Alpha Mesh Help

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Hi. I'm chopping the shirt off of my favorite CloudlessNights conversion (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=266492) and adding the sleeves from this conversion (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=267085) as an alpha part of the mesh.

I've followed all the tutorials and have just finished doing bone assignments. I have a couple questions I have not been able to find the answers for yet.

1. Bone Assignments. After chopping off the mesh and making some slight edits, I imported the original mesh to compare bone assignments. I discovered that some of the vertices on the original mesh had incomplete bone assignments. Since the original mesh I brought in for reference had the same underweight bones, I fixed them a la common sense (which does not always translate to mesh sense). I'd like to know if I did this right.

Most of the underweight bones clocked in between 96-99%. Very few were 90% or 95%. What I did was raise the present bone numbers incrementally until I reached 100%. Here is an example of an underweight bone, the red numbers indicating where I had edited. Is this the correct way to go about this, or should I have imported another Maxis mesh and copied bone assignments from there?

http://imgur.com/9BDUs.png

2. Simple question. The alpha part of my mesh is the sleeves. The sleeves themselves have no fat morph. Is this appropriate text for the comment of that mesh group?

ModelName: top
Opacity: -1
HasTangentArray:
NumSkinWgts: 3

Or do I need to point to a fat morph anyway? If I do, then does it need its own fat morph or can I point it to the existing one (for the top).

Thanks for your help!

[CatOfEvilGenius]

1. Underweighted bones are due to the original mesh having 4 bones per vertex, but MilkShape only being able to handle 3. Bone weights should always add up to 100%, as you said. Don't worry about small changes of 1-3 percent, you probably won't even see the difference. 5% might be noticeable, or might not. If you fix underweighted bones by hand, rather than letting MilkShape do it, just try to keep the relative ratio of bone weights the same and you should be fine.

2. Alpha groups can have their own fat morphs if you want them to change shape when a sim has too many cookies. If a mesh group has a fat morph, then it needs a morph reference number (morphrefnum) in the comment! Look at the comment of a mesh group that has a fat morph to see what I mean. Each mesh group needs a *unique* morphref number, and its morphs must have that number in the beginning of their names. So if the morphrefnum is 2, the morph might be named ~02MORPHMOD.01 or some such.

Your alpha group should have a *higher* opacity number than your main group. So if your main group has opacity number -1, your alpha group could be 1 (positive one). This controls which group gets drawn "in front of" the other. If you have multiple alpha groups, you'll want the "outermost" to have the highest opacity number.

Hope that helps! :)

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edit: Are you making this a separate top? Sounds like it. If so, squeee! More separate tops! More! MORE!!! And less work for me!

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Thanks for your help -again- lol

1. Good to see common sense apply here. That's pretty much what I was doing. There were a couple bone assignments that were 90% (GAH) but I kept the ratio as similar as I could, so cross your fingers.

2. What I was actually asking was whether or not you NEEDED a fat morph for each group, even if that group (such as sleeves, like here) doesn't actually morph when your sim eats too many cookies ^_^ I think you answered it, though. And that answer is no, you don't NEED a fat morph for each group.

2a. I was uncertain about the sleeves (alpha) group opacity number. Since I can't imagine the alpha sleeves ever being combined with semi-transparent textures (sheer sleeves on a layered tee?) I wasn't going to change it. But I probably should, because no matter how I think it won't happen, odds are some simmer is freaky enough to want transparent sleeves.

Yep, making it a separate top. I've borked it, however, somewhere in the making it alpharized stage. I am going to start all over tomorrow again and log my work with screenshots. I'm somewhere around take 8 or so and it's driving me absolute bonkers. I'm returning to my pants Smooks Bros pants recolors (nearing completion) for the rest of tonight.