Is there any way to make an object rotate around its center of mass regardless of what verts are selected? When I use the "Rotate Around Selection Center", the mesh jumps every time I select a new vert, and disappears off the 3D view when nothing is selected at all. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi; you're my only hope.

If I understand your question - as far as I know you have to have all the vertices you want to rotate selected when you do the rotation.

not sure wat you are trying to do here but rotation of the mesh often messes up the normals.
To avoid that i usually assigne a mesh to a joint, then go to ANIM mode were i select that joint.(the whole mesh will be selected now)
I can now rotate it with the tools without messing up the normals.

When done rotating you choose:
Animate
Rotate all
In the popup you leave everything as it is(0.0.0.)
click ok

Thanks to both of you. I THINK what Bloom is talking about will work, as long as I can edit the mesh once I've moved it around a joint. Let me explain what I'm trying to do, maybe that will make it a little clearer. As you move the camera closer and closer to the origin, it eventually becomes nearly impossible to move and you have to reset the view. When I select a group of verts and have "Rotate Around Selection Center" ticked, they're centered on my screen regardless of where the origin is. What I need to do is lock that position and KEEP it there while I edit that section of the mesh. As it is, every time I select or deselect a vert the camera moves and I have to figure out where I am again. If I select a single vert the entire mesh usually jumps completely off screen. I'm not trying to move the mesh relative to the origin, but I do need to change the point the camera rotates around. I looked on the Chumbalum forums and there were a LOT of complaints about this, but the last one was 7 or 8 years ago when Mete said it annoyed him sometimes too. I'm hoping some shortcut was added to accomplish this and I don't know what it is. In the meantime though I'll play around with the animate tool.

As long as I'm here, I have a question about bone assignments. I've got the base and fat morphs almost complete for this mew mesh. There are 4 verts that need to be moved just a little on the base, and some backface edges tweaked on the fat. My problem is with the bones though. The area I have circled looks strange when the model bends and twists at the waist. Is this something that can even be corrected or do I need to close the sides a little more and just be done with it? If it can be done awesome -- I'll eventually figure it out. If it can't, I really want to make it into something that will look good in-game before spending any more time on it. I do hope there's a fix though, I've got a killer monokini in the works too.
BTW -- you saved me a ton of time by posting all those swimsuits and underwear as accessories BloomBase. That's what this was designed to use.

Do you mean that the suit comes away from the body? If so, the more the bones of suit and body match the less gapping there will be.

Well, I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. Dealing with bones is something really new to me, and the simplest things in the tutorial don't always work until the 5th or 6th try so progress is pretty slow. Anyway, after screwing around with the mesh for a while I noticed one problem is the backfaces sometimes come through. If I turn them off, at least that problem looks OK Will the same hold true in the game? I haven't done the textures yet, but I think the next step is going to involve making some solid color stuff and run the mesh through TSRW so I can see what's moving where a little better. There's a little "blockiness" when I put an extreme twist in the torso, but I don't think the game animations will twist the skeleton that far. Having more faces where the mesh can bend would probably clear it up, but that defeats the whole idea of making low poly count CC.. My biggest issue is with the legs clipping through the skirt. The verts are moving, but the leg is moving more, Is this what vertex weight is about? I'm guessing here, but do I need to assign more weight to the knee joint for those verts? I really have no idea what I'm talking about yet -- as I learn more I'll ask better questions.

If anyone has a list of a few animations I can use in TSRW to see my model in motion, that would be a huge help. The list is overwhelming! I've found a couple of shower animations that show some range of motion, but I'd like to have a short list of some animations that move the model in many different directions..

Backfaces don't show in the game.

The more the bone assignments on two vertices are alike, the more they'll move alike in animations. What you need is to match the suit/skirt vertex bones as closely as possible to the body vertices directly under them.

I'm not sure exactly what I did, but after checking the bone assignments again as you suggested everything works beautifully. So well in fact that I can make the material thinner and still not have clipping issues. Thanks Cmar! I'm sure I had something out of whack, and maybe next time I'll be able to find it before it gets fixed so I can learn something. I'm sooo glad I'm done with the bones for a little bit -- I can't even get the skeleton to show up right now!

I could really use those animation names though, if anyone knows of a few in TSRW. I've tried WALK as a keyword in the searchbox, but they point to nothing useful. A simple slow walking animation would be nice, where I can see how the mesh moves when driven by the game engine.

type in ''dance'' You will find nice ones.

To let the middle part animate correctly you need to manually finetune it.
By default(when toolkit is used) it will be assigned to the breast/spine 2/spine 1 and spine 0 joint(like the underlaying body)
But for a nice and smooth animation you should exclude spine 1 assignements cos that meshpart is attached to breast/spine2 to spine 0/pelvis parts.(hopes this make sence)
However, this increases the risk of clipping it with the body during some animations.
If it works correctly it will look so much nicer tho.

I did some similar work but i cant find it nomore(seems the creator i helped took down her uploads on MTS2)

To paraphrase you're saying to remove all spine 1 assignments from the mesh, but leave them on the body correct?

I have a question about the edge between the front of a mesh and its backface. Because of the way this mesh is made, the edge will always be visible no matter what angle it's viewed from. In the game, the edge sometimes looks almost black and can "flicker" between the normal texture and the darker color even when stationary. How do you keep that from happening? I've thought about replacing the single flat edge with multiple faces, but that's a lot of work and if it isn't going to make any difference, a waste of time. I'm also trying to keep the poly count to a bare minimum, and the edges already make up 33% of the entire mesh.

Yes, it then would kinda look if the body(tummy) moves seperate from the dress(or vice versa..)
This is a alphadress(with the nude body underneath it) were the dress first moved like the body.
After editing the joints the movement of the dress was from breasts to pelvis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-2OpUTWZ9Y
Not sure if this is the best example lol.



Edge glitches or sparkles usually is a normals issue and can vary, depends on people computer/graphic card how the mesh is rendered.
Wat i did in the past(and is alot of work) is to give the outeredge row of vertice identical normals.
You can do this using auto alligne normals but that will look very bad so you need to do this with Wes his merge tools.
I forgot wich normal it is that you want(top vert from the outerlayer or the outerone from the edge itself) but youll see the moment you copy them wich one you need.

Wow, the body movements look awesome when rigged that way. I really want to get this top done so I can go play around with the joints. Now if we could just make the breasts move like in Sims 2 ---
I did a couple of trials with the normals, and I think I have it right. I took some screenshots to show what I'm getting, The first is obviously wrong -- copying the edge normals onto the face makes a right mess of things. The other ones are what I think you're saying, but they look different than I expected. I want to be sure before doing the edges on all the morphs. I copied the face's normal onto both edge verts straight across from it. When viewed from above it looks very dark, but when viewed at an angle it looks just like the outer face. I'm going to copy the face vert normal onto each pair of edge vertices associated with it. It's not as bad as it sounds though, I already have the edges in a separate group from the faces and backfaces, and there are only 80 vertex sets I have to change per morph. Once I get the groups set up in the correct order it'll fly by.

EDIT: If anyone reading this gives it a try, a MUCH simpler way to go would be to make the changes on the base group only and re-do your morphs with ToolKit, using the morphs with the bad normals as a reference. I learned that the hard way after doing 400 verts manually. I could have got by with only doing 80.

no need to do the morphs imo, they are not used by the game(altho im not 100% bout the normaldata....maybe Cmar knows)

I'm having some trouble getting the new assignments to take. I've loaded the TSRW skeleton and imported the mesh with the bones from the original dress already copied onto it. I'm highlighting spine1 on the list and hitting SelAssigned. The verts assigned to that joint turn red like they should. Back on the Model tab I select Vertex and deselect the ones on the front of the mesh that are directly over the body. When I hit the Assign tab, nothing happens. If I hit SelAssigned tab, the verts on the dress come right back. I tried going back to the model tab and selecting Joint BEFORE hitting the Assign tab, but still nothing. I must be doing something incredibly simple wrong, but I can't seem to figure it out. Do I have to clear all the verts already assigned to the joint and reassign everything?? That sounds like enough trouble to be correct somehow. A little help please???

Morphs contain normal data.

What are you trying to do with the joints? It sounds like you're trying to remove a joint from a set of verts - is that right or am I way off? You wouldn't be able to do that the way you describe.

In post #10 Bloom suggested removing some of my mesh verts from spine1 while leaving the ones on the body intact. "All" I want to do is remove a dozen or so vertices from the ones already assigned to spine1. Nothing I try seems to make a bit of difference. I get the verts deselected, but as soon as I choose SelAssigned the ones I tried to remove are still there. I'll qualify this by saying I can't get the tutorials on the Chumbalum site to reassign anything either. The tut explains how to assign bones initially in decent detail. Tthe steps I'm trying are the ones outlined there, but nothing is happening.

wish it was that easy to unassigne and assigne vertice....unfortunate not.

I indeed suggested to eliminate the spine 1 assignements, or reduce atleast a considrable ammount of weight on those on the front of the dress part so it animates more smooth between the lower breasts and waist area.
To select them you can use spine 1/selassigned, then select inverse, hide the others.
select the area you want to finetune, select inverse, hide the rest
You now should have some verts on the front left, select them and select Wes his joint tool.
In the popup you can toggle through all the vertice.
On each assignement you select the spine 1 and reduce the weight, increase the weight on the others to 100% then hit commit.
Move on to the next vert, and so on.

You might want to skip this till your next project Sci

It sounds like you have the concept a little backwards - the verts are not assigned to the joint, the joint is assigned to the vertex. If that makes sense. Each vertex has assignments to / associations with up to 4 joints each with a weight which is a percentage of the total assignment. (Which you know.) The assignments are in the vertex, not the joint. What you need to do is select one or more vertices, change the joints and percentages, then click Assign and those verts will be changed. Changes are made only to selected verts. Unfortunately this is very tedious when doing assignments manually.

What I've done in this kind of situation is to use an edited mesh as reference in Toolkit Autobone. In this case you'd take the body mesh, select all verts with a Spine 1 assignment, delete them, and use that mesh as reference in Autobone. Unfortunately the TSRW Autobone still has the bug Bloom pointed out so you'd have to either convert to GEOM and back or wait until I fix it, which will be after the holidays.

I dissagree miss :P
Imo verts are assigned to joints as the skeleton/and joints are responsible for the animation and they drag the verts along.
But when it comes to assigning them you need a bonetool and those select by vertice not joint.....

Sci could use the select all function in the joint tab and select all vertice that carry the spine 1 joint in their assignements.
After that you could use Wes his bone tool and manually update each vertex,

I don't use Wes's bone tool so don't know how that works but think it's similar to the MS tool. I meant that the data for bone assignments is in the vertex, not the joint, so you have to edit the vertex and not the joint, but the wording was confusing. It sounded like Sciguy was selecting all verts assigned to a joint, deselecting some of them, clicking assign, and expecting the deselected verts to lose the assignment to that joint. Maybe I misunderstood or am not explaining myself well.

That's exactly what I was doing Cmar. I do still plan to remove those verts from spine1, but I'm gonna put it off until I get this top done. I finished all the LOD's last night so all that remains it adding the thumbs. Well, I do have to track down the app that converts Sims3Packs to packages again. SOMETHING hijacked my 'puter last night and made some nasty changes to things. Everything's up and running normally again with the exception of the converter.

If you can explain how to change bone assignments with the MS tools, I'd appreciate it. I'm having a rough time finding good info on working with bones! The tutorial I found indicated that what I was doing was the correct way to reassign verts -- no wonder I could never get it to work. Thanks to both of you for all the help you've been throwing my way. Merry Christmas!