resizing shoes for Teen female meshes

[ConanDgreat]

Around a month ago I posted a request on the Insimadult site for an experienced mesher to add shoes to warlokk's teen C/lg nude body and teen lg bottom meshes. The response was less than overwhelming(only 1 post-as useful as that 1 was) and I've come to the reluctant decision to try and do it myself.
         I say reluctant because my past efforts at meshing have been less than successful, but that's not the reason for this post I found a tutorial on how to add shoes and the whole thing seems relatively simple except for two things.
         All the shoes meshes I've found are for adults and will need re-sizing to fit what I've been unable so far to work out is how much to rescale down to adult mesh to fit. I've been experimenting in milkshape using Al's tutorial, a pair of his shoes and an extracted copy of the teen bottom mesh. So far deleting the lower leg of the bottom mesh works well, importing the shoes and the replacement leg works well but I can't seem to find the right scaling to end up with a reasonably close match in size.
         My other problem is snapping the vertexes together to join the new part to the old, my problem is working out which pairs need to be snapped without stitching both legs together, or the front top to the rear bottom.
         Does anyone know of a way recolouring the dots marking the vertexes so that each seperate group has a different colour-not all being white and extremely confusing.
        Any help with re-sizing rate would be greatly appreciated. I read in another post about resizing adult meshes to teen sizes that a rescale of .94 would give an approximation of the teen mesh size-is that x-y-z set to .94 or just the x-y?

[BlooM]

its x-y- and z, just make sure you have the options set to origine.

Now this is a bit tricky because you have to make sure you start with a teen mesh because you need the teen skeleton.
Best thing to do:
*Import the adult mesh with your favorite shoes
*select all and scale the mesh to 94% (0.94)
*cut off the part above the knees
*Save this file as wanted shoes

Open the teen mesh and cut of the part under the knees
Import the adult shoemesh(wanted shoes)
Do NOT import additional bones if unimesh askes
You now have both parts,
Go into side(left/right)view and select the back of the seam(the row of vertices at the back of the knee)
choose hide selection from the menu
Go back to front view and snap the verts together(the row at the front of the knee)
When done choose unhide all and go back to side view .
Select and hide the front row of vertices(front knee, the ones you just snapped together)
Go back to front(or back) view and snapp the vertices at the back of the knee together.
That should do it.

[ConanDgreat]

You have my thanks again Bloom.:happy8::happy8:
I don't need to cut down the adult mesh as I've downloaded all the shoe meshes and lower legs I need for them from Al's site as well as all of Gothplagues from here. It should be simple to import the versions I want to use, resize them as you said and save them as a milkshape file for use on the teen meshes I want to convert.
I'll try what you said about selecting and hiding the vertexes I need to snap together on my next practice run.

[BlooM]

oh....you downloaded ALL's shoes??
Then it wont be to ez after all im affraid as most of them are objective files that dont have boneassignements...

[ConanDgreat]

Hi Bloom I realise they don't,neither do the body meshes I've been practicing on as I exported the from Simpe as a maya object file. Your suggestion helped me join both halves together smoothly and get a perfect looking result. I've found a tutorial by Dr Pixel where he adds a pair of Al's shoes to a mesh and it appears if you import the GMDC into Milkshape using the bodychop plugins you get the bone assignments of the original mesh and it's simply a matter of re-assigning the bone assignments to the new parts if he's got it right.
      I've been practicing  with an old version of Milkshape(v1.7.0) and have just installed the latest version with the bodychop plugins. I've been looking over the various tutorials on how to mesh just to refresh my understanding and all of them start with the premise you'll be starting from scratch with a Maxis mesh for which you need to search out the various of to combine into a single file.
     As I'm converting a warlokk mesh he's already the basics for me and all I've got to do is a bodyshop project for the nude mesh I want to add the shoes to, save it,close bodyshop,open Simpe extract the shape& resource node from Warlokk's mesh as per the tutorials and add them to my new file as per the tutorials and we are ready to begin. Can you confirm I'm right?

[BlooM]

No, dont use the cres and shape file from Warlokks mesh!!!
Normally you clone a maxis recolor with bodyshop
Open Simpe and start new
Use the PSJE tool to make a mesh package and save it.
Then fix intigrity on it/save it again and then extract both cres and shape files
Open your maxis recolor and link the mesh package to it using the cres and shape file.
Then open you mesh package and load the new gmdc.

Writing this down quickly, but all side info you find/learn in the tutorials.

[BlooM]

and it appears if you import the GMDC into Milkshape using the bodychop plugins you get the bone assignments of the original mesh and it's simply a matter of re-assigning the bone assignments to the new parts if he's got it right.
 

he is talking about the gmdc that is exported with Simpe.
Exported by right clicking the file and choose extract

I really cant tell if the Maya obj export contains a skeleton but i doubt it so its pretty much useless
Skankyboys export you can use also as exporter as it contains the needed skelton.
But everybody uses right click and extract and then import that file with unimesh in milkshape.
Thats the way you should do it.

I do not know a way to assigne a skeleton to a obj file, unless its unedited.
with a unedited obj file you can import a earlier exported objx file wich contains the skeleton and bonesettings.
but not with a maya obj file so im affraid you have to start over with your mesh.