Ahem. So, I updated cmomoney's plugin a bit? Kind of? Also I used RonDoe's work on updating for 2.73 (on DeviantArt), but that version only imports without exporting and I thought it wouldn't be hard to make it do both. Which it wasn't. And now it'll work for up to Blender 2.79a. I make no guarantees whenever Blender 2.8 comes out though because Blender is annoying and frequently changes its API like that.

I'll do my best to answer questions but I really don't understand it as thoroughly as I probably ought to. So. I may not be able to help? ...I'll do my best though. As it stands, the UV maps might be a little odd if you export and some of the faces are all isolated in a corner (by which I mean all the vertices are on top of each other in exactly. the same. spot. Why is that even a thing, WHY). Please do tell me if you get list index out of range errors anywhere, I have been hunting those down with MENACE.

I DID try and minimize the questions I'll get by making it easier to use. You're more likely to get useful error messages now rather than having Blender spit code exceptions at you, and it will now also automatically convert quads to tris and move into object mode so that you don't have to worry about saving from the wrong mode or anything. Also, if you disable the rig importer, you don't get the option to import the rig, while if you enable it, the little dropdown appears in the import window. Yay! No more exceptions for that either!

And one thing I was REALLY pleased with: it tries to catch all the most common problems before even creating a new export file. No more going back, deleting, renaming, fixing whatever, trying again... Now it's (probably) only fix & retry.

I did test whether the imported mesh and rig were working together, and from what I can see they are. You should be able to change the vertex weights and deform the mesh by moving the bones around. If it doesn't work for you, you can ask but be aware that the answer may well be sorry i don't even know .

IMPORTANT STUFF

If you want the rig importer, I refer you back to this thread, where you should download ONLY io_TS3_rig.rar.

Things may not work if you don't have Python 3.0+. Sorry about that. That's what I've got so that's what I used.

DO NOT UNZIP THE zip FOLDER DOWNLOAD. Install it into Blender as-is. For more information on how to install (or how to import, or export, for that matter), once again: this thread.

YOU MUST INITIALLY IMPORT A SIMGEOM, AND SAVE YOUR NEW SIMGEOM TO THE SAME FILE YOU IMPORTED FROM. The script takes that file and reads the header and formats and all sorts of stuff like that in order to then write it to the new file. I don't know what the header means or what's up with the formatting so for now you're stuck with this. It backs up the original as a .bak file so don't worry about that if it screws up the export!

Seriously, I did very little. I may, in the future, add the ability to save to a new filename, but that will require learning a lot more about how .simgeom files are even put together and argh. So, yeah. Maybe. We'll see.

I hope this is useful to you all!

@kitsu3

Can I just say... THANK YOU! For this pet project I was working on (It's a default replacement and I rather don't use TSRW for those things) so I knew I had to do things the old-fashioned way. Problem was, Milkshape doesn't like GEOms OR meshes (objs) with 2 UV maps and pets are actually the only one having 2 uv maps due to the whole fur stuff... anyways! Blender was then my only option and I first went with cmomoney's plugin, since in the old days I used the hell out of that, but only coming to realise that renumbering and stuff wasn't working correctly anymore, the import was sort of working but in a very broken state. I then saw that deviant thread which worked-ish but still had some or most of the bugs that were breaking the mesh for me, but this one really seems to fix pretty much everything! If not, it actually works!

So once again, and it's also kind of a validation for other people wondering about it, that this version does actually do what cmomoney's plugin used to do back in the days and that this is probably the stablest one I have yet encountered. *Hands out virtual cookie*

If I ever come across any more errors, I'll let you know, but this is pretty sweet! Sorry for replying on a pretty dead thread :P

Well if this works, I'll be pretty damn happy. Because for the last couple of years I've had to do all my mesh edits in Milkshape, and it's honestly shit at organic shapes. Next time I pull the shoulders out on a piece of clothing or decide to scale up a hairstyle, it should be loads easier.

I approve this message

Small question, I'm not sure if this is because it's a Pet RIG or whatever, but I've noticed that my weight paint edit doesn't seem to export. What I've done was basically:

- Imorting the GEOM, saying that I wanted the adult cat RIG
- In the modifier tab, it says it did it successfully make a RIG, although I'm not seeing any skeleton/RIG..? The vertex groups are there too, so it seems to import those fine.
- I changed the weight paint that I needed to change in order to make an animation to actually, well... look decent and not stretchy.
- Exported the GEOM but in game it actually doesn't seem to show any changes?

So I wonder... is it maybe the exporter not taking the weight paints values at all? Do I need to press "Apply" to the modifier? Is there some special step I'm missing?

Modifiers should be applied automatically on export. IIRC, the rig is just there for visual purposes, the vertex groups are what is important. If you reimport your mesh are your edits still there?

I think it might not like the RIG as much because according to blender's error's it's really just failing on the rig. (See pictures atttached).

Basically what I did was changing the weight on the Chin weight group, since it was slightly overlapping the snout. I also made sure to select the right Rig from the import menu, just to see if that does anything. I then just exported the geom from the Scene menu, and reimporting it just seems to show that it's not importing... According to S3PE it's not corrupted or anything, but it is showing the same exact values as the original cat face rather than a different value that I would get when I do succesfully export it... Or well, with Meshtoolkit and what not.

Kind of makes me wonder if this plugin plus the older RIG importer do work well together?

Yeah, that error is caused by an obsolete(renamed) attribute. See if this one works.

Hrm I installed the new rigs, removed the old one in blender and added this one to the plugin settings. Although now it's giving me this error:

Does this have anything to do with the vertex start indexes, etc?

That means something is wrong with a uv map. Not sure what though.

Okay so that error was just irrelevant in even the slightest! aka me derping with non-sims relating stuff. Because I moved my workfolder onto a different server but I forgot to remove the old one so it was saving it to the wrong folder that still had a corrupted GEOM file that was only 4bytes (hence why the error was complaining about trying to find that uvmap)

However, right now... I guess the pictures speak for themselves... But I wonder if that's due to the whole bone limits or if I just screwed up hard somewhere here... (The good looking one was actually an export where the bones weren't assigned whatsoever, so in case of confusion). But let's be honest, this cat has seen some better days.

Any ideas on how to... well, fix it? I mean it's animating so that's great but yeah... I remember this same thing happening though with this Blender MLOD exporter so I wonder if I can find my answer there.

EDIT: I think part of the problem is the morphs that I still need to add so that's all okay, so the adult cat head seems to be flipping and such but the elder cat seems to... sort of behave? Although there I notice that the bones I edited haven't saved whatsoever (aka the mouth area) and they're not animating at all.

Nope, still broken. I have a series of FBX files that I need to convert to a format readable by Milkshape (preferably OBJ) but Milkshape crashes to desktop when I try to open them. So I'm trying it with SIMGEOM but as always, Blender throws one or more of the above error messages.

Can't help without error messages.

Same error message as always. At least it's consistent.

Looking at the pic, there is no active object. That is what is causing that error.You have to have something actively selected for the addon to know what to export.

"Please select existing simgeom file to save to."
Even though the whole point is that I DON'T have an existing SIMGEOM.

Well, the first step is to extract a simgeom from the game. If you're not willing to do that, you can expect to have a hard time.

Ah, so the idea is you clone an EA object. I get that. Seems a bit redundant, though, because the next step is opening the SIMGEOM in Milkshape, importing the new geometry, and porting over the groups one by one.

Milkshape? Nah. The whole point of this addon was to not have to use Milkshape.

I'm sorry for resurrecting a thread but... I really don't know how to do this in the slightest. I have a proper UV map, I have assigned bones... I really don't know what to do.

When saving to an exported GEOM, I get 'list index out of range' error first and then I get this, and when I get this error (after exporting for the second time) the file size, no matter what the file is, regresses to few bites.

I'm really lost as to what to do.

EDIT: first error if anyone is interested... seems this plugin is broken whatsoever.

Actually, it's interesting how people keep saying it's 'broken' (And I know this is going to get some disagrees) But really those errors are pointing at what you might have done wrong in the process. unfortunately, Blender doesn't have a nice error popup thingy like most programs that would say "An error appeared, maybe you did this or that wrong?" I'm kinda tempted to make a post about "this is what gone wrong if you got this error"

@mixa97sr Regarding your error, are you by any chance overwriting a package that was loaded in? It could also happen you're overwriting it over a 1kb file, which is not good of course. What I did to fix this error, was reclone a FRESHLY new package of what you're using. Then, duplicate that package and set it into a different folder, and let's call this 'blender's folder'. make sure you open one package for blender, and the other one to overwrite.

I got the plugin to import and export properly with blender 2.77 days ago, I guess it was just blender version. I could also import multiple GEOMs with 2.77 unlike 2.79 which could hardly import only one.

I've switched from GEOM (manual) workflow to TSRW (easier/automatic) workflow which indeed does leave me less control over what I do (bone assignements and morp manual editing) but is the only one that would work for me. However thanks for the answer.

For everyone else, 2.77 is a blender version that you want to use with this one (if it does work for you). I tried 2.6, 2.63, 2.7, 2.76, 2.79 and latest 2.79b and none worked properly except this one for me. Blender is indeed kinda weird.

I tried getting it to work in 2.79b but there seemed to be issues with the rig importer, instead of trying to fix it I figured I'd just flip the table make a whole new importer since the Blender 2.8 release is close and the API will have changed a bunch since 2.73.
So far I've managed to read all the data from a GEOM file and wrote a new one from scratch(No need to save over the original ), I've also borrowed and changed the code for reading .grannyrig files and managed to get all that data loaded.
Now I just need to tie it all together and make the importer/exporter for Blender 2.8.

This is certainly going a lot smoother than when I was making the Sims 2 importer, managed to get the rig imported in no time thanks to cmomoney's original work.