I'm having an issue with the generated (LOD) sunshadows with a chair I'm making.The issue seems to be the bounding box-- the new chair is taller than the chair it's cloned from (and all the other chairs too, unfortunately) and the shadow is bent/reflected at the height of the original.



To verify that the height of the mesh was the issue, I tested it with a shrunken mesh, and the shadows do work correctly with the dwarfed chair.
Then I tried it in the TSR Workshop with their autosunshadow feature, just for the hell of it, and it did work that way as well, so I know it's possible:



But I find the packages made with TSRW unsatisfactory for other reasons, so I really want to make it work with S3PE.

I haven't dealt with bounding boxes before, and the only place in the package I have found bounding box values is in the VPXY. I tried editing the bounding box values with the VPXY editor, but making any change whatsoever to those values turned made my mesh show up in-game as the dreaded Shiny Ball O' Death.

Is there some other way I should be changing the bounding box? Or something else I should be doing, besides tearing my hair out ?

I updated the ObjTool recently, for that very reason. Seems that I neglected to add the part where it whould write the new bounding box it calculated out during compilation, and thus the original value stayed in place. My bad.

This update should not affect your existing files, you just need to recompile the project with the new code.

It's over in message #1 in the sticky thread for the ObjTool, in Meshing.

<* Wes *>

Hmm. Thanks, Wes.

Thought I had the most recent versions of everything, including the ObjTool.

I'm off to re-check versions and try again...

BabaYaga, is it the bounding box that determines the sunshadow? I've been under the impression that it's the MLOD2 and MLOD3 (the low poly MLODs) that determine that.

And I have objects whose sunshadow I've been unable to correct by making changes to those even though most objects do respond to altering the shape of these two MLODs in Milkshape.

When you changed the size of your chair which MLOD size did you change?

Have you figured out a way to change the sunshadow for objects that don't respond to simply changing the low poly versions of the mesh?

ETA: Also, could you post which chair it is that you're cloning?

Wes-- I checked to make sure I had the right versions of all the tools, then I retried it.

And I'm still having the same problem.

I tried decompiling and recompiling the mesh in the otherwise-working package that has the bad shadows, but no change. (I did empty caches too of course).

I tried recloning from scratch, I even tried recloning from scratch with the beta versions of S3PE and s3oc, but it still looks the same...

(insert sound of hair ripping here)


OM, yes, as far as I can tell, the sunshadows are generated from LODs 2 and 3-- the large resized LODs (only LOD3 is low-poly afaik).

However, the shadow seems to only show up inside the bounding box-- any part that's outside the bounding box gets cut off. So it's not that the bounding box determines the shadow, rather that is constrains it, if that makes sense.

Remember though, I'm just figuring this out from trial and error.

>When you changed the size of your chair which MLOD size did you change?

All of them...? The two shadow meshes need to be specifically sized in relation to the others, as well as placed properly.

I haven't encountered any objects that don't respond to changing the shadow meshes-- I mean, this one isn't responding *correctly*, but it does change noticably in response to my editing the shadow meshes, so I wouldn't call it unresponsive! :D

You've come across objects where changes you make to the shadow meshes have no effect on how they show up in-game? So they still have the shadow of the object you cloned them from?


Oh, and the chair I'm cloning is the colonial living chair

"However, the shadow seems to only show up inside the bounding box"...ah ha ha...this is it then!...I posted the other day that the larger I made the mesh for my sunshadow MLOD's the closer it seemed the shadow simply approximated a square shape in the game and now this explains it

Yes, I change both sunshadow meshes and yes I know they need to be changed both in size and orientation. But there are some clones which, no matter how large you make the new MLOD, will never make the right shadow. Anything large cloned from the gnome is like this and, as I discovered, anything cloned from the bathroom towel cabinet (or at least my single glass wall clone...lol) won't either.

The gnome was the first clone I really tried to change the sunshadow for and if you look in the posts here from somewhere in August or September there is a thread where this was all discussed and finally sort of just dropped as an issue for the future. I'm hoping your findings are going to move us forward in the right direction.

"I haven't encountered any objects that don't respond to changing the shadow meshes"...and I haven't either. Sorry to have poorly described what I've had happen but I'm pretty excited about the thought of finally being able to adjust these super-annoying sunshadows so I didn't type carefully.

My experience has been that most clones respond to changes in the MLOD2 and MLOD3 by showing an appropriate sunshadow. But there are some clones which, if your object is larger or differently shaped than the original, will not have an appropriate sunshadow no matter what you do. The sunshadow will change, but it always looks wrong.

I was pretty sure about fixing the bounding box in the 1.01 release, the old program from the beginning did not properly export the new bounding box. I had been calculating it all along, but it was not being inserted into the binary file output... I just never remembered to write the lines of code to do it. But check carefully that you have not made a simple mistake using the wrong files.

While I will be happy to look at the issue, if you can post up some files, you can do some analysis on the issue yourself... I know you are sharp enough to understand. At export, the new values of the bounding boxes are placed in the .mcfg file (group by group)... they are an output, not an input, so editing them will not change the binary. But you ought to be able to compare the values there with the values in MilkShape's Tools->Show Model Statistics ... function. Just note that MilkShape will report the size of all the groups loaded, so unless you delete the groundshadow group from the mesh the width and depth will report larger than your main group actually is.

It looks like the bounding box numbers in the .mcfg closely match the ones in Milkshape, so that means that the ObjTool is doing what it should, if I understand correctly.

And yet, no matter how hard I bang on this package, I can't get it to work, and it sure *looks* like the issue lies with the bounding box somewhere.

Wes, I've attached the package, if you're still willing to take a look at it. (Or anyone else, for that matter.) I also included the Workshop version with the correct shadows, fwiw. Any help would be greatly appreciated...

OM, where was your recent post about shadows? I did some searching but I've had some trouble finding stuff since site search has been down.

The Colonial Living Chair is a non-responder for me too as far as manipulating the sunshadow successfully goes. The gnome is one of the worst offenders IMO. I've taken that shadow and made it about 100 times the size of the original and all that happens is that the sunshadow starts looking more and more like a one-tile or so square in the game.

Maybe this is a silly thought but is it possible that the bounding box works sort of the same way the FTPT seems to? In HL's footprint tutorial thread it seemed like the FTPT numbers aren't really interpreted literally by the game. It's like the game sees the numbers and assigns the closest standard FTPT to whatever object it is that you're trying to change the FTPT for. So, in this case, if you aren't changing the bounding box to something that would be rounded to the next higher bounding box you're still getting the same size bounding box as you were before?...could that be it?

The thread I was referring to was the Sun Shadow question thread started by Lois but it's not recent...it's very old (back on page 8 currently). I mentioned it only because the issue was hashed out, Lois did experiments, but nothing ever came of it.

I'm really hopeful you can make some headway on the issue now because it's very frustrating to make something that looks decent (or a close approximation of decent...lol) only to have the whole effect spoiled by a ridiculously truncated shadow when the object is placed outside. It's especially painful when the object in question was designed specifically to be an outdoor item

But I'm with you on the TSRW issue...I'm not going to use it as long as there's an alternative (and maybe even if there wasn't TBH). Probably cutting nose off to spite face but there you have it.

Good work on including both. I will try to scope out what is different... I believe there is a problem, I didn't think it was the bounding boxes.

As far as the values of the bounding box, MilkShape rounds them to 2 places for display, I round at 6 places, and the real number value can go past seven places. 6 places past the decimal would be micrometers... generally, things are not made any more precisely than that in real life (although the precision has a purpose, so that rounding errors don't add up to anything significant).

The bounding boxes in the VPXY are different, the ones in the TSRW file are close to the same, except for the height (MAXY, fifth value).

I copied just the six needed values from the TSRW version to the other VPXY, and attached just it here. Please try just that with your package and see if it changes the shadows.

Depending on your results, we will decide the next step necessary.

<* Wes *>

EDIT: What a dumba$$ I am sometimes. Here it is!

Thanks, Wes, I'll try that-- though I think that's what gave me the Shiny Ball O Death before.

Oh, but, unless I'm totally blind, you didn't actually attach anything. So maybe I'll wait for that.

Bumping for edit.

I am so very sorry to report that it didn't help. The shadow looks the same.

That is so disappointing.

I had my fingers crossed that this was going to finally be the sunshadow fix. I really hope that this doesn't end up meaning the shadow issue gets shelved again.

What happened when you tried the VPXY Wes sent? Did you get the SBo'D again? (I like that term...is that the same thing as that very small silvery-grey pellet you get if you try to change the footprint of a mirror?)

I realized in reading back over the thread that I misunderstood you when you asked about my shadows post. I was talking to michimska in his car thread here:

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=382039

post 7.

No, there was no SBo'D this time, so that's an improvement! It just looked exaclty the same as the non-edited one. If I remember correctly, yes, your mirror problem was also the phenomenon I call the Shiny Ball O'Death. Seems to be what shows up when the game can't find the mesh the package is referencing. You can find it via S3OC if you poke around.

Maybe I'd have better luck cloning from another base. I've been resisting that because I made four custom recolors for the chair which involved a seriously tedious amout of editing in the OBJD. And I don't know if another base would act differently.

Also, I am now very curious about this shadow issue.

I will look for additional differences between the packages. I suspected that the tool you edited the VPXY with may have a separate issue, as I would be surprised if small differences in bounding box values would cause a crash... perhaps a distorted rendition of the lot, but not a BFBVFS. But altering other values could.

Wes, I don't know if I was very clear: the package didn't actually *crash* the game, it displayed a reflective sphere instead of the mesh-- if you look for SphereSpecular in the cloner, it looks just like that.

I'm really pretty sure I didn't alter any other values other than the bounding box ones, btw...

Well that's a great name for this phenomenon and I hope you're ok with me borrowing it. Wes, this is what it looks like if you haven't seen it before:

http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=382724

at post 12.

I've tried to steer clear of making chairs so far, they've got all those little pieces that need shadow-mapping which I'm not good at yet, so I can't be much help in suggesting a better clone although I wish I could be. But there has to be one in there that doesn't have the sunshadow problem doesn't there?...one would hope so anyway.

But I don't blame you for wanting to make the object you've already spent a lot of time on work...and I'll admit, I have more than a passing interest in getting a solution to the sunshadow problem myself. I've had an interest in this issue almost from the time I first started learning to mesh for Sims 3. It is definitely hindering the ability to make outdoor things for the game with the tool set we have...*not complaining mind you*...just sayin' I would like to see the competitive edge which currently exists for outdoor items go away.

What is a BFBVFS? I've not seen that term before.

That sphere is a placekeeper from game development because the referenced mesh was defective... no doubt something in the way the FTPT was edited was making it unusable for the game. What specs we have are homemade.

Big Flaming Ball Visible From Space (copied from MATY).

Ty I like that one too...very accurate in describing how I feel when the computer goes boom.

Given the fact that the edited VPXY didn't change the sunshadow of BabaYaga's mesh in the game do you think that the bounding box is really the place we should be looking for the key to the sunshadow issue?

I know this isn't really an issue of the ObjTool...but still your thoughts on the matter are appreciated. This sunshadow problem is one of the most pesty things in Sims 3 meshing IMO. I hate the thought of someone taking an outdoor screenshot of something I've made that has a shadow I couldn't fix....almost as much as downloaders having to look at the ridiculous thing if they place that object outside in the sun. On the other hand, trying to only pick clones that have a decently adjustable sunshadow is...a little limiting. I only say all that to explain why I keep asking about it...I apologize for being painful.

Teko-- thank you so much! I'll check it out.

If you find out please share BabaYaga...please, please, pretty please...lol. I'm too caught up working on that object you helped me with to do much else.