Hey there, I'm a modder for Unreal Tournament 2004 and I have experience with milkshape 3d as well as creating models in milkshape. I have a question I'd like to ask, does anyone know how to port created sims from the game, or bodyshop into milkshape 3d? with all of a sim's appearence and clothes? if you know anything then please I need help. I'd like to port a sim from the sims 2 into UT 2004. Thanks

The clothes and hair are usually easy to extract, as they're the same for any sim using them.

Extract the mesh and texture for the clothes and hair you intend to use via SimPE. If you extract the GMDC you get the skeleton, so you can pose the character, in case the characters for your game start out with a different pose. Extracting as GMDC also goes around an annoying problem where the UV-map occasionally jumps down a step vertically - this has happened to me with CAS parts when I've tried to extract as OBJ.

A clothing tutorial will have details, but simply explained:
* Open the mesh file, right-click the GMDC, and choose "extract" (same for the hair, clothing and accessories).
* Open the recolor file, go to the TXTR resource(s), and save the texture file by clicking the "export" button.
PS: If you need the whole texture without the alpha added, first right-click the texture, do "export alpha channel". Then make a 100% white texture as PNG in the same size as the texture (Photoshop/Gimp/similar), click "import alpha channel" and import that texture, and then click the "export" button. Helpful if some areas on the texture are see-through.

Depending on the game, you may have to fix up some parts

I'm not sure about the face, but you may be able to extract it via the Neighborhood Manager in SimPE paired with Bodyshop, and then opening that sim in SimPE and extracting the face - but I haven't done it before, so I'm not sure. Either way, you wouldn't be able to animate the face in the other game, so it's best to just extract the parts and make a very similar face in the other game.

Extracting sim faces is really easy.
1) Launch SimPE, open the Object Workshop and hit Start (this prevents memory problems later)
2) Go to Tools -> Neighbourhood -> Neighbourhood Browser and open the hood your sim is in
3) Go to Tools -> Neighbourhood -> Sim Browser and open your sim
4) In the Plugin View panel hit the More tab and then "Open Character File"
5) In the Resource Tree, select Geometric Data Container (GMDC) and look through the available options until you find the mesh for the age you want. Export it, and import into Milkshape like usual

Notes: Ignore any meshes with LOD15 in their names. You may find that you have multiple meshes per age; so for example, age3_0 and age3_1. These are both parts of the same mesh; you want the one with a group called face, though you might want to export both since the other one contains the sim's accessories.

Thanks for the help, I'll try everything you said and if there are any problems I'll come back to this thread to report them. Thanks for the help!

Upon opening the face file in milkshape, I get this. I have no idea what's going on :I

It's just the joints showing too big. There's an easy fix - go to the File Menu, and choose preferences. In the Misc tab, set the Joint Size to 0.01000.

If you import another GMDC mesh, make sure you click "no" to the question "Do you want to import another skeleton" (or some such). An extra skeleton can cause problems later.

Programs that copy over meshes from games can potentially give you bad results, so if you have the meshes easily available, the best solution is always to use the original, or as close to the original as you can get. Extracting directly from the game or from CC via SimPE will give you the best results, and lowers the chance of things going wrong.

Upon waiting for your response I got ninja ripper, I ripped files from the game and it's a complete mess of files with integers. Now I have two options, either continue using the ripper or using SimPE to extract the contents. However I'm curentley having trouble understanding both ways. I don't know how to get anything out of SimPE, and ninja ripper, as I said is a mess


Since you use the ripper, how on earth do I know which mesh file is a sim's mesh file contents. Whenever I get the ripped files they're all entitled "Mesh_00nn" with "nn" being the string it rips. I'm going blind with it and importing several files into milkshape trying to find the sim's files, but I'm constantly getting a mix of other weird objects. I thought that the .dds files would correspond to the .rip files but they don't. This all bundles into a fustrating mess.


With SimPE I'm having issues understanding where the contents to the clothes and sims are. Also by the way since I'm porting the model into UT2004 I can't have the sims 2's skeleton, so if I do get the file contents I'd have to delete the skeleton that comes with the sim.

I'm so confused with this game's files rn

UPDATE:


After searching aimlessly with those "Mesh_00nn" files I managed to put the sim's parts together, fixed the texture files and bang. I got it working well. Now all I need to do is consolidate the textures and all will be set for UT2004.

For help however, I really need help with identifying these "Mesh_nn" files for the future

If you export the outfit with the skeleton you won't get the UVmap problem. After you've made a file with the skeleton, it's very easy to export as obj, and reimport into a file with the proper skeleton.

It does look like you're using CC for the sim. If you are, you can open the CC files you used for the hair and clothing (if you know where they are inside your Downloads folder). You need the mesh file and the recolor file. SimPE shows the resources found inside the files. In mesh files you need the GMDC resource, and in recolor files you need the TXTR resources. Most clothing tutorials will go in more depth, if you need a better explanation. Hairs and accessories are extracted the same way as clothing.

Tutorials for body meshing and extracting can be found among these: https://www.modthesims.info/forumdisplay.php?f=445 (Several show how to extract meshes and textures).

@frogz2007

Do you happen to know if Ninja Ripper retains the joints assigned to any mesh imported to it, and then exported from it? I'm interested particularly if the program retains joints assigned to a Sim's face, so that when it is exported, the edited mesh with move with a Sim's face.

There aren't joints assigned to the face, only to the head. TS2 face animations are done via morphs, similar to how preg/fatmorphs are handled. Sims' faces will only move in TS2, and as far as I know it's not possible to extract the face animations/morphs for use in other programs.

I'm pretty sure the ripper program can't do much with joints. The files need to be a (.simpe) file (exported with Milkshape), or a set of two (.5gd) files (one of them an XML document) when exported from SimPE. I think there's one other file format that works (SMD?) but I'm not sure.

OBJ formats usually don't carry joints - I have yet to see one that does. It's one of the simplest formats, which is why most 3D programs can read them.

Quiet crazy the amount of games I've managed to get characters ported from into UT2004. Seeing a sim like this in the game is amazing :P

Also, @froggz your a saviour. I followed your advice on the .mtl files. Now I no longer need to aimlessly import :D

That's so true. I created a model of Kanye West's graduation bear and put it into ut2004 as well, it's good that were investing our free time into good stuff like this XD. That would be cool to play you know an open wolrd game about TS2's story would be sick but it's a shame you never got to finish it . Anyways, thanks for the help everyone!

That's really impressive, I'd love to give it a go at creating a sims 2 game based story of mine one day. Would take a lot of work but I wouldn't see why it won't work.

I'd love to learn UE4 and then make my own game in it. That wouldn't be a bad engine since it's free and a lot of people are using it nowadays to create games, apperentley the interface is a nightmare for beginners but I'd love to try it one day

In future, make sure you've got "Autosmooth" unticked in the Groups tab in Milkshape - otherwise you'll wind up with weird lines down the sim's leg like in your UT screenshot.

Thank you so much, I was trying to find a guide for this everywhere on google but there isn't a lot of documentation of milkshape anymore but now I finally found out how to stop this from happening! you're all are a blessing!