So, the case is the next: I've created a dress in Blender, it worked really well, even put it in game, and it looked really nice, and it worked with sliders.



I tried to add two armbands to the dress, because they didn't really work with accessories, and also there was not many I could use. But the problem is, they were not made along with the dress (I used multiple meshes and joined them together to make the dress itself). I had to append the armbands to the dress' blender file. I've properly set up the UV, even made a new UV map after adding and joining the two meshes together, and went through the same process that I did with the dress itself. But it did not work with the fatness and fitness sliders. Fatness had to be 50% and fitness 0%.



I've created another dress before, and it had the same issue; added a ribbon belt, and it ruined the dress completely. However, I did not test out whether the dress itself would have worked, but seeing the current case, the ribbon must be what made it wrong.



How can I fix this? Is there a proper way to combine two different meshes? Do I have to maybe use two groups instead of one? (Don't really understand why some full body clothes have two groups while one is a random place, also, when I import clothes where there are two groups, it becomes wiggly.)

send the .wrk files for both of them

from a technical point of view there's no difference between two meshes combined together and a mesh that wasn't. in the first case it looks like something went wrong while you were assigning bones/making morphs, though without looking at the project myself i can't tell what exactly caused that

the second one is almost definitely caused by your mesh having too many vertices. it's possible that it was already close to the limit, and the addition of the ribbon finally crossed that line. the dress mesh looks like it was made in marvelous designer and wasn't retopologized, which is awful because raw md meshes are only meant for cloth simulation and not games. without retopo they look bad and are way too highpoly

two groups are used because one group can only have 60 bones, and sims' bodies (and therefore clothes) use way more than that. i'd say you probably don't have to worry about that until you get more advanced with your cc

Usually, combining meshes in Blender is simply, select one mesh, hols shift and select the 2nd mesh, right click the meshes and then click join.

The first looks like you may have exceeded max vertices count. The armband looks very smooth... is it high vertices count? Max is something like 14,999 and that is for ALL LODs, for an outfit. There is a chart in Meshing Tool Kit. Geom Tools> Re number Meshes> Hint. There is a vertices counter in Blender, but I forget which preference turns it on. There is a very old thread somewhere on MTS, maybe from 2012ish about vertices count and exploding custom mesh. It's the one that solve a problem I had a while ago. Generally, decimating L2 and L3 more might fix it if L1 is not too high.

It's also possible that you went over on bone count, or poorly weighted bones, but looks more like vertices count. Bone count for a 1 group outfit is 60. Generally, you can have 59 in Blender, and TSRW adds a rootbind for some reason. When combining most tops with a bottom mesh, delete right and left thigh bones. Those are the bones that EA doesn't use in swimsuit plunge. I have also seen a couple of tops that had extra bones, although I forget which tops and which bones were extra.

If it is bone count, I often use EA cocktail dress. 2 groups L1, and 1 group L2 and L3. If you really want to keep bones in L2 and L3, EA tight halter dress is 2 groups in all LODs.

https://mega.nz/file/lToQCYhD#e9mRI...WgNgwi8MR1U8eJs - the files are here. No mesh or bone was edited here.

It seems like the problem is not quite the mesh polygon, even when making it have less verticles, it's not working.
However, I tried out the bone removing and two group method. I exported group 0's mesh and removed two thigh bones, and assigned it as reference for the meshes I made. They had 59 bones in group 0 and 6 in group 1. It all seemed to be working, but after quitting and re-entering TSRW, it has been ruined once again. As lod1 (medium) and lod2 (low) seems to be working with that one group, the problem is most likely lying in group 1, which became the right armband here.

https://mega.nz/file/EHYDXR7T#iZq_k...SmyzNGcE3R693sc - this file is the one that has reduced verticle number and two less bones.

Thornowl and I will certainly look at it.

Edit: There is not much I can do with the Lisa Dress. Marvelous Designer is not a friend of TS3. It is a topology program that produces ridiculous poly counts and oddly shaped faces. It's main purpose is to create models for rendering, that do not have morphs. Your L1 is more than 13,000 vertices. Then you used the same mesh for L2 and L3, which completely blows up the vertices count for outfits... 14,999 total for all LODs. What happens is that the categories overlap, and the game cannot compute what to do. It may actually work in TS4?

You would have to get L1 count below 10,000 (7,000 to 8,000 preferred) and MUST severely decimate L2 and L3 to start.

But, there are other basic issues. You do not need a full body mesh under the garment, unless making open bottom or transparent garments. They are unnecessarily adding to the poly count and possible clipping. Not sure which Blender you use, but when I opened the TSRW, I saw seams in the legs and where the neck and ankles join head and feet. As af seam fixer works fine in Meshing Tool Kit 1.49 (other age groups not so well), It's easiest to merge all vertices, set normals to faces and export as object, then convert in MTK. Garments that are not open bottom, use an EA mesh as reference for conversions and adding morphs. This, especially with dresses, as using swim plunge will give bad bones and morphs on dresses.

The Vyloris Dress has a more workable mesh, with even rows. The main problem is again, poly count. The bracelets you added are close to 10,000 vertices. I wrote earlier that they looked toooooo smooth. With the bracelets, that mesh is more than 14,000 vertices, and again you used the same mesh for L2 and L3. Blender decimate will butch those bracelets when reducing them to something useable in TS3. I think BalancerN Pro can do it, but not sure the free version can handle 10,000 vertices. I have never tried the pay version of the program.

The Vyloris dress also appears to be open bottom? And perhaps you intended the skirt to be fully transparent in the untextured areas??? This is a bit of a PITA to do properly, but it is also what I primarily do, so if that is the goal, I can help, but doing such requires a 2 group mesh (for the transparency to work). 2nd group used for transparency shader.

Other minor thing I saw, is that you marked the projects as valid for teen, YA, A, E, male and female. Will not work. Your meshes are for YA/ A female.

Not entirely sure what you meant by "They had 59 bones in group 0 and 6 in group 1." Your base donor for both dresses is swimsuit plunge, which is a 1 group mesh. To have 2 groups, easiest thing to do is start with one of the EA garments I mentioned above. It is possible to add a mesh group to any project (tutorial by Bloombase somewhere on this site), but not something necessary for what you seem to want to do. I think the most I have done is 4 groups with 3 different shaders.

Just poking my head in to offer some tips on lowering polycount cleanly in Blender, because it's totally viable with the right steps.

• Select and separate pieces where you logically feel they should be considered different 'parts'- ie. the wings, the bracelets. For any perfectly symmetrical parts, consider deleting one of each pair.
• Remove any undersides (duplicate faces for hiding backfaces) if you made them.
• Start with the Decimate modifier set to 'Planar', which will flatten areas rather than arbitrarily destroy geometry. The result needs to be triangulated again, so the polycount can redouble from whatever you get it down to- but consider cases where you are happy with how it looks reduced by MORE than double, so it's a net gain anyway with much cleaner topology. It will help to have your textures loaded in Blender and rotate your mesh as you increase the angle threshold until you start seeing angles or artifacts you dislike. Apply the modifier, then select all and Triangulate from the Faces menu (required for TS3)
• Then you can turn to old reliable- Decimate set to Collapse, Triangulate ticked. Reduce again, switch the preview on and off to double check if anything unwanted is appearing. It will also look much nicer having separated the pieces and no undersides, as there is less 'interference' of the modifier not understanding complexity.
• Join all of the pieces together again. If you removed symmetrical parts, duplicate and flip those from the new low poly version. Recreate undersides. Mesh should be at a face count far lower than Decimate > Collapse by itself could have made without unwanted destruction.
• Feel free to only use Collapse for the LODs. (The first two steps can be done again if you want them to be particularly pretty LODs.)

Good luck!

I was going to pop in to say that I was able to use decimate on those bracelets, and they don't look too bad. I simply select the faces I want to work on in the UV edit side, then in the mesh tab (not modifiers tab), Mesh> Clean Up> Decimate. Actually took it down to 10%. Total mesh is under 6,000, but would still need more work. It was already missing backsides for shoulder pieces, and a bit depends on whether it is to be an open or closed bottom garment.