Extracting sims to blender?
 

I wasn't really sure what category this fell in. As far as i could tell it could easily fall into the help section, general section or creation section of the forum. So i settled on here. I want to know how to extract custom sims, made in create a sim, with all their settings like facial shape and details and body shape, to import into blender. If the solution is really complicated or difficult that is fine. I assumed there would be no easy answer.

The solution sounds more complicated than it actually is.

You need to use screen ripping software. Before you get started, I should mention that it is imperative that you are below patch 1.69. This patch made some changes to the game launcher, but it also prevents several 3rd party applications (like the aforementioned ripping software) from working.

I personally use 3DRipper: http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/3DRipperDX.htm
You can also use Ninja Ripper, or any program compatible with DX9 games.

If you are using Windows 10, you *may* have to run 3DRipper in compatibility mode for Windows 7/8, you may also have to set both 3DRipper and ts3.exe to always run as an administrator. YMMV on this.

If you use Reshade, you need to remove it before running 3DRipper. They will conflict.

Boot the game through 3DRipper. Make sure not to alt+tab! Once you are in Create a Sim and have selected the sim you would like to capture, hit the capture key. By default, it should be set to F1. A message should display in the upper left hand corner of the screen when your rip is complete. 3DRipper will save all on-screen meshes, textures and shaders visible when you took your capture. Unless you plan to edit a shader, you can delete these. Your sim's mesh will be included with the rest of the scene in an .obj file. In addition to your actual sim, the program also captures ALL geometry in the scene including your sim's reflection - make sure to delete these items.

Unfortunately, 3DRipper captures Field of View distortion on the mesh itself, damages all of the UV maps and strips all bone assignments. You will need to fix these issues before your sim is usable. For example, if you took the capture while your sim was facing front, it will be completely flattened along the Z-axis (you'll need to increase this by 1200-1800x to match the default proportions, if you're scaling a whole sim at once and not just the head). Regardless of what angle you take the capture from, you'll typically always need to scale down the entire rip (about .0009), rotate it 180 degrees, mirror the mesh from left to right, and finally align the normals. To fix the UV maps, import .pngs of the UV layout and assign them as materials to each part respectively, then just resize the UV islands to fit the image. It's important you really take your time to make sure you match the UV islands exactly.

It's kind of a pain in the butt to do, but if you're looking to make custom textures for a character, it really is worth it! I do this every time I make a sim.

It's not doable. Sims have a main "rig" for each gender, a model of a Sim in its default state, and with sliders the game modifies the geometry through bones and weights. You can import a Sim rig into blender, and you can edit it as normal, but to replicate a Sim in Blender you'd need to find a way to export each slider value from the game, into a format that Blender can be made to recognize. That would require writing an entire new plugin and there's a number of reasons that make it unlikely that that'll happen. Of course you can export all the other meshes and textures that are used on their body and import them into Blender just fine, but sliders are a long and complicated story.

But it IS doable. I wrote that explanation, because I have completed this process myself dozens upon dozens of times. Ripping from CAS with an appropriate DX9 compatible program maintains all slider adjustments - whether applied from bone-based or geom-based sliders. I'm not talking about opening the default sim geoms in Blender - I'm specifically describing how to extract the altered meshes from CAS that result from applying slider adjustments. If you need to re-rig the exported mesh, you can re-assign bones with toolkit relatively easily. Bone-based sliders can also be translated into Blender, but that's a different question, and, yes, a lot more complicated to do.

Sorry to necro this thread, but none of the other threads asking this seemed to have this much info. Even though it would be very complicated, how would you bring individual sims and their face and body sliders into blender? Surprised no one asked here earlier with how much interest there is in this topic.

My way of doing this is pretty simple, you don't need to extract anything, you just need to have some sculpting skills. Basically I'll take a front and side pic of my Sim's face and sculpt them in Blender using the default rigs. Of course though, it won't be identical to the Sim in the game, but if you're good at it, you can make it so it looks almost identical.

Is this online tool good with sims 3 screencaps? Really doubtful it will work with 4. https://cvl-demos.cs.nott.ac.uk/vrn/ Maybe using one of those online photo and image upscalers before would help too? https://imageupscaler.com/ and https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x

I've tried multiple ways to rip sim models from TS3 but every method has it's flaws.

I tried using Ninja Ripper, models will appear in T-Pose with proper textures and UVs but the body and face will be that of a default sim.

3D ripper rips face and body structure properly, the model is stretched but it can be fixed, and using a mod it's possible to make sim T-Pose in CAS, but UVs are heavily distorted and i wasn't able to fix it (For some reasons, the entire sim UV map was stretched in a spherical shape).

Has anyone found a successful way to rip the models?

@SeriousNorbo

I would consider contacting @CmarNYC via PM, they looked into this briefly recently:
http://modthesims.info/download.php...489#post5616489

I've started on this project and barring unexpected problems nothing looks prohibitively difficult. (I may regret saying that.) I have to figure out how to composite the textures using the CASt system plus trying to remember the basics since it's been a long time since I worked with TS3, so it may take considerable time. The morphed meshes alone should be relatively easy so I guess I'll do that part first and post it for feedback, and those of you who can successfully get the textures from Ninja Ripper may be able to use them.

Very interesting- will look forward to that!

That would be amazing! And yeah, getting proper textures might be a problem here, using NinjaRipper They seems to be separated into 3 layers like TS4 textures, except here it's a bit more difficult to figure out a proper settings to get the right skin colour.

Edit: Also, Ninja Ripper cannot export textures of a horse, i haven't tried 3D Ripper though.

Edit again: I found a strange way to get the proper skin texture, you must remove the transparency from the texture that has clothing (for example convert it to a jpg) and basic skin colour should appear.

I've posted a beta of TS3SimRipper for feedback: http://modthesims.info/showthread.p...d=1#post5621928

It's very preliminary but seems to be doing human sim meshes pretty well. No textures yet.