It is, and seems redundant, but other stuff I am looking at right now seems to indicate that it is an important part of unifying all the pieces into a whole, i.e. hair, face, top, bottom, glasses. Different parts of the standard skeleton seem to be adjusted by BodyShop & CAS (e.g. the male/femal skeleton models are the same, but men are generally larger than women in the game). Some of the points outside the zone of interest (for glasses, the forehead and two temples are probably enough reference) seem to be used to allow the game to use the same routines to adjust the locations as is used to adjust the whole.
If my research bears any fruit, you'll see it first here (on MTS2).
<* Wes *>

Well, I don't want to start a "religious war" in my beta-test support thread, but, price aside, I find MilkShape quite easy to use. Click on a vertice, press 'delete' and it's gone. Select a few verts, click on the 'extrude' button, click and move the mouse, and the vertices move. Easy enough for me.
But then, I am not a "modeller". It is not likely that you will ever see a wonderful, complete and detailed object from me that was created from scratch... all I do is buff up REAL artist's work.
<* Wes *>

Ok ,Wes, i send a standard body wich i can import in milkshape with your plugin. With this body, like others, when i select a bone, and click "selassigned", nothing is selected. Else, you are right vertices are assigned anyway, because i tried the anim mode, and when you rotate one on the bones, the according vertices rotates too.... weird weird weird......how strange it is... :bump:

I looked at your upload, thank you. I can see vertices selected when I click on SelAssigned for all the arms bones, fingers, thighs, etc. There are entites that show up as 'bones' that never seem to have vertices assigned to them that I think are for clothing... but I haven't finished testing that concept here.
Cretainly, the bone assignments are there if you can animate the object. Try looking in your preferences (file menu), pull up 'selected bone' from the drop-down list and check that you have that item set to a color you can see (I have mine set to red).
<* Wes *>

For me, some turn red with a RGB handle (actually its a pink, teal, yellow handle... Good grief) and some just show the handle. Is there a difference in the 2?

I'd say I don't have a clue what you're talking about, except for the fact that I think I have a clue, but then again...
I really don't think I quite understodd the question. Maybe there's a feature or option in MilkShape that I don't use and you do?
There are some joints that are co-located. I don't know if that has any bearing, because all I ever saw was that I have a lot of trouble highlighting those joints, because sometimes the unhighlighted one is what is mainly showing, and you have to look real hard to see a red pixel somewhere.
Having said all that, I have never even once tried using the animation features in MilkShape... I mean to one day, but I have been focussed on other things recently.
At one time (in unreleased code) I had the joints organized into a full 'skeleton' (with parent bones and all). But I took that out because it was all work based on conjecture, and I am convinced the actual IK animation parts aren't even in the GMDC. But I think they do act on the bone assignments in the vertices, themselves.
<* Wes *>

That is so lame. I'm going to whore myself out to raise money to get you maya. Might take me a few years though.

so, if it works with you, Wes, maybe an issue with win XP pro and SP2 and only 256 MB ram on my puter

dyonis-my,

Did you scale that model down about 2/5 of original or is it me?

Spine1 joint selects 2 rows of vertices in the middle of the model for me.

Also these show vertices...
spine2
clavicle
neck - I stopped checking here.

no, i think this is the original bunny body

I edited my post with some results.

That model imports much smaller than the mesh I've been working with.

i tryed one thing, and what you said is right, your plugin does not export scaled bones. i imported a gdmc, i used the plugin 'scale all', wich scales mesh and bones, when i export the result, and re-import it, the mesh stayed scalled, but not the bones. Wes, do you know why your plugin makes this ?

Version 2.10, uploaded today, does reexport the new bone positions. Now, how it works may not satisfy every thing people might want, but the reason lies deep in 3D math.
Two important things involved in the bones are the initial rotation, and the translation values. The initial rotation sets the default axis the bone lies on, and the translation values the 'lift' it up into place. The exporter merely recomputes the translation from the new location values, and leaves the axis the same. While this should suit scaling and some things, it doesn't change the axis angle.
There's more that could be done for the bone structure, such as recreating a full skeleton, but I'm leaving things as is for a while, until I consider the work a little more stable.
<* Wes *>

used the plugin but the skeleton seemed really wired. see all the blue lines are the skeleton. then i did no changes and just export it and put back to game, the body mesh looked like a monster, with hands streching very long like a spider.

Just tested the version 2 plugins in game, I just used them for reference before. I imported the am bottom mesh and exported it without changes. Here are the problems I had.

Pic 1: The basic shapes get deformed at the joints.

Pic 2. Texture info is lost. The front and back half of the bottom male can be seperated in Maya (feet can be seperated also). I thought the game didn't treat them seperate, but its obvious they are seperate here.

Pic 3. Meshes don't attach.

Good work on this, it helps me to understand alot more than I would otherwise. I'm going to test several things with this.

See post #3 in this thread about the blue lines. http://72.9.230.162/showpost.php?p=221472&postcount=3

The deformation at the joints is due to the single bone assignment. I'm pretty sure on that.
There is definitely smoothing information that isn't carried over, that seems to be important to matching the top & bottom, etc. up. It also is related to belly fat, thigh fat, pregnancy and perhaps some other effects.
I heard before that the meshes were split. I just carried the vertices and triangles back and forth. MilkShape goes to a lot of effort to reduce duplicate vertices, and that is likely where the severability went to.
You might try checking if "Autosmooth" is turned on, it would also "fix' things you don't want fixed.
I appreciate the careful notes. I am intrigued to know if the autosmooth has anything to do with the mesh seperation issue or not.
<* Wes *>

Also I noticed that the following joints got renamed. EDIT: I meant renamed between the last plugin version and this one.

skull
forehead
r_temple
l_temple
crown

to...

c_hair
b_hair
l_hair
r_hair
f_hair

and maybe others.

I thought the game used certain labels and they couldn't be changed? Whats going on here?

The "names" are just inside the importer plugin. The NUMBER is the reference point for the bone assignment.
I updated the names by carefully going through the CRES file and correlating the names used there with the bone numbers, and the bone numbers with the picture in MilkShape.
If you use a hex editor, you'll see that the names aren't in the gmdc. The numbers (which you don't see on a body mesh because I used the real names) are a very important key to the animation. Animated items have a whole section of the gmdc where the vertices and faces are repeated, sorted by bone number. A non-animated object doesn't use that section, placing a copy of all the faces and vertices in a different place, all coalesced into one big pot.
<* Wes *>

K, I checked off autosmooth. It fixed the texture problem and most of the deformities. The mesh seperation is still there. So 2 out of 3's not bad.

Its kinda strange cause I didn't have problems with autosmooth and textures with your first plugins and I'm pretty sure I've never touched that autosmooth checkbox before.

Even though autosmooth is off, everytime i press the '1' smoothing group, every vertex on the model is highlighted. I can't unassign it either.

Great plugins! keep up the good work. The only problem that I have encountered is the split mesh that fleabay mentioned.(any way around that yet?)

I noticed that there are some complaints about this being based on milkshape. While it is obvious now that milkshape is not the best tool for body meshes for TS2, I still think that it is one of the best choices for objects. most of today's 3d games(including TS2) are meant to have low-polygon models because of the amount of calculations that games have to do to render and animate the objects and characters, and milkshape just happens to be a low-polygon modeller. It seems that alot of the new meshes that are coming out have more polygons for the smallest objects than the largest maxis objects in the game.

Thanks

I tried the last version of the plugin with milkshape 1.7.4, i imported a simple toddler hair, here it is :

http://www.modthesims2.com/attachme...tid=30425&stc=1

withou modify, made nothing, i just re exported this mesh, and reimported it, here is whet it gives :

http://www.modthesims2.com/attachme...tid=30424&stc=1

i attach the original and re exported gdmc, so you can try too

This is strange...

I imported/exported the adult male top through Milkshape. I thought either the gap would grow bigger because it was a scaling error or the neck would gap because it was translating down in error. But neither happened, instead the model now looks half-decent. The gap is closed.

I just wonder why the head didn't have the same problem with the top body in a simular manner.

Maybe it is a scale/translate problem but the neck/head has some overlap so it doesn't show?

Also I was able to import dyonis-my's .5gd file, export it as a .simpe and reimport without a problem.

I realilized that I had the previous importer/exprter installed. Using the latest plugins, I retried the am top and got this below. I reimported back into MS and pretty much had the same thing as dyonis-my. It looks wicked in the game though, like a spider. Freaking wild.

I have noted and replicated the bug.
A fix will be forthcoming, one way or another (if I can't make the movement code work reliably, I'll have to put it back like it was).
<* Wes *>

I seem to remember having some other type of problem that would crop up when you immediately reexported. I'll have to look through my notes.