Blender GEOM Tools v2.1.4 (Blender 2.8x-3.x)

It's been quite a while since I released the original version of my GEOM Tools for Blender 2.8.
While that version works, it is plagued with improper error handling and couldn't handle the game's original normals.
This new version aims to get rid of these issues.

I've reworked how meshes and morphs are imported to support custom normals and tried to get better error handling implemented, so hopefully no more mysterious stacktraces pop up for the poor users. If they do, let me know an I'll try to fix it. Remember to check this page every now and then, smaller updates may have been released since you've first downloaded it

If you're currently working on something with the old GEOM Tools I'd recommend first exporting your work with the old version, then installing this new version and reimporting the file(s) with the new version.

If something doesn't work please let me know, I'll see what i can do to help you out.

Add-on Installation
This add-on is installed like any other Blender add-on, to install it follow the menus as shown below.
Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Install

Tools

Tool Panel


Update Checker
The add-on will now automatically look for available updates by connecting to my github page once every time the add-on is first loaded.
When an update is found the panel will display a button that's hard to miss that links to this page, if the connection fails it will instead notify you of the failure, if no updates are available nothing will show up.

In all cases you can keep using your currently installed version without any problems, but you won't have any new features or bugfixes of course.


Morphs
Morphs can be imported from GEOM morph meshes, these can be extracted from BGEO files and the base GEOM file with Cmar's tool  Make sure you have your base mesh selected and import the morphs, you can select all morphs and import them all in one go.

The way morphs work has been completely overhauled, they are now separate meshes instead of shape keys for technical reasons. Instead morph meshes will now have two properties, their name and the mesh they're linked to. Any morph linked to you selected GEOM mesh in it's 'Linked to' field will get exported as a morph GEOM. The 'Morph Name' field is what will be added to the name of your exported GEOM file for the morph GEOM files, if two or more have the same in this field they will overwrite each other.

Morphs can have custom normals, just like the base GEOM meshes


Splitting UV seams
This used to be a button in the UI panel, but it didn't always work properly. Instead of fixing this I decided to remove it completely, since it's so trivial to do manually anyway.

This is still an important step that should not be overlooked or you will have issues.

All you have to do is the following: Open the UV Editor, got to 'UV -> Seams from islands', go back to the 3D view with edge select mode active, select one or more edges that are marked as a seam(orange), go to 'Select -> Select Similar -> Seam'. Now with all the edges marked as seam selected you can simply press the 'v' key to split the seams. Don't forget to recalculate the vertex IDs after if your mesh uses them.

Vertex IDs
start_id tells the add-on the vertex ID to start renumbering at.
Displayed to the right of it is the highest vertex ID and the amount of unique vertex IDs, these are updated after the 'Recalculate IDs' button is pressed. Don't touch these if you don't plan on adding/removing vertices, this way the original vertex IDs are preserved. It's also possible to remove vertex IDs from a mesh if it is needed, some things like pet accessories don't seem to use them.

Transferring GEOM Data
It's now possible to transfer GEOM data from one mesh to one or more other meshes, this is a lot less tedious than combining 2 meshes and deleting the geometry you don't need. The data will be copied from the active (mesh)object to all other selected (mesh)objects. The data that is transferred is part of the GEOM header structure, allowing the mesh to be successfully considered a GEOM mesh and to be exported.

Rebuilding the FNV map
If you ever import something and vertex groups have names like 0xef89a3e3, you'll probably want to change those to their proper names. To do this, you'll have to import the rig for the mesh in question, make sure the rig is selected and press the 'Rebuild Bonehash Database' button on the panel. After doing that select the mesh and press the 'Rename Vertex Groups' button on the same panel. You will only have to do this once, as the bone names are added to a json file mapping the fnv32 hashes to names.


Github link
https://github.com/SmugTomato/blender-sims3-geom

Credits
cmomoney for the original rig importer that I adapted into this one, can be found here