Then you dont have to worry about any errors i guess.
I do not know of Wes his plugin and compiler update the boundingbox and the shader offsets.
I used them today for the first time but was facing the same problems with the WSO plugin.
Both plugins cant handle scaled normalmaps(or the uvcoordinates for them)


@ Inge, when you import a whole new package(all files at once) and delete everything wats in it then i get a new preview.
It is how i create default replacements, clone with S3OC and import all the files in TSRW throug project contents.
Ill try next time to save and reopen

yeah but the plugin is just a shortcut to doing that. And one resource at a time. You even use it from the Project Contents window. If it works the way you've just described (and I agree it does) then it will work just as well using the export to S3PE plugin, just easier!

Thanks Base ...it uses Word Press...a free and easy way to make a decent looking site. Also, if you're finding you need to get your mesh in .package form and want an easy way to convert it to SimPack form there's a tool for that at Simlogical that works real well and is about as close to one click as you can get. It's here: http://dino.drealm.info/den/denforu...php?topic=198.0

Esmerelda I've had that same problem with shadows chopping off on larger objects. The tutorial Base wrote on the subject finally let me understand why this happens. If you haven't seen it maybe it would help you too. It doesn't seem to always work but when it does it's really great. Also, Cmo automated the process described there for the Blender plugin so if you're already using Blender to bake with it's not much more than another button click to have it make your shadow lods for you too.

I prolly dont need unless it works for sliderfiles aswell, then i might try it.
I always convert to package because it is so much easier to uninstall after testing.

The shadow meshes were so frustrating even after figuring out how to create them.
Those meshes use the sun shader but that shader needs to be updated with (i think) the correct boundingbox value's and i dont think they get updated when importing new Mlods?




Remember the guy with the columm wich made the correct mesh but still had incorrect shadow?
He prolly needs to update the Possoffset.

That's too bad...the tool works for objects only right now. The newer versions of S3PE do, however, update the bounding box values when importing a new .s3asc or .s3m2b (MLOD or MODL). I must have tried using the old stable version which does not. Ty for posting that information...I'll give my object another try with the latest stable version

GAH!!!!!!!!!!!! Didn't I spend half of yesterday moaning at you for not updating? You of all people!

Thank you, just went looking for Bloom's shadow tutorial and found it (hadn't seen it before), so will have a good read through it later - thanks for the tutorial, Bloom! It would be useful to understand more about how (and/or why) shadows operate.

(I don't use Blender, unfortunately I've never been able to get my brain around it despite several tries [I use Milkshape]. I did recently try Blender again just to try baking a mesh, because baking sounds like a very useful function to have, but couldn't even get that to work! Will have to try again sometime!)

If you get the current version of Blender and install Cmo's S3 Blender tools for it baking and making your sunshadow mlods are very easy...no hunting around in Blender to find the buttons to make it do what you want. You basically just import your object in .obj form into Blender, set the size of the map you're using in the prominently displayed boxes and then press the go button. I wasn't much good with Blender either until I used this but now I couldn't make an object without it...I hate making the shadow stuff by hand and Blender does a better job of it than I can anyway

Inge, I tried this when Base first posted his tutorial...s3pe wasn't updated yet at that point. :P

Hooray, did it at long last - got all my passengers lined up in a row in front in reasonably 'sensible' positions. THANK YOU again Bloom, for the advice on getting started with rigediting - I'm getting all sorts of ideas for new projects now!

Only problem with the rigedited result is (see pic below):

a) the shadows of the two passengers who have been moved from the 'back seat' to the front left wing, don't join up with the shadow of the bat and the other two passengers - the two former rear seat passengers are showing up as separate shadows next to the bat shadow, and

b) lady passengers' skirts all go up into a point in the middle! Is this how EA rigged their car passengers, since nobody would normally see them?

Does anyone know if anything can be done about either of those two issues? Or is this something we have to live with?



Ooooh, thanks, OM, I'll have to give Blender another try, that would be really useful!

The sims shadows are fine, its the bats shadow that is to small
OM is experimenting with the shader posoffset i think, i do not know if S3PE updates those value's when importing a new shadowmesh


The skirt is indeed very strange, no idea how to fix that but i would check wether the seat slot(joint) is rotated.
If so try set it to 0(not the axis you used for the 180 flip ofcourse but the others.)

It's weird, isn't it? I can't get the bat shadow to go full-size - if I make it bigger it cuts off at the sides. For some reason, it came out full-size a couple of versions ago, but when I made the next version it went back to being small again.

I really don't understand the shadows on some objects - it seems to especially affect cars, the shadows come out too narrow from side to side. The shadow came out the correct size when I cloned from that scooter, although the scooter is narrower than a car!

Now that I've read your shadow tutorial, I'm going to try making the mesh exactly 2x2x2 and see if that works.


Another weird mystery! I didn't rotate the seating positions, just moved the rear passengers forward and moved all three passengers up slightly so that they weren't clipping into the wings so much. Will have to experiment further! Was hoping to have this finished for Halloween but it may be next Halloween at the rate I'm going!

it is because you didn't update the shader possoffset(post 29)

ofcourse, you only moved the sims instead of the rotation.
You prolly need to update the other files aswell.:



One of the reason i prefer TSRW, it does alot auto while these joint adjustments are done in the meshtab.
Most of the times you only have to edit the RIG file tho.

Ugh, I have no idea how to do either of those things - where is the shader posoffset, how do you update it and what do you update it with? Where is the SKINs of the MLOD and MODL and InverseBindPose and what do we do with them?

EDIT: Ah, OK, I found them:

InverseBindPose is under [4]Chunk Entries/RCOL Block/Bones, of which there are four Bones entries.

PosOffset is under [5]Chunk Entries/RCOL Block/Mtnf/SData/[2]SData/Field.

Have no idea what to do with any of them, though...!! Guess it's trial and error time again, unless anyone can advise!

You dont have to adjust the 4 wheel jointsd(50/35/13 and 76) because your not using them.
The only thing i can think off are the container enrty's, the CBB and CBC joints.(seat slot 3 and 4)
The values of those you update(think you can take em from the RIG or calculate.


I wouldn't know how to calculate the sunshader Possoffset but i roughly scaled your car to the size of the bat and i got these:
[2]: Field: 0x790EBF2C (PosOffset); Data0: -0,0570; Data1: 0,9361; Data2: -0,1027; Data3: 0,5000

S i suspect that
data0 is the height
data1 width
data2 lenght
data3 is always 0.5

Make sure you have made the correct shadowmeshes!


edit,

hmm, there might be another reason the shadow is so small
because it floats high above the ground and shadows are generated from the floor??
Anyway, try and see

Thank you so much for looking into all that, Bloom! I spent all yesterday afternoon and evening doing trial-and-error with those Data0, Data1, etc fields, inputting all sorts of random values into each of them, and all they did was move the position of the shadow all over the place - there was no combination I could find that would make the shadow wider.

I then tried cloning from another car, with the same result - the shadow would not get any wider.

My guess is that because the bat is so much the opposite of the shape a car would have, wide and short rather than narrow and long, it's not going to be possible to make the shadow wider, because the game can't deal with that. It's strange that when I cloned it from the scooter, the shadow did come out the right width, but then the scooter object seems to be totally buggy so maybe that was just another bug!

But, I may have found a compromise: I was looking at a mod just uploaded here by Morphead that lets you choose how fast your car goes and how many passengers it will have, and it got me thinking. I tried editing the OBJK of my 'bat car' and changed the Script data string from Sims3.Gameplay.Objects.Vehicles.CarHatchback to Sims3.Gameplay.Objects.Vehicles.CarSports, and voila - now only two passengers will appear on the bat, no matter how many you tell the driver to take with him, as below, where there are four passengers going for a ride but only two are showing:

So now, although it doesn't seem possible to make the shadow bigger, at least the two sim shadows are combined with the bat shadow, without having another two sim shadows hanging separately off to the side! It also helps solve the problem of women's skirts sticking up in the middle - if the first passenger you select is not wearing a skirt, then he/she is the only passenger who will show up and you don't have to worry about what anyone else is wearing. If all your passengers are wearing skirts, then at least you only have to see one skirt sticking up in the middle and not three! It's a shame, though, because I liked how it looked with four sims lined up in a row along the wings, it was quite cute!

I did have this problem with my driveable UFO as well - the shadow was too narrow, it was oval rather than a circle, but when I asked advice from a mod as to whether it would be acceptable for upload, she said it would be OK because the shadow was at least close to what it should be. If there are any mods looking at this thread, could you please advise whether this item would be acceptable with this current shadow?

upload the file and i run it through TSRW to see if it fixes the shadow?
I am currently working on a replacemeny of the taxi, it gets replaced by a doubledecker bus.
So i am also changing the seat slots.
Will check passengers with skirts

Oh, thank you very much! Here's the file, will delete it after you download it: [deleted]

I hope you'll figure out what the problem is with the skirts - I don't think the pointy bit in the middle of the skirt is anything I've done, it seems to be already present by default. I tried out an earlier version of my file where I hadn't yet done anything to the front-seat passenger whatsoever, and the passenger still had the pointy skirt. Strange!

got it

Thanks!

Saw the file and fixed:
Normalmap
Textures
Footprint
Shadow

You definatly need to change how you export your textures, none of them had mipmapping.
This can slow down your game...

You can not use the normalmap with vehicles.
Alot objects use a diffrent size of the normalmap.
If you notice this then dont bother to make one as it is scaled.
Such a normalmap scales in on a particicular area on the uvmap and i do not think someone figured out how this works yet.
I know TSRW doesn't and i doubt if any one understands the scaling coding and on how to do it in s3PE.
Normally i kill every reference to the normalmap to avoid errors but when i did on your file i got a error on export so i loaded a blanc normalmap in it.

Noticed sims walk through the wings, fixed the footprint.

TSRW generated a nice shadow mesh, had nothing to fix there

The skirt is like that by default, default cars show the same results.
I think they forgot to adjust the skirt joints on the adult to object pose.
Someone with animation skillz prolly can fix it by making a new pose as replacement.
I can make poses but they always show as a corrupt file in S3PE so i gave up on that part

Got the file, thank you so much! I have to go to bed now but will take a look through it tomorrow. So all you did was open it with TSRW and it automatically generates a correct shadow? I'll have to download TSRW again and keep it around for problems like this.

I've always made my TS3 textures with 'no mipmaps' - the TS3 texturing tutorials that I learned from 2 years ago said to NOT generate mipmaps, has that changed? If so, I'll generate mipmaps from now on. The vehicle I cloned from has a normal map (depicting the car's wheels and trim), I did try a blank one at first myself but then tried making one from the texture and felt it looked better with it, it brings out the texture. I wasn't sure if changing the footprint would be a good idea, as it might take up too much space and be awkward, I was just going to let sims walk through the wings if necessary, but I'll see how it looks. Is changing the footprint something that TSRW does too?

Yes, I guess EA just didn't bother to do the joints properly on passengers in cars, since you wouldn't normally see them!

Thank you very much again for taking the time to work on the package, I'll look at it properly tomorrow.

You definatly want TSRW in combination with S3OC and s3PE!!
It works so much easier for objects.

Do not use it for CAS stuff tho, it still has this nasty skintone bug.(prolly also related to the normalmaps)

Sorry this is a little off topic...but what do you mean when you say all your poses show as a corrupt file in s3pe?

Thank you so much for the package - the shadow is perfect! Even better, I extracted the shadow mesh from your version of the package and s3pe'd it into my original package, and it works there too! So now we know that in the future, if we have problems with a shadow in an item made with s3pe, we can run the package through TSRW and extract the shadow mesh it produces. (I still don't trust TSRW to make the finished product, ha ha, I just had too much trouble with it in the past! I made CAS items with TSRW and they always came out with major problems so I stopped using it, but because you find it good for objects, I'll give it another try, at least for fixing shadows!) Thanks so much again, and if my upload gets accepted, you'll be given credit for helping make it work.

The next headache is today's big topic about how Pets/the latest patch have apparently borked most, if not all, cc objects... I'm not going to patch my game or buy Pets until more info comes out, but at the moment I'm installing and patching a secondary copy of TS3 on another PC to test the bat and my already-uploaded objects with the new patch - the patch is just downloading now. Ughhh.

A while back i just wanted to edit a existing animation walk and import it back(as replacement)
But every animation i ran through the animtool comes back corrupt in s3PE.

In Milkshape i tried with both Wes and Mesher their Rigs, but along the way something gets wrong and i do not know wat it is....

@Esmeralda,
Glad it works
There are alot of settings that are easier to edit when in TSRW, like the slots, footprints, light resources and a few others.
I didn't change the light resources on the bat, you still have to do that.