Hello! You got any tutorials for clothing meshing? Particularly
with TSR Workshop (if possible)? 🙂 I am scouring the interwebz with
poor success for anything other than texture edits. 😦
You, my precious poor Padawan learner, are in for a terribly rough ride. May the Force be with you.
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Welcome to Murf’s School of Crap and Crap-Making!
School Motto: Prepare to be tortured! For Science!
Lesson #3: Clothes CC: 10 Basics You Should Know
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I cannot repeat this enough: I am a converter, not a mesher. People who go around making meshes from scratch have NOTHING but absolute respect from me, I STG, because I just don’t have the frikkin patience for it.
Me? I like to scrounge around in games for ready-made clothes meshes, and tweak them to my liking (and/or limited ability) so we can play with them in TS3. Hence all the Skyrim, Final Fantasy, etc. clothes.
In my travels, I have never come across a start to finish CAS meshing tutorial for simming, let alone one that, as you mentioned, dear Padawan, does not merely show you how to add stencils or do retextures or photoskins.
However, there are tons of tutorials about how to use Milkshape and TSRW, so I hope you’ve brushed up on all of that beforehand, before trying to make your first clothes cc. If not, as I said before: Start smaller. I directed y’all to the tuts that helped ME, and I’m a raging noobtard, so they’re effective! I didn’t start doing clothes cc until maybe 2 years ago, and I still have problems. And I’ve been making CC for like 5 dang years now. It’s not rocket science, no, but it ain’t the ABC’s, either.
Make sure you understand how to import and export .obj and .wso and .dds files. Make sure you know how to make high/low level poly meshes (DirectX Mesh, etc). Make sure you know your alpha channels, multipliers, overlays, and RGB masks. Make sure you have all your programs and tools and plugins in working order (Milkshape/Blender/etc, Gimp/Photoshop, etc). Get the right version of TSRW (I said right, not latest – my version is 2.0.80.0 because I didn’t install the TS4 updates).
You’re good on those fronts? Great! You’re halfway there. 😉
Again: I don’t mesh from scratch. So I can’t tell you much about how to turn a bunch of spheres, cylinders and boxes into the sexiest couture outfit, unfortunately. WRONG simmer to ask! But I can tell you what I DO know.
*cue dramatic music, with stock footage panning around some grand landscape in the majestic wilderness, Peter Jackson style*
KNOW THY UV MAPS
The texture tutorials you find online are actually VERY important, and if you’ve never made clothes for The Sims then I HIGHLY recommend sitting through a few of them. While it may seem easy enough adding stencils or cropping/lengthening the alpha channel on a pair of jeans or long sleeves, they’re actually showing you the ins and outs of how EA uses textures on clothes.
A great mesh can be RUINED by a shoddy texture application.
And a lackluster or low poly mesh can be VASTLY improved with a stellar texture. (EA does this a lot, especially in TS2/TS4).
If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I absolutely FREAK out over UV Mapping. It SUCKS.
One little mapping slip-up, and your clothes are jacked up, sometimes irrevocably. So understanding how EA maps a sim’s nude body is the very first essential step.
I’ve used this as my reference base since I started out. A tad imperfect, yes, but you get the idea.
Y/A Male texture:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/u817645sxajg667/rgb-2.bmp
Y/A Female texture:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/n436v63rsloquz2/rgb.jpg
If you need sim nude body meshes to use as base reference “mannequins”, BloomsBase helped me out BIG TIME by uploading them here.
Everything in red is where tops get UV Mapped. NEVER put shoe or pants textures in the red areas. EVER. I don’t care. NEVER.
Everything in green is where bottoms get UV Mapped. NEVER put shoe or tops textures in the green areas. EVER. I don’t care. NEVER.
Shoes, however, are different. I’ve seen plenty of shoes that use the pants’ section of the UV Map, and I’ve also seen the consequences when it goes wrong. It depends. But this isn’t a shoes tutorial. ^_^
Now, you see those distinctly blank areas on either side of the legs
in the UV Maps? Those oh-so-gratuitously placed free zones were put
there by an angel of mercy somewhere in Sim Studios, who decided to
throw us the smallest bone possible.
EA uses those blank
areas in the Red and Green areas in order to add space for extra texture
detail, like buckles, zippers, buttons, stencil designs, and other
fancy appliques on belts and collars and cuffs on tops and bottoms (and even shoes).
But
for converters, those blank areas are sometimes used to squeeze in
entire textures, depending on what’s going on with a particular mesh
and/or UV Map.
Using areas that don’t belong CAN lead to textures bleeding over, so while it is a common enough practice (borrowing free zones), you have to warn your downloaders to be careful in CAS, with which items they use together, because sometimes the textures WILL conflict if say a pants and a shirt are both using the same part of a UV Map at the same dang time. More on this later. For example, my Tsun Loincloth does this, which is why I warn users that it conflicts with most tops, so keep your sims bare-chested, or use an accessory top instead.
KNOW THY DIMENSIONS
When converting clothes, you’ll often notice that most games’ body meshes do not match body shapes in The Sims. The waists are too high/low, hips to wide/narrow, torsos too curved/thin/full, etc. So a lot of time will usually be spent reshaping and rescaling the converted bodies to fit TS3 dimensions.
That arrow is pointing to the default TS3 Y/A Male nude body mesh, next to the Skyrim Sheogorath body mesh. And that’s just a g-d shame. It’ll take a few minutes (or HOURS) to remove all the stupid bones (those spikes sticking out), rotate, angle, backface, rescale, reshape, and remap the Skyrim mesh so it has roughly the same dimensions and mapping as TS3′s much smaller body mesh.
Meh, close enough. 😛
KNOW THY CLIPPING
Now, you see how bits of the sims’ shoulder and legs are poking out from the mesh underneath? That’s what I mean by making sure you rescale and reshape properly, so there’s no clipping issues.
I stumbled upon this one nifty trick LITERALLY the moment I made that AMR Hattress dress. Ever wonder how that steampunk arm replaced the sims’ human arm? Yeah, me too! 😛
It never occurred to me that we could actually CROP OFF parts of a sim’s body and replace it with other parts. I had to look HARD at the Simbot and Plumbbot bodies to figure this out, and it took me a few days o realize how to do it, I kid you not.
You just delete all the sections off the sim body mesh that you don’t need! Easy! Clipping eliminated!
For this project, all I need are the sims’ hands and neck area. The torso and legs are going to be covered in clothes, and Skyrim’s body shape is a bit different from EA’s, and I don’t really feel like aligning all the glutes and shins and nonsense.
KNOW THY TEXTURES
Alright, so you’ve got your mesh, and you’ve got your texture. You even imported the mesh’s texture into Milkshape to see if it looks nice, and it does!
Oh.
You think you’re DONE? You think you’re ready for TSRW?!?!
HA!
No, booboo. You can’t handle the truth! Cuz your mesh is still using a mapping according to Skyrim’s UVs, NOT EA’s. Assign the sample UV Map I showed you in KNOW THY UV MAPS, and you’ll see what happens.
A MESS. That red should not be on the legs. That blue shouldn’t be there PERIOD – that’s a shoe texture, sweetie. 😛
Remember what I said in the UV Map tutorial; TS3 is reading maps FAR differently than how you think they are, eff what you see in Milkshape.
In the Texture Coordinate Editor you have to rescale the whole UV Map to turn that Before into an After.
Mine is very slapdash and shoddy, but hey; I’m not gunning for any frikkin awards, yeesh.
You can export your newly mapped outfit as an .obj file and import it into UV Mapper, to then export out the Texture Map as a .bmp to use as a reference in Photoshop/Gimp/etc for the textures you want to create.
KNOW THY MESH ALLOWANCES
If you’ve been paying attention, notice that where the GREEN goes on the UV Map is all over the place? Green as in BOTTOMS ONLY?
I know. Naughty Murf. *spanks tooshie*
But sometimes when you’re working with a clothes mesh you’ll be fortunate enough so that the mesh takes up a good portion of the sims’ body, like when you’re doing full body outfits, instead of separate tops and bottoms.
A clothes mesh with more surface area automatically lends you more space on the UV Map to use. Because then you won’t have to worry about the clothes texture bleeding onto the sim’s skintone where it doesn’t belong. And with Outfits, it doesn’t MATTER if the top texture is on the legs or the pants texture is on the arms, because all of it is being shared on one giant mesh. This is the exception to the rule. Hurrah. 😀
KNOW THY TEXTURE SCALING
Simquisitor gave me some of the BEST advice I ever got about CAS textures: by default the CAS UV Map is 1024 X 1024 pixels, but to force more HD resolution on a texture that perhaps is being squeezed too small (which leads to dreaded BLURRINESS in-game), you CAN cheat, and make your texture 2048 X 2048 instead.
The Overlay and Multiplier normally will need this the most; I don’t think it’s really necessary for your Mask, Specular, and Normals to be this dang big. Your mileage may vary.
YES, this will more than likely cause the equally dreaded TSRW memory crash, so you’ll have to save save save save save.
But it’s worth it (most of the time).
KNOW THY MESH TOOLKIT
The best worst kept secret about CAS CC creation is CmarNYC’s Mesh Toolkit. The Mesh Toolkit makes
it SINFULLY easy to assign and import the joints and morphs into TSRW.
First thing you need is a good reference mesh. Anything works, really, as long as it fits the shape of the outfit
you want to give joints to. Don’t use a skirt if you’re making pants.
-_- Don’t use a female reference if you’re making male clothes. If all you’re making is pants, you can use a full body pants outfit. If you’re making a full body outfit, you can’t use a separate pants mesh as reference, because there’s no top portion. Makes sense. It’s not
that hard.
I personally always use either EA’s Ninja outfits (I think WA?) or Investigator outfits (AMB), which can easily be extracted using TSRW to clone them in a New Project and simply Export the .wso files. You’ll have to change the group names in Milkshape to group_base; the Toolkit will not accept any other name.
From there, you just import your .wso and the reference .wso into the Toolkit, using the Auto Tools for WSO tab, for both the Bones and Morphs sections. Click Create and save, and you’re done!
Only sometimes do you need to go into Milkshape and manually tweak the assignments, in case the arms or legs or something are in need of fine tuning (especially if they’re baggy and too close together).
KNOW THY TSRW
When I’m making clothes (usually Outfits, since I’m normally converting Skyrim amor), I like to keep the sim’s body separate from the actual outfit mesh. Two separate meshes, two separate groups.
EA often merges the body to the outfit in one group, with the fingers chopped off in a separate group for eff knows whatever reason. In TSRW, these sorts of outfits have two groups, which is just what I need.
I like using the female Teen or Y/A BodyDressTight_Halter (usually Teen, because the teen clothes load in TSRW faster, since there’s effing LESS teen clothes than Y/A clothes – thanks a lot, EA) It’s found under Female > Teen > Formal.
I import my nude body mesh in one group, and the outfit mesh in the second group.
Viola.
NO, it doesn’t matter that you cloned a Teen Female outfit for a Y/A Male mesh. Just change the age and gender, let TSRW reload everything, and you’re fine. It’s just a shortcut. Ain’t nobody got time to go hunting down which Y/A male outfits have 2 groups or not. >_>
Anyway, so once you’ve imported all your textures (if they’re 2048 X 2048 TSRW probably crashed on you a zillion times already), if everything looks nice, check the morphs and movement of your mesh.
KNOW THIGH THY BONES
Load up the Animations list and choose a good one that has a lot of motion involved (I always pick the Spar or Practice Spellcasting ones).
Uh oh. See that protrusion in the thigh area? One of my joints got assigned wrong, so I’ll have to fix it (darnit).
Head back into Milkshape, and in the Joints tab doublecheck your bones. That’s the upper right leg acting up, so you’d want to make sure everything on that side is assigned b_R_Thigh_Compress__. Unfortunately, my pants are a wee bit baggy, so the Toolkit thought that one vertice was close enough to be considered part of the b_L_Thigh_Compress__ section. So instead of moving with the right leg, it wants to move with the left leg. Fix the assignment, export the .wso out again, import it into the Toolkit and re-assign the morphs (not the joints, or you’ll erase your fix!), and then re-import your meshes back into TSRW, while praying that nothing else goofs up. (Luckily for me, everything was good after that.)
Import your Medium and Low Level Detail meshes (who cares if they look ugly; they’re only for zooming outwards and the thumbnail pictures anyway).
KNOW THYSELF
If everything looks good, and you’ve set your CAS Categories and whatnot, then feel free to export your sims3pack and test it in-game (as a package file, if you know what’s good for you)!
Sometimes there’s issues that can only be spotted in-game, which forces you to return to fix them. Or maybe you cut a corner (or two or three) that you know you should spend more time fixing. *cough!* >_> And god forbid you want transparency on your mesh – I STILL mess that up. But otherwise you should be fine!
If anyone more knowledgeable than I am sees anything I got wrong, feel free to let us ALL know! I’m still figuring this crap out.
But I hope this crap advice helps!
If you need more specific help, that would be better asking for than this big ole thing. I know it’s a lot to take in. Don’t be intimidated though! It took me longer to type this frikkin tutorial than it did to convert that outfit! XD
Time for my dang lunchbreak! 😛
The Faery's Gifts 