Wow! These are amazing, thanx so much for sharing!

~ Syn

I'm working on a theme,and these are exactly what I wanted,thank you very much!

Such a greate work;-)

As I said on the previous thread, words can't express the happiness I feel now, that these new meshes and clothing are finally out! Thank you! Amazing!

the Highboots mesh was a petition of mine and this was the only way of saying thanks for all the effort and time that marvine put on these meshes. I'm glad I could help her this time.

My dear Marvine, you're the best

...And I just PMd you, Metalfenix! :D

I cannot say how much I adore this mesh. I can hardly stand to have any other type of men in my neighborhoods. (If only I could arrange my life like this!) I would die and go to heaven if you could make thigh high boots!

Wonderful! Thanks a ton.

Marvine you are a genius. What tools do you use (obviously SimPE or Datagen + a 3d editor) . Do you use body chop plugins

OMG!!! I've just died and gone to boot lovers heaven!!!
Thank you sooooooooooooooooooooooo much!!! :bow2:

Roxy99,

I'm using SimPE and the body chop plugins - this is a necessity since my meshes aren't just morphs of existing ones, the bodybuilder has more polys than the regular sims, and a good part of my stuff was made from scratch. This jacket looks like the short jacket from Uni, but in fact I just used the collar from that one.
These tools allow much more freedom, but the counterpart is that with tops and bottoms the "fat" and "pregnant" morphs are unusable, and they won't associate well with other meshes. It also seems that "bumpmapping" doesn't work, and sometimes normals problems occur on import (here, weird shading on the front of the jacket, luckily unnoticeable on dark recolours)... I'm still a big fan of them.

When you say from scratch you must surely mean to start from an existing mesh from a working gmdc file first. Unless you are telling me you completely replace the obj file in the gmdc.

If that is the case, how do you sort out which bone goes where? I presume you mean you start from a working mesh model and literally chop and join body parts, testing in between in game and outside? Is texture mapping an issue?

Regarding texture mapping, can you confirm that you only have to do this with new body parts, since existing bodyparts are already texture mapped. How come in Milkshape the Materials editor does not show my sims skin color or clothing for that matter? All that shows is a gray sphere- what am I supposed to map here?

You don't have to reveal all your secrets, maybe just give me a couple of hints or point me in the right direction.


Since u use bodychop, then this means milkshape which only has one bone per vertix limit. Also, I read that body chop only works on full body meshes- how did you get around it. And since you are using Milkshape, did you use a more powerful 3d modeller later on to smooth out the rough spots? Milkshape can be pretty tedious to do a full 3d mesh from scratch.

As you can see I have done some research so its not as though I did'nt post without googling first.

Thanks

PS - whoever did the screenshot should submit that shot to Maxis promotion department for Nightlife. Nice stuff.

Roxy,

This is a lot of questions... :D

To the others, please skip this post if you are not interested in meshing!!

So, the Body Chop plugins, Milkshape and LithUnwrap.

In this case, to make it short, I took different parts from different meshes (the collar and bottom from the Uni jacket, the neck, center chest and belly from a bodybuilder nude top, morphed and poly-reduced torso and arms from another)that I had saved as .obj files (the original format is not relevant as long as the orientation of the mesh is ok) and (painstakingly) assembled them, adding totally new parts such as the inner lapels or the inside of the sleeves.
Then I exported each surface to smooth them separately (since I still don't know how to use the smoothing groups feature :D), then put everything together again without regrouping, exported the mesh as an .obj again to remap everything in LithUnwrap, and had to do the separate smoothing again for the main torso group because LithUnwrap messed with it (but i knew it would happen, that's why i didn't regroup the parts before).
After this, I imported a random gmdc in Milkshape with the plugins, deleted the 3 groups (which are used to support the multiple assignments), leaving only the skeleton.
I then imported the .obj file, regrouped it and triplicated it to re-create the bodymod groups, renamed the groups. I imported another top gmdc in a new Milkshape window, and copy/pasted the group comments in my new mesh, and then spent a LOT of time trying to assign the vertices properly, knowing that the trickiest part is the shoulders region. Well, studying other meshes, trial and error, and lots of testing in game usually do the trick...:D

In fact, I'm able to use the plugins for my tops and bottoms because I got rid of the "fat" and "pregnant" morphs; I use the 3 body groups just to keep the multiple assignments. And top and bottoms made with this tool don't work properly with maxis or mesh tool meshes...

About the uv-mapping, when you add new parts you have in fact to remap also the original ones, to insert your new parts in free places.
And to view your texture in Milkshape, you have to assign it to your mesh : select all, then go to materials, click "new", then the upper "none" button to browse to your texture, then click "assign".

Well, I hope this makes a little sense... :D

Marvie,
I actually understood most of what you said. Since I'm already being a pest, how do you get rid of the "fat" and "pregnant" morphe? Do you simply delete something in Milkshape or do you mess around in Simpe?

Roxy, this is a boring process since you have to delete the 2 bodymod groups and replace them with duplicates of the body group, then redo all the assignments...

And I just edited the post above to answer your question about uv-mapping.

Yes, you're The Best, Marvine!!! :agree: :bow2:

Thank you for sharing your creations :clap: :clap: :gidea:

Great work! Now I'm one step closer to some Tom of Finland Sims!

OMG! Ur Work IS FaNtAsTiC! :clap:
Thanx alot

cool

thankkkk:)