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Me? Sarcastic? Never.
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Alchemist
Original Poster
#27 Old 27th Jul 2009 at 4:01 AM
The tutorial as it stands (open to tweaks and corrections!). There are pictures, but it's not compiled yet. This should be enough for HL anyway.

Replacing the Default Maternity Wear with a Custom mesh:

Start with choosing the mesh you would like to use instead of the Maxis default maternity. Make sure it has a preg morph (you can add one if it doesn't, see someone else's tutorial for that).

Then extract the Maxis maternity wear - in SimPE, select File, New. This opens a new file. There's nothing in it yet.

From the Tools menu, select PJSE, then Body Mesh Tool, Extracting Stage.Type into the window the name of the mesh - afBodyMaternityShirtPants. Press OK and wait - the tool will cleverly extract all the parts of the mesh and put them into your new file. You should have GMDC, GMND, SHPE and CRES files.

In the File menu, choose 'save as', give your file a name and save it somewhere you will find it, such as the desktop or a dedicated folder.

At the bottom of the SimPE screen, click the Finder tab (or use the Scenegraph Resource Finder form the Window menu up top). Where the Finder tab says 'Find', use the dropdown to select Namemap if it shows something else.Then the 'Type' should say Contains[match]. Where it says Match, put in afBodyMaternityShirtPants again. Wait a bit, and a list of results will appear below.

Scroll down to the TXTR files which are under the Sims07.package heading. Double click on the first one. After a moment the list will appear in the Resource window, with your first file already highlighted.

Now we need to extract all the TXTR files for this mesh. Right-click on the first afBodyMaternity one in the list. Choose Extract from the resulting menu. It's a good idea to make a new folder to put these extracted files in, because they are not distinguishable from any other extracted files at this point - the names are encoded, and you get two files for each one extracted.

Go back to the Finder results, and double-click on the set of LIFO resources (Sims08.package). There are two files for each name - you want the ones labeled 0_lifo. This time we don't want the coded version, so...in Plugin View, there's a button labeled 'Extract' on the right hand side. Click there and save the image in a new folder. Add the 0_lifos for the rest of the maternity colours.

Now go up to the toolbar and open the new package you made. In the Resource List, right-click anywhere, and choose 'Add' from the resulting menu. Navigate to the set of TXTRs you extracted, select them all and click 'Open'.

Voila! the now-recognisable files will appear in your Resource List. They will be in italics at first, but once you save the package, they will look normal.

This is your default replacement package. However, so far it's just a copy of the stuff that's already in-game.

Now we have to get the replacement files ready. Open the package you want to use as your replacement mesh. I'm using the preg-enabled hula dress from BonVoyage, made by the_mystical_one.

In the Resource List, Right-click and extract the four mesh parts into their own folder.

Open your default package again.
Left-ckick on the maternity GMDC, then click the Plugin View tab at the bottom of the screen. Where it says Filename, highlight the name of the file and copy it (Ctrl+C).

Go back up to the Resource List. Right-click on the maternity GMDC and choose 'Replace'. Navigate to your extracted replacement files. Select the file ending in .5gd, and click 'Open'. SimPE will ask if it should reload the altered file, click yes.

Notice that the name in Plugin View has changed. Paste the original name back in (Ctrl+V), and click 'Fix TGI' on the right side. This corrects the Type, Group and Instance numbers, and makes it all work properly. Press 'Commit' to transfer that change to the Resource List.

Now repeat these last three steps for the remaining three mesh parts. Replace the SHPE file with the one ending in 5sh, the CRES file with the one ending in 5cr, the GMND file with the one ending in 5gn. At the end of this process, the package should look just as it did orignally, but WE know the files have changed.

If you put this package into your Downloads folder now, and run the game, you should see any pregnant sims wearing your new mesh, but still in the default colours. Probably looks a little odd. (see my example, with hula decorations over sneakers!!)

So now we alter the textures. And the bump map. You will need nine recolours to replace the nine maxis maternity outfits.

The bump map is making seamlines and shadows that belong to the original mesh, and don't match the new one. We can leave it out altogether I think, or bucketfill it with pale grey. When you replace that image using Build DXT in SimPE, you need to alter it to Raw8bit format or it will look really bad. (Insert pic here!)

You can now recolour the LIFO files for each of the nine colours, in your paint program of choice. Then Build DXT to overwrite the maternity TXTR files in Plugin View. Or, use unlocked maternity files (some by Mokitoki on MATY) so they appear in BodyShop. The SimPE version will not recolour the accessories on the hula mesh; you have to use Bodyshop for that. I think.

Also, can this be made basegame-compatible, despite using a BV mesh? Would be nice if so.
Doing all the things, and *mostly* not failing.
retired moderator
#28 Old 27th Jul 2009 at 6:24 AM
You can't leave the bumpmap out all together because the game will still call it and use the incorrect texture. Blanking it out is a much better solution if the new outfit doesn't have a bumpmap to replace it with.

If you use this method to drag a BV mesh in, it is basegame compatible. MTS doesn't really approve of making EP items available to people who didn't pay for them, so you might have some issues with uploading it. If you use the original textures you can tell the GMND to link to the BV textures and then it will still require BV and it will be completely uploadable (and a smaller file, including textures always makes the files huge)

When you get this all done with pictures too, start a new thread for it and I'll move that one to the Bodyshop Modding Tutorials forum for you. Congrats on getting your project to work! And thanks for taking the time to write the tut!
Alchemist
Original Poster
#29 Old 27th Jul 2009 at 12:22 PM
Heh, I need the tut for myself! In six weeks I won't have a clue how to repeat the process, and I really don't want to go through all this fuss again. Why there wasn't a tutorial written years ago, I don't understand, since it seems many people must know how to do this better than me.

Thanks for the tip about the bumpmap, I wondered if that would be the case.
Quote:
(...) If you use the original textures you can tell the GMND to link to the BV textures and then it will still require BV and it will be completely uploadable (and a smaller file, including textures always makes the files huge)

I would intend to flag it as BV-required anyway, specially since I had no idea that it might not be.

I need nine textures, and the hula dress only has six (or is it three, since there is the lei and no-lei version?). The file is currently 13.7 MB. Can I combine original textures with new ones? How?
Me? Sarcastic? Never.
staff: administrator
#30 Old 27th Jul 2009 at 7:26 PM
I am trying to adapt this to use the games textures, but no matter what I do the default maternity textures are being used. The mesh itself is being used, but the textures and bump mapping are the maternity ones.

So I have the GMDC, GMND, CRES, SHPE. Instances are correct to afBodyMaternityShirtPants. I tried adding in to the gmnd to reference another mesh the same as I do for objects but it appears to not work. I added a tsMaterialsMeshName, and a string referring to the mesh afBodyDressHula.

However, after looking at other defaults, I noticed that they contain a cres and txmt. So when I did it this way and used my gmdc, txmt (with the texture line changed to point to the hula txtr), and the cres. They showed up - minus the lei textures.

So aelflaed is adding the textures to the package and it works, but no txmt's? So this method is also a texture replacer, say if you wanted to change the default txtrs?
Alchemist
Original Poster
#31 Old 28th Jul 2009 at 1:05 AM Last edited by aelflaed : 28th Jul 2009 at 1:42 AM.
I don't have any TXMTs in my file.

I did add them to the previous version in the hope of getting the accessories, but it didn't work. The new version - made while I wrote that tutorial - got them.

I've just noticed that I seem to have two versions of the mesh I'm using - one is half the size of the other, and dated differently. I'll start SimPE and see what's in those packages, perhaps that's the answer to the riddle - the smaller one might be what I used the first time, and might be lacking those extra groups.

EDIT: No, both look the same to me. No idea what the difference is.

I can't see any mention of a fix to the hula mesh on the download thread, and the file available there is the larger, older one, from 2008, while the small one I have is marked January 2009. Interesting; maybe after the crash the files were replaced with an earlier version? If so, I have an update! Still don't know what changed apart from size.

One thing found in the comments - TMO says later files were compressed, so that would explain the change of size.
Alchemist
Original Poster
#32 Old 28th Jul 2009 at 5:15 AM
Phaenoh, I finished the tutorial and uploaded it - twice, in fact, because it tells me the thread is invalid when I try to edit it, and the attachments are not appearing.

Now I don't know if there are two threads or none. Let me know what needs to be done about it.

I'll attach the PDF here for now, in case it's missing completely. I'll take it away again when not needed.
Alchemist
Original Poster
#33 Old 28th Jul 2009 at 5:16 AM Last edited by aelflaed : 28th Jul 2009 at 11:46 AM.
Interesting, no attachment here either, and the same invalid thread message. Must be something going on. I'll check in later.

Seems to be working again now. I was able to add the images and PDF to one of the threads I began earlier. And delete the extra one.
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