Shoes- ankle gap and seams on body

[kittyvibe]

Hi, my friend and I have been trying to make these shoes work. In milkshape and tsrw these are showing fine, but once in game, there are two major issues we cant figure out.

Im the mesher (using maya and exporting the .obj) and she is the one putting it together into a .package.

Problem 1; ankle gap

when I meshed these shoes in maya, I made sure not to move the verts that would attach at the ankle.

Im assuming that the weights are off when she adjusts them in milkshape, but she is just copying the original weighting on the shoe base and applying it to the new shoe shape.

She said she did the following;
"I just assigned the object to right food and left foot and then grouped them to the existing foot mesh"

Problem 2;

Once I select the shoe in CAS, it appears a low poly base body is also applied onto my body, resulting in these light and dark lines, with visible seams running vertically.

I linked her the other ankle gap threads to help us tinker with this but she is still confused on those processes. I know nothing about the process myself, so Im asking here for any help I can send her way.

The below screenys show our problem, thanks in advance for any help.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/simming/Untitled-4.jpg


http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/simming/Untitled-2.jpg

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/simming/Untitled-1.jpg

[omegastarr82]

Check your morphs for the ankle gap and check your uv map about the textures being on the body, make sure to only use the shoes' designated area.

[BloomsBase]

Gap could be boneweights also and textures might be the normalmap.
Did you make them with TSRW?

[birdyfly]

Yes, we make them with TSR Workshop. What I did was assign the shoe itself as Right and Left foot, but attached it to the regular barefoot mesh.

[omegastarr82]

Yes, we make them with TSR Workshop. What I did was assign the shoe itself as Right and Left foot, but attached it to the regular barefoot mesh.

Ok, I'm pretty sure the top row of vertices need to be set as left and right ankle. I think.

[kittyvibe]

Ill have her try that, thank you!

[BloomsBase]

yes, check the boneassignements and the normalmap

[kittyvibe]

Ok looking at the meshes again in game and it looks like the dress is the one making the seams/lines on the body. Not sure why, is it possible to accidentally attach multiple mesh bodys to the different morph states in milkshape>?

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/mesh%20work/Untitled-14.jpg

[whiterider]

If you used TSRW, then the most likely cause is that one of you - probably the Milkshape user - has smoothed the normals. Milkshape has an autosmooth normals feature enabled by default, so lots of newbies fall afoul of it. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to fix after the normals have been smoothed - if this is another one which you have a pre-Milkshape obj version of, I suggest reimporting from that after turning off autosmooth.

Another possibility is that the texture is uneven - so it's darker on one side of the leg texture than on the other. Since the texture is then wrapped around the leg, differences in shade which may be very hard to spot in a graphics editor become glaringly obvious on the mesh. The easiest way to fix this is to copy one edge of the leg texture into a new layer, line it up next to the other edge of the leg, and use it as a guide to help you match the colours across the seam.

[kittyvibe]

If you used TSRW, then the most likely cause is that one of you - probably the Milkshape user - has smoothed the normals. Milkshape has an autosmooth normals feature enabled by default, so lots of newbies fall afoul of it. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to fix after the normals have been smoothed - if this is another one which you have a pre-Milkshape obj version of, I suggest reimporting from that after turning off autosmooth.

Another possibility is that the texture is uneven - so it's darker on one side of the leg texture than on the other. Since the texture is then wrapped around the leg, differences in shade which may be very hard to spot in a graphics editor become glaringly obvious on the mesh. The easiest way to fix this is to copy one edge of the leg texture into a new layer, line it up next to the other edge of the leg, and use it as a guide to help you match the colours across the seam.

Thanks, it looks like it was a problem with the mesh from the beginning. It was just a recolor we were doing, the original creator has these lines on the mesh. arg. Gonna have to find another mesh to recolor. :(


Also, I linked my friend the help threads on the transparency hair issues but she has a hard time following it. Is there a idiots guide to transparency hair? lol

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/mesh%20work/Untitled-12.jpg

[whiterider]

Those particular transparency issues look more like a grey alpha channel on the texture than anything else, to me. :)

[kittyvibe]

I made the whole apha white because I couldnt figure it out, lol. Were going through everything for the upteenth time to see if we can compare our textures to the base ones to see if they differ at all. If they dont differ were really stumped :/ Ill update after we check that. thanks for the suggestions :)

[kittyvibe]

We found that the hair needed an underside, this helped make it solid, but am now getting an invisible issue from the undersides. In Milkshape, these errors are shown as black areas and in game they are invisible.

The alpha on these are all white, I left no black areas. We followed the Anubis tutorial and will next try the moving groups, Im just splitting everything up. So hopefully this will fix the errors for invisible undersides eating the top hair layer.

Also, I cant for the life of me find the barefoot high heel mesh shown in post # 8 . I found a random app type page that wasnt even on a sims site that had a set of feet like this but I know I didnt download them from there. Any idea where these feet might have come from? Were going to try using those as a base since our other attempts are failing still.

[BloomsBase]

Undersides are always invisible, you need to duplicate the outer layer, reverse the faces and realligne the normals.
Then you follow Anubis's tutorial,

[kittyvibe]

thanks for the suggestions on the hair, I think weve figured it out and will hopefully have that done soon. The ankle gap issue still persists.

Weve tried assigning bones at the left and right foot , left and right ankle, ect to the foot mesh with shoe. Ive tried using an existing shoe mesh of just the tippy toes and modeled the actual shoe over it and assigned that to the foot mesh already attached bit were still getting breaks.

Which is really weird, since the bare foot is already attached and all we did that time was import the shoe over it and assign that to the bare foot.

Anyone with experience with ankle gaps have any more suggestions not mentioned? Weve tried everything suggested and even work arounds and no go :(

Thank you!

[BloomsBase]

Did you make the morphs for it and new Bgeo files(making Bgeo's are not needed when using TSRW)?

[kittyvibe]

Hey Bloom, we have all the morphs made for it. My creating partner and I am not sure what you mean by Bgeo, but we are using tsrw, so maybe thats why we werent seeing bgeos. :)

At first we just cloned the high heeled pump ea shoe, but that had 2 issues. The ankle breaking and when wearing socks the texture wasnt aligning right after the ankle, you can see that problem in the OP.

After assigning the bones and verts of the entire shoe/foot mesh in a few different combos we just werent getting anywhere. This involved all the suggested things already posted in the thread and anything we got from tutorials and trial and error. assigning respective feet to left right ankle at the top and the foot to the R/L feet, R/L foot bone only, ect. nothing worked. We could load these abominations into the game but they werent correct.

Thinking we could go around this problem and just use a clone of a tippy toe mesh (non base mesh) and model the shoes around it, that didnt fix the ankle break or texture on foot. grr. Ill see if I can get more info from my creating partner and possibly get some files to upload if someone would be so kind to look at our issue hands on. Problem is we were using TSRW and I think most peeps here use CTU, and to add insult to injury tsrw isnt loading for my partner lately so were at a loss to fix the loading issue.

I would just use CTU and try to work with that but for some reason I cant get CTU to load properly either, it crashes if I try to clone anything.

[BloomsBase]

TSRW is fine for shoes, user friendly and easy to work with.
If you upload or sent the file i can have a look if you like?

[kittyvibe]

TSRW is fine for shoes, user friendly and easy to work with.
If you upload or sent the file i can have a look if you like?

Thanks again so much for your assistance Bloom! I went to get the mesh but first loaded up the game to make sure I had just the one pair in game to find in my downloads folder.

I had updated just before that to the new version (1.33? ) so imagine my surprise when I loaded the shoe in game and the ankle break wasnt there. The foot worked! We did nothing new.

There is still 2 issues with the shoe, so hopefully this is an easier fix. Im confused what went wrong with it so I bundled everything just in case.

The issue is the sole of the shoe is invisible and if you wear a pattern sock it wont lay right still. I made screenys of it below of the issue. I will continue working on this since I think it will be an easy fix. I tried opening the uv map in milkshape but I just have the default window, a uv map wont show for me so I guess Im having some milkshape issues, grr. So now I have to wait until my partner finishes her finals with school before we can do anymore. ><

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/mesh%20work/Untitled-3-1.jpg
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/mesh%20work/Untitled-2-1.jpg
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/kittyvibe/mesh%20work/Untitled-1-1.jpg

[BloomsBase]

If the ankles are a morph issue then it only shows on non default bodyshapes.
Make the sim a little fatter then you know for sure.

The sole might be related to reversed faces or missing boneassignements.
turn off hide back faces and check the joints used on the sole.

You do have to pick a texture when uvmapping in MS.
new/none/browse to texture/import/assigne