Coolness! I haven't had a single problem with it, but I do have good luck with the sims not crashing, unlike some people. I will keep trying to break it for you, though!

I've just finished rebinning thousands of hair styles (my dl folder is huge ) and I didn't have any problens with this.

Sounds like the DNA thing is still a bit experimental. I think I'll wait on that.

Remeber that this function is only needed if you have created sims in CAS using custom downloaded hairs. When you do this, the hair's guid is imbued in the sim's DNA (and possibly their offspring's), hence the need to correct the values when the custom hair guid no longer exists.

Oh, so if I don't have any CAS made sims with the hair I rebinned, it's no problem. So then is it true that any sims I make now with the binned hair will have the proper DNA and it will read as the right color hair for attractions, etc?

Yes, the sim's DNA will then use the normal guid, taken from the hairtone property in the SkintoneXML resource.

The "Custom Hair" attraction surely refers to custom bin hair, and not custom content hair. Although there are other factors involved, I've had occasions whereby categorizing the hair would also change the attraction strength (the lightning bolts). I've had a number of sims that had to change their turn-on/offs, because they preferred custom hair .

Hi there! Thank you for creating a wonderful tool. I am looking forward to using it.

Before I do use it though.... I have a few questions.

1. There are several hairstyles that I have downloaded that only have 1 hair color. Meaning that the creator never did all the maxis color schemes. So for example I have a light brown hairstyle that appears in custom and I want to bin it for the brown area..... is there going to be a problem since there are no other recolors of the hairstyle?

2. My other question is this:
After looking through bodyshop I can see like 70% of the toddler hairstyles and about 50% of the elder hairstyles are the same. When I bin the hair colors to the maxis areas .... must I keep any toddler or grey haircolors? Of can I just have the adult hair style/ hair color binned with no other age groups?

Sorry if my questions are confusing. I just got off an 18 hour shift at work. My brain = fried.

Thanks for any imput.

Again thanks for making this tool!

Hello Snuggles

If you don't have all the recolors you can still use this tool without any problem, the only thing different is that when you are in the game and switch to the non-existent color, the hair mesh will revert to the default mesh.

And you can select which ages you want, just check the respective items you want included in the output packages.
For example, here we're going to remove the Toddler, Child and Elder ages from the black recolor:

You'll have to check the items you want on each color tab, and don't forget that at least one elder age item must remain checked.

I have made a tutorial that explains how the whole process should be done, you can see it at http://theos.chewbakkas.net/tools/c...alkthrough.html.

cheers,
Theo

this is an awesome plugin, thanks!!

the only trouble (not very important though) is when there are more than 4 regular recolors of the same hair (like 2 shades of blond or brown)... then, for the extra recolors, the old simpe-property-set-changes method applies, i guess?

anyway, a great tool!!
good job and great tutorial!! Thanks Theo!!

Hi

You're right, it can only process one package on each color bin.

However, you can still do the following trick: when doing the main packages, take note of the Family Guid.
After you process and save the main batch, you can load the remaining packages on their respective color bins, and then paste the previous guid into the Family Guid.

That guid is what the game needs to associate the different colors of the same hair.

Beware that the current naming scheme forces you to choose a different name for the second batch, otherwise the main packages would be disabled or overwritten.

oooh, thanks for the tip, i'll do that!! :lovestruc

Hi

Regarding the file size issue, sometimes the textures won't compress even if you check that option.

This is a known problem of SimPE's compression function (which is used by this tool), and I think it happens when the compressed data is larger than the original.

Perhaps in a future version of SimPE that problem may be solved, but until then there's nothing we can do. You can try do do the compression manually, but in the end the result will be the same

*lol* Thanks! I just edited my post at the same time you posted because I found the thread over at maty and found the answers there, thank you anyway, it's a great plugin!

OK I really want to use this tool, but I don't get it I manged to open it up in SimPE but how do I know where the hair is in my downloads folder?

I recommend organizing your downloads folder for that matter. It will be a daunting task and especially time consuming, but in the end it will save you a lot of time when you want to find a particular package.

To give you a hint, here is the folder structure of my downloads folder:


This way you can drop all your downloaded hairs into the "Hair" folder, so that you can find it later when using this tool.

Edit: BTW, it helps a lot if you sort the files by creation date

Sorry I forgot to post that I figured it out. Took me forever. Thanks for the tool.

I have a question, this is a pretty neat tool and figuring it out now, but is there a way to use this for clothing skins? I am trying to find an easier way to put my clothes in their proper categories rather than tying up my everyday wear?

Sorry to derail slightly but different websites have different help tutorials and I am still new to all this.

Man after a few hrs all my hairs are color binned, next time I am gonna d/l in small batches. It wouldnt have so bad if those numbers didnt always come before the name it was like playing matching pairs. But now I hair a hair folder with all the hair sets neatly labelled.

Great Program!

Hi,

You should try the latest version (0.2.25.1) which can be found at my website. I didn't update this thread because that version is still a bit experimental, and there's always the chance of misuse.

But basically it enables you to load a clothing package into the tool. Of course there's no color binning to perform, so you can just ignore the color tabs names.

After the package is loaded, you'll see the PropertySet listing, normally consisting of one item. When an item is selected, a new Properties tab will appear at the bottom, where you can set the relevant attributes for that package.

I hope this helps

cheers

Cool I saw that when I messed with a clothing package but because of the bins I didnt know if I would mess it up, man oh man here goes my day off, to sort clothes for the sims2!

:D

Ok I may do this in segments as its alot worse than clothing when have to do one at a time instead of the clothing batches. But I have a question, does renaming the files hurt anything? I saw some sites warned about changing names but it makes it alot easier just to rename and sort then attempt thi.

Sorry to be a pest, I am almost tempted to start over and control my downloading better so its presorted.

You can rename your downloaded packages, but you must be aware that if you later download an updated version of a package, you may have the same content in two files.

In that case, the game will not load both packages, but rather the last package to be fetched from the filesystem.

That is the reason for the "Disable original package" option that you can find in the output options panel. When enabled, it will rename the input packages in such a manner that they won't be loaded by the game, leaving only the processed packages, and thus minimizing the chances of a package conflict.



I did spend quite some time doing that myself , the tool is fine for re-sorting categories, but it doesn't make any checks for age or gender, so you must be careful if you're going to mess with those settings.

As far as I know, it's safe to change the assigned gender only for child and toddler clothes (eg, making male child clothes available to female child too), and making clothes available to different ages is only possible between the Young Adult, Adult and Elder ages.

Thanks alot for the help, just finished making a new set of custom folders and while doing so kinda jotted down what names looked out of place. I think you have a great tool but was surprised no one made an altered bodyshop program with more options. I am doing ok for some of the clothes but sometimes trying to see if its a bikini or underwear has me just leaving those alone. Plus I am lazy to boot..

But once again, thanks for your patience Theo, I am so happy the hair is sorted, it is so much easier now and lol I was happy when I started a new family and it choose one of the hairs I binned...

Heh 4 days now and the only part of the game I have got to is the CAS.....Actually think having more fun sorting..

PS thanks for tip about renaming, didnt think of that as a end result and yeah that could be a problem. I renamed all my hair packages but then again its not as many as the clothing and I now have folders sorted for downloading hair.

When I try to move one color of hair in a package file, all of them move even if they weren't selected! For example, a file I downloaded is a dark brown male hair, which consists of the brown hair and the elder equivalent in gray. The creator classified it as a black hair, while I would rather have it show up under brown and have the gray show up under gray.

What am I doing wrong?

divinebovine, I had that problem too. You need to load the colors into each tab - so you're loading twice.

Otherwise, I need to report that this didn't work for me, and when I looked at the code in SimPE, the hair color value was set in a string called "proxy" instead of the value specified in the manual hair color binning tutorial. Could that be why?

I know that's really not helpful, but I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination.

The "Move To" command is just a quick'n'dirty way to put a package in the correct color tab, instead of having to remove it, and then loading it again.

For example, sometimes the package filename can't tell you what hair color it contains; in those cases, you just load the package into an available tab, inspect it using the texture preview, and if it's on the wrong color, use the Move command to put it where it belongs.

That command cannot move single PropertySet items, it operates on the whole package.


Now for the grey color

If at least one of the loaded packages already contains the grey color, then you're all set, and you can leave the "Grey" tab alone.

Just remember that on all four tabs, only one grey (elder) PropertySet item should be selected - this will ensure that only one version of the hair will appear on the catalog of elder hair.


alkaloid, can you give an example of what you tried to do?

Hey Theo,

Thanks for getting back to me. I'll try to do it again with screenshots, but I won't have time to put that together until this weekend. Will it be OK if I wait until then?

Now that I've finally figured out how to bin hair, this makes things so much faster. Thanks a lot!