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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 1:32 AM
Default Breast slider issue
This mesh looks fine in all morph states, but when I increase the breasts with the slider they start coming through the material. The entire nude body is underneath the mesh because there isn't enough material there to cut anything away. How do I go about fixing this?
Screenshots
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Sockpuppet
#2 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 3:28 AM
just a matter of finetuning the morphs.


Combine the fit and fat and it will probably look even worse.
And for some reason the fitmorph always needs more space then the others.
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#3 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 6:10 AM
Look in particular at the bones in corresponding verts of the body and suit - they must match exactly for the breast slider to work well.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#4 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 7:26 AM
Don't the bones have to match in order for the morphs to work correctly? I don't have problems with any of the morph states. Spine1_, Spine0_, ROOT_bind_, L_breast_, and R_breast_ are the joints assigned to the breasts and the corresponding parts of the outfit, and I don't see anything that looks out of place when I check what verts are assigned. This mesh is using a custom body shape, and when I use the breast sliders on it by itself everything looks OK until a slider multiplier is used. I was just removing the outfit from the body to see if something unusual happened when I put it all together, but that all looks normal. I would like to rework the breasts soon, but before I start on that I'd sure like to know what's causing this problem so I can avoid it!
Screenshots
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#5 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 1:46 PM Last edited by CmarNYC : 27th Dec 2013 at 2:05 PM.
The fat/tit/thin sliders are GEOM morphs and dependent only on the morph meshes. The breast slider is a bone morph and dependent only on the bones. It can be tricky to get them to work together when combined, as you're finding out! And matching the bone assignments means that not only the bones for each vertex but the weights for each bone must match for corresponding verts. In a bone morph each vertex is 'pulled' by the movement and scaling of the bones it's assigned to by a distance proportional to the weight for that bone.

Even if the bone assignments/weights are well matched, if the verts in the suit don't lie directly over the corresponding verts in the body the combination of morphs is likely to produce clipping. That's why layered meshes are a nightmare in general and particularly in the breast area. IMO the best strategy, if possible, is to make a duplicate of the relevant part of the body mesh, expand it slightly and reshape it as necessary, and use that for the clothing layer. You can use transparency to make only the clothing visible in the duplicate.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#6 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 6:35 PM
Transparency? There's a way to make parts of the underlying body transparent in-game? That I did NOT know, Guess its time to start digging through the tutorials again ---

Quote: Originally posted by CmarNYC
. IMO the best strategy, if possible, is to make a duplicate of the relevant part of the body mesh, expand it slightly and reshape it as necessary, and use that for the clothing layer.


THANK YOU! I didn't think of using the body itself as a clothing layer. The breasts on this mesh simply don't have enough polys to do much with, but I've been meaning to re-work them anyway. I'll redo the breasts before the top I was just about to start, and make them with a high enough poly count that I can both delete underlying faces and use as clothing layers. It really is a b**ch on wheels to make layered meshes, but I like them so much more than the more conventional ones.

I gotta say thanks AGAIN for ToolKit. I've been dissecting a morph that went totally spastic for days, trying to sort the scrambled verts into something almost simlike. Just a couple of minutes ago I was able to use the REPLACE VALUES to instantly put the fat body back in place. I honestly don't think I could have done the crotch area manually. Now that the body is out of the way, the rest of the mesh will be a breeze
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#7 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 6:59 PM
Well, I was thinking of making the clothing layer with transparency using the SimHairSimple shader - the usual way of doing it. Clothing with the body transparent might be a neat way of making an invisible or translucent sim, though!

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Sockpuppet
#8 Old 27th Dec 2013 at 9:44 PM
And i would test with a default sim, looking at the elbows the body has been edited with sliders.
They dont look default to me.
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#9 Old 28th Dec 2013 at 2:10 AM
This may not be the correct place to ask, but where can I get my hands on the pregnant morph for copying the normals at the waist? I don't know if the ones I have will match. Is there onee available someplace of do I need to use the BGEO and make it? If I do that, will the normal data be good? GOD I hate normals ---
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#10 Old 28th Dec 2013 at 3:46 AM
Both Bloom and I have made pregnant morphs for the nude using the pregnant morph meshes for the burnt nude - it's called afTopNudeBurnt and afBottomNudeBurnt or something similar - I'm too lazy to look it up right now. It's got weird indentations at the sides of the back which I smoothed out but the waist seam makes a good standard.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#11 Old 31st Dec 2013 at 4:40 AM
Well, after getting everything squared away with the skirt (thank you Cmar!, Much care will be taken when messing with mesh materials in the future) I went back to add faces to the breasts for all the reasons pointed out earlier in the thread. Anyway, I made a sphere and rotated it 90 degrees along the Z axis. After a little scaling I ended up with something that I think will work nicely, even though the poly count is a lot higher than I wanted.. HOWEVER, How in the heck do I deal with the UV map? Instead of nice rows of squares, the map is laid out in concentric circles. I thought there was a way to unwrap spheres with LithUnwrap, but I can't find anything that talks about it or anything that works when I start pushing buttons and pulling levers. The last time I did something similar I manually dissected the mesh, rotated each piece to face straight ahead, redrew the UV in the TCE, and stitched it all together vert by vert. If that's how I have to proceed with this I'll just use it as a template for the shape and make planes to patch onto it.
Screenshots
Sockpuppet
#12 Old 31st Dec 2013 at 11:21 AM
Yup, like you mapped them the last time and then finetune with a original female uvmap in the background.(atleast that is how i did it)
Not sure if your going to add nipples but you might want to do that first.(they need to match the skin, as all other parts)
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#13 Old 31st Dec 2013 at 6:38 PM Last edited by sciguy77 : 31st Dec 2013 at 6:51 PM.
Wow, you'd think there's be a better way to remap a sphere! It's such an important shape when modeling. Anyway, I found an easier way to do it this time around. First I duplicated the Maxis breast and regrouped it into circular rows of boxes from the nipple outward, . From there it was a matter of subdiving the faces to make an "X" inside each box. Naturally they didn't always split where they needed to, that would have been way too easy. When that happened a vert would have to be moved a little until it did split correctly, and then the vert moved back into place Then some of those faces would have to be split again to create another ring of circles going around the breast. It took a lot more time that using the sphere to do the mesh work, but since the Maxis mesh was already mapped, I only have to do minor tweaks once the breast is shaped. Thanks for reminding me about the nipples. I've been using Cmar's morphing ones, but since the new ones will more than likely get moved I'll have to include stationary ones in the mesh itself until I can figure out how to reposition them. I only went into detail about how I reworked the breast in case someone else wants to do something similar. You can spend hours and hours fiddling with the UV on custom surfaces and still get poor results. There just aren't enough polys in the Maxis LOD1 to do much with. In my opinion anyway, starting with a Maxis mesh and making it a higher poly count is the way to go as long as ya make sure there aren't any unpaired verts. They're just gaps waiting to happen.
I do want to make the new breast about 20% longer than the original. The ones that were coming out the sides of my clothing meshes were this way too. I would like for this new area to work with the default skeleton if at all possible, I don't have much experience with bone work yet and am afraid of totally borking things. Is this possible, and if so what's the best way to proceed? If I have to work with the bones, so be it.
Screenshots
Sockpuppet
#14 Old 31st Dec 2013 at 10:38 PM
Thought we had discussed this once over a shorts?

Anyway, i did just one breast.
I would rotate one breast like 30 to 40 degrees ''inwards'' towards the spine on the Y axis.
Then Map it from the front
scale it so it fits a original female UVmap
finetune it, done


After i would open the model in lithunwrap and mirror the coordinates for the other side.


But, why make bigger breasts if this can be done with sliders?

You dont need to worry about the assignements, Toolkit has a option for inbetween vertice.
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#15 Old 31st Dec 2013 at 11:09 PM
I'm making them larger because of the slider. Once they're made and look nice and smooth, I plan to scale them back again. I'm thinking that when the slider gets used, they'll remain smooth into sizes larger than the default ones do.
Have you seen Cat's UV flip MilkShape plugin? -- http://modthesims.info/d/405374. You can flip UV coords in both horizontal and vertical directions. I use it pretty often since I can usually do all the UV mapping without ever leaving MS and killing the normals.
Also, I'm feeling kinda stupid now. I tried to map the entire sphere and ended up with the front and back overlapping. I also put the axis of rotation on the center of the nipple, It made easy work of making the mesh fit, but by that time the UV was a lost cause. The shorts you're referring to were a Sims 2 conversion. You helped me through a ton of stuff with that one!
Sockpuppet
#16 Old 31st Dec 2013 at 11:31 PM
i do have some meshes arround you might want to have a look at but i can not share em here.
I lost my best work after a disk crash, only Cmar might have a copy of my work...
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#17 Old 1st Jan 2014 at 1:29 AM
I can always use quality meshes, thanks for offering Bloom. Disk crashes are the worst. I lost an entire semester's worth of data for my astronomy professor's research project she was going to publish. Thank goodness I had it all in hard copy even though I had to spend almost an entire week re-entering everything.
I'm always looking at BobbyTH's stuff to see "how it's done". Her poly counts are way too high to actually use in the game, but the meshes look amazing and I try to make my stuff look as well thought out as hers. I'm trying with varying levels of success to find the "sweet spot" between low poly count and smooth meshes in-game. If I'm not really careful this body could get out of hand really fast. I've split each triangle in the breast into 3 -- so far. I may try again with the sphere to see if I can get that # down a little. I don't think I need to split the top area up as much, it has very few curves. The underside is a different story all together, very curvy and difficult to make attach to the torso properly. This might be a good mesh to import into SketchUp and play around a little.
Sockpuppet
#18 Old 1st Jan 2014 at 3:06 PM
Not sure how far you are yet but the biggest problem are the normals.
Once you divided a face you have to move the new vert to smoothen the mesh.(no point in dividing otherwise)
After you done that you need to realligne the normals and the results are often dissapointing.

I had a look but the meshes i have all have a diffrent breastsize, pretty useless i guess.
The one close is Poser Jessi but thats a very high polygon model.
Were i sent it to?
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#19 Old 1st Jan 2014 at 6:51 PM Last edited by sciguy77 : 2nd Jan 2014 at 3:03 PM.
I'm fighting with the normals under the breast right now. I got the mesh done (so I thought) and corrected the UV map to get the nipples in place, When I aligned the normals though, I had some awful looking light and dark patches under the breasts. The pics show a comparison of the Maxis mesh and the new breasts. I think I removed too many polys there, so I'm going through those areas and trying to make the curves more gradual by putting some faces back. VERY tedious ---
Screenshots
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#20 Old 2nd Jan 2014 at 12:22 AM
When you align normals, are you selecting the whole mesh or just one breast at a time?

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#21 Old 2nd Jan 2014 at 3:37 AM Last edited by sciguy77 : 3rd Jan 2014 at 4:52 AM.
I've tried several different ways. There was a pretty sharp edge where the underside of the breast connected to the body, so I tried each area separately. Even then I'm not really happy with the results though. I plan to use this body for all my new stuff, and often there are parts of the body exposed. I figure if I spend the time now to get the mesh where I can fix the normals all at once I'll save myself lots of future grief. I reworked the area under the breast as a separate piece and am replacing the entire area. This pic is in the early stages, but I think the normals will be easier to work with once I get it all put back together. There's a long way to go with this, but I'm liking the way the breast is taking shape, especially around the outer edge of the body near the armpit. There are lots of complex curves in that area!

I've seen pics of Poser Jessie in one of Cmar's tutorials, she's amazing' I started with nice stacks and slices with this rework, but it looks a mess in wireframe view after all the subdividing and moving things around. The normals are looking much better in the trouble areas, but I really wish I could keep the nice rows of triangles like I see in the more complex models. It does make a difference in how the normals align and how the mesh moves with bone sliders. I really think I'm gonna need modeling software with a little more power than MS to create something like that.
Screenshots
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#22 Old 3rd Jan 2014 at 4:48 AM Last edited by sciguy77 : 3rd Jan 2014 at 7:07 PM.
Default Normals done?
I think the normals are done. The UV map is a mess, butt I'm confident I can get that sorted with a little time. I added more faces than I initially wanted to ( a total of 700 more than the Maxis default) but there were places that wouldn't smooth properly without them. Does anyone see anything else I need to address with the normals before i move on? I'd much rather find out about any problems and get them fixed before I start making the morphs and LOD's. Thanks for your help everyone.
Screenshots
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#23 Old 4th Jan 2014 at 6:33 PM Last edited by sciguy77 : 4th Jan 2014 at 9:23 PM.
The UV map is driving me nuts. I made 2 duplicates of the round area of the breast, and remapped those from the front and left view respectively. In the 3D view I hid the bad area from the front view and replaced it with the corresponding part from the left. The 3D view looks really nice. It LOOKS like a little tweaking at the seams will finish the job in no time. When I try to fit the new UV's together though, it ends up looking worse than when I started. I've been at this for 2 days now and am getting absolutely nowhere. Is there ANY other way to do this? Can Blender do a better job of unwrapping a model? There has to be a better way -- somewhere. I'm more frustrated than you can possibly imagine.
EDIT: I just noticed that I somehow managed to screw up the normals on most of the different ways I regrouped the mesh to remap. I do still have 1 good copy, and this is how its mapped right now. I guess I'll gave to edit this one vertex by vertex unless someone can point tell me a better way to go. The entire breast needs to be remapped to fit the Maxis torso.
Screenshots
Sockpuppet
#24 Old 4th Jan 2014 at 10:59 PM
ye, manual labor with a original female uvmap as material/reference in the background.
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#25 Old 5th Jan 2014 at 7:49 PM Last edited by sciguy77 : 5th Jan 2014 at 11:05 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by BloomsBase
ye, manual labor with a original female uvmap as material/reference in the background.


Probably the BEST tip you've ever given me Bloom! It's still slow and tedious, but the UV is finally starting to look like its supposed to. I added a a lot of verts, and after splitting, rotating, and scaling it looked more like someone threw a handful of birdseed into the snow than a UV map. By regrouping the mesh 1 stack of verts at a time and working with that in the TCE (with the recolored UV as the material) it's really looking good. I'm finding a lot of UV coords that are on top of one another. I'm assuming it happened when the mesh was rotated and remapped. The pictured area is one of several that were killing me when I tried to remap using only the grid as a reference. I did have to change the color from B&W to something a little easier on my eyes, and there's still a lot of material switching to tweak the added verts, but I'm actually going to get this done. I was on the verge of scrapping the project. If it hadn't been so important to me to get it done I'm sure I would have moved on days ago.
For the benefit of anyone else that has fought an unruly UV map I attached a pic of a really nasty part of this one. The area under the breast got stacked on top of itself, and the whole area looked like the mess you can see above the part that looks "normal". The entire UV looked like that about an hour or so ago! I'm tellin' ya, take a single row of polys and use the corresponding UV map of whatever you have handy as the material in MS. Even the most god-awful mess can be sorted like this as long as you're willing to put in the time!

Thank you and Cmar as well for all the insight you 2 have given into modding the Sims. Without you 2 (and all the other gurus) that take the time to answer some of us mere mortal's often stupid questions we probably wouldn't get out of the starting gate.
Screenshots
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