Most maxis hats are enabled for everyday wear only (a very few are also available in formal), that’s fine; sims look strange sleeping with their hat on anyway. What we are going to change is the hair the sim wears when the hat comes off. The default is usually the Elvis hair or the short cropped one for males, and the shortish tucked behind the ears hair for females; neither of those are very inspiring.
In this example I’m going to use all maxis hairs and hats, but the same principle can be applied to any hair package with or without hats.

Tools you will need:
Bodyshop SimPE Theo’s Colour Binning Plug-in for SimPE Difficulty: Medium at worst

Step one: Bodyshop
Open Bodyshop.
Select “Create Parts”.
Select “Start New Project”
Pick “Create Genetics”
Click on the Hair icon.
Choose hair colour. (I’m using blond since it shows best in dark pictures.)
Find the hat you want to work with. For this example I’m using the straw hat.

Select it, and click the export button. Give the project a name; I’m calling mine TheHat for simplicity’s sake.
The preview window should now show you the hat, and all its current states.

This hat only shows as a hat for teens to elders, children and toddlers only have the basic “underneath” hair. This is worth noting for later when we need to find out what to do with those ages.
Since I’m not actually going to change anything about the hat, I’ll just import it straight back into the game.
The file will go into your SavedSims folder, and it will have a name along the lines of 634c1f45_TheHat.package

Now let’s find a better hair style for when the hat comes off:
Start a new project just like the first one, and look for a hair you like.

I’m going to go with the knotty hairstyle, because it’s so noticeably different from the original and because I know it works for all ages. I call this project TheHair and export it.

Again, I’ll just import it straight back into the game, and end up with a file called 3f961029_TheHair.package

That’s all we need to do in Bodyshop so let’s close it.

Step two: SimPE
A lot of people run away as soon as SimPE is mentioned. However, in this tutorial we’re only going to use the colour binning tool, and that’s not nearly as frightening as most aspects of the program.
Open SimPE.

From the tools menu, select the colour binning tool.
An almost blank and quite scary window opens:

I’m going to select the blond tab, since I’m using a blond hair as example. If you don’t care about colour binning you can use the custom tab.
Click on the package menu, and select open... Find your SavedSims folder and open the hat package.

Now we need to sort out what’s the hair and what’s the hat. In this case you can easily see the difference, both in the file name and the texture preview.
Our hat is the ones named XXhairhatclassicstrawup_blackribbon_blond the hair, which we are not going to use, is XXhairacorntuck_blond.
Uncheck all the hair textures. There should be one for each age group, including child and toddler; we’re not using any of them. Make sure all the hat textures are checked (the elder texture is unchecked by default).


Now we’re moving on to the properties tab in the smaller window in the bottom right corner.
This hat is only enabled in the Everyday category. Since it’s such a nice hat, I think my sims will want to wear it in formal wear as well, so I’m checking that box too.

Make sure you do this for each age. Take note of which categories the hat uses.
Now, go to the Package menu and select Options. Pay attention; this is the most important part of the process!

Copy down the GUID number! This is the unique number that tells the game which hair it’s dealing with and we’ll need it to tell the other hair that it belongs to the hat.
You should also stop by the Output tab and make sure “Remove unchecked recolors” is checked (this deletes all the textures for the hair we disabled, and will reduce the file size considerably) and probably “disable source package”.

Lastly you can go to the hairtone tab and check the Hat box. It’s not important, it just affect turn-ons and turn-offs if you have nightlife, but since this is a hat you might as well check it.
Click OK.
Now, we save the file. Click on the package menu and SaveAs... I’m going to save mine in the Download folder as Strawhat.package
Since I’m using the blond tab, the package will actually be saved as Strawhat_Blond.package. And since I have “disable source package” checked, the original hat package will be renamed to 634c1f45_TheHat.packagedisabled and the game won’t try to load it. We can delete that when we’re done and sure everything is working.

That’s the hat; now let’s start on the hair.
We’ll open the hair package we made earlier in the blond tab.

You’ll see that there are fewer files in this package. Now, remember earlier we noticed that the actual hat is only available from teens and up, so here we have to decide what to do with children and toddlers. We can either leave them with the adult hair style in all categories, or remove them entirely. Since this hair is an exact copy of the one in the game, I’m going to remove them so it won’t clog the child category with unnecessary duplicates. If you want to keep them, just leave those boxes checked and don’t change their properties.
Now we open the properties tab again:

We start with the Young Adult hair, and UNcheck the categories the hat uses; in this case, everyday and formal. Do the same for adult, elder and teen.

Now comes the “merging”.
Open Options from the package menu like you did for the hat.
This is important! Paste the GUID number we copied from the hat.

These have to be exactly the same, or the game won’t understand that the hair and hat belongs together.
Click OK.

Save. I’m naming my file Strawhat_hair.package and saving it next to the hat file.

Believe it or not, that’s it. The hair and hat are in two separate files, but because they have the same GUID the game understands that they are the same hair.

Let’s close SimPE and open up the game and see if it works.

There it is!

And look, she’s still wearing her hat in formal, but she takes it off to go to bed. That’s a relief.


This can of course be applied to any kind of hair. Maybe you just want your sim to undo their pony-tail when naked, or have a slightly more sophisticated do in formal wear, or have messy undone hair while in PJs. You can do them all at once if you want: different hair styles for each outfit. As long as the GUID is the same and you don’t have duplicate categories it’ll work.

I hope this is the right place to post. It's not quite skinning, but it was the closest I could think of. Feel free to move it to a more appropriate place.

Oh, nice! Thanks for this tutorial, I had no idea this could even be done.

gwillewyn, you posted in the right place, and I just moved it into tutorials. Excellent, and your screenshots and text make it so clear what to do!

Great tutorial! Thank you so much... this gives me so many great ideas.

Just a quick question - Is it possible to remove the hat entirely? I really like the hair that comes with the santa hat for males and would love to be able to remove it.

Hat/Hair meshes as a rule do not have 'hair' underneath the hat... is there a hatless version of that hair that shows up in the game if you pick that hat and then send them swimming, or does the hair change to some other style?

Being new to this colour binning tool, I didnt know I had to download this from another site. I spent 2 hours trying to figure out what the hell this is.

This is the link for the "colour binning tool"

I must thank BeOSBoxBoy for posting this elsewhere.

Thankyou for the tutorial, you are a great blessing!

I put this information in Theo's thread here on MTS2, but I'm adding it here for those who won't see it otherwise: I have found that the "hat" checkbox does not make the game recognize the hair as a hat. (Checked by putting the hair on a sim and looking at their Nightlife qualities in SimPE.) By comparing property sets and sim qualities for several different recolors, I found that I was able to make a hair into a "hat" by changing its Property Sets "flags" string from 0x00000000 to 0x00000002. I hope this helps.

Great tut. I was just wondering is there anyway you can make a hat stay on permanately.

Thanks It really helped out in my story. I love your work.

This is very good, thanks. I was just wondering if it is possible to make this with a custom hair.

SimPE doesn't have a colour bin!!!!!How do i get it?

uh Gwillewyn were did u download it?

So this...mod thingy allows you to switch the hair underneath the hat too? Or are there more complications and such?

It's very beautiful. And I think that you can used a hair accessories . It's very beautiful.

What I'd REALLY like to know how to do is change the hair that's under the hat while the hat is still being worn... I've tried and I cannot do it. I tried removing the ponytail in the mesh but then it's just a gray ponytail shape where it used to be. I really don't even begin to KNOW how to do this. I want short emo-ish hair under the baseball cap for girls. )=

on mine the colour binning tool. isnt on it

You have to download it and install it into your SimPE. The download is here.

i have just one hairstyle. how do you get all that exist in the game? please help!!

I know this may be a silly question, but is this possible with custom content? I'm fairly new to doing all that, so I'm afraid I may screw something up. I downloaded a hat mesh for a character of mine, but I wanted him to be able to wear it in Formal as well, and I have no clue on how to change that.

In theory it should be - in practice there are bugs up the yin-yang. One serious problem is that SimPE has been massively upgraded since the tutorial was written, and no longer looks or acts quite the same. It may be necessary to process each and every hair color you want to use with the hat, rather than one shot doing it all.

I just had a very nasty go-round, ending in flat failure, with a "custom" hat that had been placed on black hair (only) and sent to Custom. Too bad, so sad, will see if my hypothesis is correct or if this just doesn't work with Custom-set hat/hair.

Update: Flat failure. Again. The files just never show up, nowhere, nohow. Even the "flags" suggestion, above, did nothing.

(Sims2Maven, previous post was 9 years old - they haven't even logged in the past few years)

Reasonably sure this tutorial is more meant for EAxis hairs. I'm not sure the same method would work for all kinds of CC hairs (or that the tutorial is even relevant now), but there are other ways to fix them, sometimes even simpler.



If the custom hair already has a hat + no-hat option (it changes depending on clothing category ingame), you can change catgories with SimPE.

Changing to formal can be done in the PropertySet, under "Category" - formal is 20, so you'll have to figure out which categories to add together in the hat-hair (formal + everyday = 27, formal + everyday + outerwear = 1027, and so on).
If the hair has a no-hat option, remove formal from the category there (minus 20 from the current category number, so if it's for instance 270 (PJs-10, undies-40, gym-200, formal-20), then removing formal would be 250.

If you plan to make recolors, do changes like this before opening Bodyshop, because then you don't have to edit it later.

I finally got what I wanted done, but it was pretty much a brute-force method (use BodyShop to export the nearest matching hairs, then copy over just the hat images, do for each hair color) and doesn't really change the hair style. (It's possible to tweak that in-game with Change Appearance, but you have to know what you're doing and what will or won't work.)

What were you trying to do?

If you have Seasons (or above), you don't really need to make hairs that have both options (quite frankly, they're mostly annoying), because as long as the hat-hair is available for all categories, it can be set as whichever category you want ingame - both in CAS and with a mirror. For two non-matching CC hairs, this is usually the best option, since the hair combo would require two sets of meshes (and possibly textures) anyway.

It's fairly easy to change hairs just via the categories (with SimPE or similar tools). If you then make new recolors, the changes will stick. Then you'll just have to bin the hairs as you'd normally do.