Well, I have a few people I talk to regularly about meshing, and I'm realizing that you have to be quite crazy to attempt this stuff in the first place - and that everyone has some funny stories of something that's happened or related to meshing that nobody else but another mesher would get (hence why I'm posting this here). So... I'd like to share a couple silly things that make me giggle or go "huh" with you guys. Feel free to share your own - I know for sure at least a couple of you guys have some great stories to share. *nudge nudge in a couple directions*

First of all... I was in the process of testing my Cherub mesh back before its release, and I was trying to get the age conversions right. For some reason, I continued to have an itty bitty little gap under the ear on the child mesh when the head was tilted upward...



You can barely see it there, it's really small, just a snippet of grass and fence in a triangle under his ear... and it persisted no matter what I did. I was getting really frustrated, having loaded up with tweaked assignments a good 5 or 6 times already. I was waiting for my sim to turn his head and look up again, when...



I stopped, looked at that, looked at my neck gap, and released it with the tiny little gap that probably nobody else would ever notice or care about. :P


Secondly... I found this cool little game a while back, Planarity, and I've played it at various times up until rather high levels. Doesn't really get harder, just more stuff to keep track of. I realized how much it feels like meshing... Play a few games. Play quite a few games if you feel like... I'd like to give it to new meshers.

Here. Play this for 8 or 10 levels. Do you like this sort of thing? Could you handle a more complex version of this - and your mesh occasionally ending up looking like how a level starts out looking in Planarity? :D

...

Okay, I'm a total meshing dork, and my laughter may be more of the slightly crazy kind, but I'm betting you guys have gone through at least one bottle of aspirin each if you've been meshing any amount of time.

*Starts total destruction of own reputation*

Like WTF


OH NOOO


WHAT THE......!??!?!?


Someone please stop the HURT!


NOOOOOO!


GAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!! *goes nuts*


PAIN!


*dies*

lol, those meshes are funny, i hate when mine come out like that...its really fustrating. I played that game...i gave up after the 5th level, lol.

Hehehe, I have made every mistake you pictured, and more.

And you are right, HP - as meshers we wind up obsessing about those tiny little flaws that no one will ever notice - your story really made me laugh.

Here are a couple of mine -

I have a "test" house and family in my game - the unfortunate Sims who live there are my guinea pigs, they must test out every creation I make.

Since my clothing meshes are generally for adults or teens, I have an adult male and female sim, and a teen male and female in the house. When I do have to try something that is for a child or toddler, I use the Insiminator to change one of the teens into a child or toddler.

So, I went to test an all-ages hair mesh in this house - but when I got there, the teens were gone at school. No big deal, I made the mom turn into a toddler and put the hair on her. I was really happy to see that it looked great (the toddler version of the mesh had been a major hassle, I had to add 4 new groups) - but then I noticed a glitch - there was some strange distortion of the toddler's hand. It couldn't be the toddler's clothes, it was just a standard Maxis toddler outfit.

Sure that I had accidentally gotten extra parts in my mesh somehow, maybe from the example body I had used, I quit and went back to MilkShape. No, nothing was wrong there that I could see...

I re-imported the mesh in SimPE just to be sure, and went back to the game.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!! The toddler's hand was still messed up. What the heck could I have done wrong?

I went back to MilkShape and again checked everything - still no sign of anything wrong.

Back in the game, the same problem was still there. It finally dawned on me that maybe it wasn't the hair, so I changed the toddler's hairstyle to another one and was relieved that the hand still was weird. But what was it? I zoomed in really close and paused the game - I finally figured out that the game was still putting the mom's wedding ring on the toddler's hand...

LOL I had the same thing, but luckily I checked

I'm currently working on my first real project with meshing. I'd just sorted out a problem with the UV map that had been giving me a headache and decided that I wanted to test what I'd done so far.

I'd made some pretty large edits, including adding new faces so I dupicated, changed the name and comments on the duplicate and deleted the old fat morph. Save and export. No problems.

Then I remembered something I'd been meaning to do before testing so I reloaded the export...

Uh, where's the fat morph?

Close, reopen. Still gone. Must have messed up the comments or the name.

Open from the milkshape native format, which is fine, double check name and comments. Seems fine so I export again.

Still no fat morph.

At this point I checked every thing I could think of. I tried loading and exporting the original files I had extracted from the game. They worked fine. Opened two milkshape windows and compared names/comments. Not the problem. exported to half a dozen different names. Sigh. Drank tea. Problem is still there. Crawl through unimesh docs. Nothing. Crawl through forums. Can't find anything.

I was about to give up and start a new thread. I just couldn't think what the problem could be. I mean it was an exact duplicate!

...

Couldn't be, could it?

Reload, change a few points on the fat mesh, export. Import.

Hello fat mesh, how nice to see you *stab*.

Enigma O - if there is no change, then there is no morph data, the morph data is not an additional mesh - it is the data of the change to apply to the mesh.

Yeah, I guessed it was something like that. You know, once I stopped going 'buh! What's wrong it's dead omg arg panic!' and actually thought about it.

The only reason I wanted to keep it there because I am planing to make changes eventually, and I thought it'd be easier that going and getting the names from another file... Easier. Well at least I learnt something.

well, as long as you keep your ms3d files, you can actually do that for tests, I have, the mesh should work in the game if you're working out the details on the initial mesh. I just found it also to be a pain if I was doing something complex to keep copying the main mesh, renaming and copying comments, so I suggest that with complex stuff people just skip fat morph till it's right, and then start a fresh file and put everything into the right place

I made the exporter delete empty morphs (exact duplicates) because I had to make the importer ignore empty morphs because many of the expansion pack meshes have empty morphs that lack name fields. There are many options available for meshes (kind of like the Whataburger ads about how many ways you can build their burgers) and some combinations are tough to figure out on the fly. Even body meshes lack consistency.

I'm glad you persevered and solved the problem.

<* Wes *>

well see this-lol-it makes me sick-eh

Note to self: adult skeleton goes in FIRST when converting from teen to adult. If not, THIS is what you get:

XD that would be an awesome zombie outfit, just like that hahah :P

I have no idea what I did to make THIS happen in my testing. Didn't change anything between it running before just fine and this, ran it and it was like that, shut it down, changed nothing, and brought it back up and it was okay again. I've had that happen to my thumbnails plenty of times before, but... yikes.



This one wasn't testing a Body Shop mesh but something else... I get stuff like this all the time as the neighborhood flyover starts if I'm in another window while it's loading, but as this one ended up layered over SimPE and was the most impressive one I'd seen, I was glad I grabbed a screenshot.

That pic is so funny it looks like its HULK!

I'm still wondering why that happened

lol, that's one impressive asplosion!

"Put your head between your legs, and kiss your mesh goodbye!"

I would be tempted to bet money on a damaged skeleton (file corruption) or moved joints.
However, that is quite an interesting looking sim. Thanks for sharing it.

<* Wes *>

Brilliant comic relief, keep 'em coming.

Just had a mesh explode beyond reckognition here -- when I was sooo sure I finally figured out some fundamental "hows" on seams & boneweights -- and about to give up. A peak in here confirmed I'm not alone, so back to work =)

yeah i think you're absolutely right I don't know how I damaged the skeleton because everything seems to be ok in milkshape
Anyway..you're welcome, I'll always send my bloopers to here, I've a bunch of them

I found this thread quite by accident (hilarious BTW) two days ago and followed your link to planarity and... well... I'm hooked! Maybe I'm weird, but for some reason I find it kinda soothing and also a bit relaxing. It's like unraveling a big ball of string or tidying up a giant mess. Neither of which I actually find relaxing or soothing... but the game is. I've only played it twice and found it quite easy to get to level 18 on my second go... but I can't find a way to save! Anyway, thanks for the link. I like to do something mindless (well, sorta) before reading in bed and this fits the bill nicely.

I guess I'm weird too. I just tried it real quick and so far I also find it quite calming, but maybe that is because I am a big math person (math, science, arts, foreign languages) and I enjoy problem solving... like those puzzles where it gives you a storyline and a few clues and you have to find out like each person's first and last name and what they bought and such. Logic puzzles. Awesome. ^-^ <<< OMG BUNNY!!!!!!

Ah, well I'm glad I'm not alone then! Just gotta throw in that I hate math (sincerely), love science (yes, you can love science without math), like art, love crosswords, love logic puzzles, and I'm an excellent problem solver too. Yea bunnies!

lol.. You fried her brains. Either that, or you've made a blonde think too hard so it warmed up a bit inside the noggin. lol

You ebil woman, you... Leading us into distraction! It's more like fiddling with and trying to fix the UV MAPPING when you OOPS and hit the remap button.