Can anyone help me with creating face sliders and hair?

[sixmillionsongbirds]

I am a complete rookie when it comes to modding. I've never used any of these programs before, but I'm really eager to learn. I want to create a slider that will affect the height of either the top of the nose or where the nostrils connect to the face. The tip of the nose is always lower than the nostrils in the game, and that doesn't work with the sim I'm trying to create! I also need to create hair. I've read a tutorial on creating the slider, but I got stuck early into it and don't know what to do next. I haven't started making the hair yet. I've read the tutorial and it seems fairly simple, but I'm certain that I will get lost somewhere along the way.

Anyway, what I want is someone with some type of knowledge of this to help me because I feel like I'm just missing something that's really simple and if I could just understand what it is, I could do this.

[CmarNYC]

I would think the easiest way to approach the slider is as a bone slider using the Nose Tip bone. Are you using Delphy's Small Tools slider tools? You would create a template slider using his template tool, then extract the bonedeltas (for left and right direction of the slider) from the package using s3pe, edit the bonedeltas with the BoneDeltaEditor to raise or lower the nose tip bone, and import them back into the package with s3pe. Of course I'm leaving out all the fiddling to get it to look right. :)

[sixmillionsongbirds]

Thank you so much for replying! I feel like a lost goose in a room full of people who know what they're doing.

I was trying to do it using your geom-based tutorial, but I got lost on step one (I know, I'm a genius!) when you said to extract the full face mesh for the adult male using postal... I opened up Postal to do that, but then I realized that I have no idea where to find that file. Is it under game files or...? So I then downloaded the facefiles.zip that you included because I figured that was the file I was looking for, but when I imported it to milkshape, it said "Unabled to locate bone file. Default skeleton used." and then another window directly after that one said "Hashed bone 0xFEAE6981 not in skeleton." So I clicked ok, and the thing that it brought up looked nothing like the face in your screenshot, or like a face at all. And that was the simple thing that I was doing wrong and I don't know how to fix... but I will read the bone-based tutorial and get Delphy's slider tool and see where that goes, though I'm certain something simple is going to happen for that one too, leaving me stuck.

[sixmillionsongbirds]

As expected, I've run into another problem! I was on step two of the bone based slider tutorial, using Delphy's CAS Slider template and when I tried to save it, I got this error:

Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attemp to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately.

Could not load type 'MadScience.Wrappers.Database' from assembly 'MadScience.Helpers. Version-1.1.3661.29520. Culture=.PublicKeyToken=null'.

I don't know what it means or how to fix it. I am so confused. :/

[CmarNYC]

Re: Problems with the geom tutorial - the messages you got when importing the face mesh in Milkshape are completely normal. The first one is because you didn't have the skeleton file (.skcon) for that particular mesh in the same folder as the mesh, so the importer used a default skeleton. This is not a problem. The second was because the mesh contains a bone that's not in the default skeleton. This is only very rarely a problem. As for the mesh not looking like a face - maybe you imported the wrong mesh? There are several meshes that make up the sim head for each lod: face and ears, eyeballs, teeth, and I don't remember what else.

Re: Problem with the bone slider tutorial - that message probably means you don't have the program set up properly. For each of Delphy's tools you should make a folder and put all the files in the zip you downloaded for that tool in the folder, then run the .exe file. Don't put all the tools in the same folder. For the slider template program, you should have these files in your folder: CASSliderTemplate.exe, MadScience.Helpers.dll, and MadScience.Wrappers.dll.

Hope this helps! Let me know. :)

[sixmillionsongbirds]

I don't know how, but I got the male face to work in milkshape!!! It looks like a face and not like crazy lines!

I tried putting the CAS Slider Template in the same folder as the madscience.helpers.dll and madscience.wrappers.dll, but in a separate folder from the other tools. Same problem. Gah! I googled it and results are turning up that it's the .NET framework... but none of them tell me how to actually fix the problem. I have Windows 7 and the 3.5 .NET framework, which also comes with 2.0... so that shouldn't be a problem...

[CmarNYC]

Yes, Windows 7 should have come with all the .NET stuff you need. Are you sure you have the template program .exe in the same folder with the MadScience dlls that were in the zip file with it? The various tools have different helper and wrapper .dll's but they have the same names, so you have to extract the zip for each program into its own folder and not mix them up.

[sixmillionsongbirds]

I probably mixed them up somehow. I will re-download it and do it that way and post back here with the results.

[sixmillionsongbirds]

You are my hero. <3

[CmarNYC]

It worked? Wonderful! :)

[sixmillionsongbirds]

It did! I successfully made the nose tip height slider and my sim is looking a lot more like the dude I'm trying to make!

[CmarNYC]

Wow, fast work and sounds like good results! Congratulations! :D

[whiterider]

Now the question is whether or not you make the 36 morphs required to do a full, shareable slider... my god, I never realised until last week how arduous these things are. :faceslap:

[sixmillionsongbirds]

I have no idea how to do that. :o

[CmarNYC]

With a bone slider you'd have a maximum of 12 morphs, one for each age/gender combination. In reality it's probably less since teen/adult/YA/elder faces may be able to use the same bonedelta. Toddler and child are likely to need their own version. The main problem is that to my knowledge Delphy's tools don't support splitting out the age groups so you might have to fiddle with the FACE files in s3pe. (Another thing to add to the tool I'm working on!) First thing is to test your slider on all ages/both genders and see where there are problems.

GEOM morphs, on the other hand: as WhiteRider said always need to be done for all ages/genders AND all three lods. Arggg!

So this depends on whether you ended up with bone or geom.

You can also do a slider with both bone and geom if you're really a masochist... :)

[whiterider]

Well, I did mine for two lods. I figure you can't actually see a sim's lip in lod2/3... so what's the point? :p

You're right though - I skimmed over this thread and stupidly didn't realise you were talking about bone sliders. OP is off the hook!