Insimenator.org

Sometime in 2005 Semloh made a skin tone with a normal-map (which is no longer available at either MTS2 or Sexy Sims 2).

Last night I tried to make a skin tone with a normal-map with mixed success.

What I did:

• I made a clone of a Maxis dark (s4) skin tone in Body Shop
• I made a recolour of the adult male suit, I chose this clothing because it is a known normal-mapped clothing
• I made a recolour of the adult male suit, this time resizing the BMPs in the project folder to 512x512 before importing into the game
• I opened the suit recolours in SimPE and extracted/exported the normal maps
• I opened the skin tone clone in SimPE and imported the normal maps
• I changed the material definitions of all the existing skin tone parts to use a single texture based on the size of the original reducing the needed base textures to 2
• I changed the Group, Instance (High), and Instance data of the imported normal maps to match two of the no longer needed base textures
• I added normal mapping data to the material definitions
• I removed all un-necessary textures.
• I saved my work and checked it in Body Shop to see if it would display, it did
• I tried to clone the skin tone to make a re-colour edit, it exported all the various files for the skin tone including normal map textures as BMPs, then crashed trying to display the newly exported file
• I started the game and checked to see if the skin tone would crash the game in CAS, it didn't crash but locked up.  I was forced to use the Windows Task Manager to kill the game.

I would much appreciate it if someone would duplicate my work and see if they get a similar result, and I would also deeply appreciate it if anyone could post a copy of Semloh's original skin tone with normal mapping so I might compare the file with my work.

Thanks in advance!

yup, tried it your way and the way i do cloning/adding/ and messing up things myself.

Same results.
The changes looking promising(see his burned skin :) )
But when running it through bs again it crashes when viewing the male before importing it in the game.

Edit:
AH, when i opened the latest recol with simpe i noticed bs has changed the names of the normal texture images......
Did that happen with your recol also?
It also screwed up the stdbasetexturenames here......
And from the 3 normal textures for cut/normal and soft there's only one left now.

Ok, fixed those but,
It crashes cos it keeps changing the normalmap textures to DXT1 instead of RAW(in my package that is...)

Thanks Bloom - very similar to my problems, I will keep poking at it until I get it to work :lol: