Tutorial: Converting standard outfits to BodyShape Meshes

[kosamipabigu]

:hello2: I have been trawling through your site for the past month or so and want to say a big thankyou especially to warlokk. I always read your posts as you have the amazing knack of stating sometimes pretty basic but essential stuff others take for granted we should know. Not only am I starting to get the hang of basic mods but am learning more about how my pc works and its been a relatively painless process thanks mostly to you. :ot: oh! your stuff is pretty good too by the way . A contribution will follow shortly. Thanx again

[The Mule]

What's the secret of converting "non-standard" outfits to the full body meshes? By "non-standard", I mean the packages with 6 files, three alphas and three textures, one standard of each, plus one of each with a 5 in the filename, one of each with a 3 in the file name. An examle being Marvine's awesome sheer stuff here.

I can make the top half seperate but the bottom half with the alpha-mesh is driving me batty.

Sometimes they can be worked through with alot of cut and paste and they end up almost like a new creation, but not the original. Any help?

[Warlokk]

Sorry Mule, that's waaaay too advanced for me to try to explain here... basically you're working with Alpha meshes there, which I've successfully managed to get one out the door, but no sizes yet.  Check out the Unimesh thread in the Create forum over at MTS2 and read up on it a bit, and it'll make sense... you're best bet is to start with the HulaSkirt outfit from Maxis, that's what I based my Alpha outfit on, since it only has 1 alpha layer instead of 2, so it's less complicated.

[The Mule]

Thank you for your time. Great work. What's your next project?

[Warlokk]

Next I'm getting back to clothing, starting with the full-body outfits for the A tops.  After that will be the rest of the sizes, DDD, D, C and Bnat (not necessarily in that order).  After that I'm not sure yet.  In between all that, I'm moving soon, so that'll slow things down a bit too.

[Jourdain]

Im haveing a problem finding the refresh button in bodyshop-oddly wierd...

[Warlokk]

It's the little circular twisting-arrow button, in the bottom middle somewhere... I  don't think it's possible for it not to be there...

[Jourdain]

Yea i found it the other day after a search and rescue of the sims body shop so thanks for the info....

[nuttytartjan]

how do i convert male things into femail things

[Star Ranger4]

:?

well, you have to know how to hack bodytypes with simpe, and then duplicate the item and designate it as now a female item.

actually, its better to just export the texture and find a femine item thats close and replace it

[Warlokk]

There isn't really any way to incorporate a custom-mesh outfit with my meshes from an outfit-making perspective... basically I'd have to make a conversion of the custom outfit mesh to fit my Bodyshapes, with a separate mesh for each size just like the current stuff.  This would require permission from the original mesh creator, and of course a lot of free time on my end which I don't have much of lately.  I do plan to make more outfit meshes for the various sizes, but I am considering also releasing my Poser magnets so other mesh creators can adapt them themselves.  It's not an easy process though, you would have to know how to create a mesh from the ground up, as well as owning Milkshape and Poser.

[ramseyazad]

Is there somewhere that explains all the names of the files when you export the clothes from bodyshop?  I have been playing around with moving the body~stdMatBaseTextureName_alpha.bmp and the body~stdMatBaseTextureName.bmp separately and getting some interesting results, although so far they're pretty random.  It seems like the alpha file tells where to apply the other file, so, in the case of some of the D40 dresses I just uploaded, I used some other alpha file and got the bare midriff effect.  Seemed to work better with the swimsuits and things, but I don't really understand what's going on there.  And also, some clothing has files that don't seem to export the same way or something, they have all these other files, i.e. body_alpha3~stdMatBaseTexturename and the same thing_alpha.  Is this some kind of second layer?  Anyways, clothes that export with alpha3 or alpha5 files don't seem to typically work with this method.  I just thought maybe somewhere there was an explanation of what those files do, so I can maybe get better than hit-or-miss recolours.
And why am I a moo-bunny?!

[ramseyazad]

oh, I mean site monkey!?

[Warlokk]

LOL... site monkey... :lol:

Most outfits will have 3 texture files... a texture, an alpha, and a normal.  The Texture is obvious, it's the actual colors that are applied to the outfit.

 The Alpha, when there is just one, affects the transparency of the Texture... black areas are hidden, grey areas are semi-transparent, white areas are fully shown.  Basically the darker the grey, the more transparent the texture in that area, showing the skin underneath.

The Normal is your bump map... it is a sort of texture effect that is applied to the model, that makes it look 3d in areas.  Usually it's grey, and raised/lowered areas are either darker or lighter (I forget which is which).  This allows things like straps and buckles to stand out a bit without actually being part of the mesh, and also work great for textured materials like a wooly sweater.

Alpha_3 and files like that are usually textures for separate Alpha Meshes some outfits have... sometimes the texture for those areas is integrated into the main textures, but sometimes it's separate.  Those can get complicated, 'cause how they work is totally up to the mesh creator, so you kinda have to play with it and see what goes where.

Hope that helps!

[Star Ranger4]

Ok.  What .bmp's you get depend on the mesh you use...  and you do have most of it figured out already.

Texture name.bmp files define the actual skin of the dress, and its matching alpha files tell the game where to and where not to apply the texture to the mesh.  Any place the texture is not applied, it will show the skin underneath.  Note that this will create strange effects if the mesh is not totally alpha editable, as the mesh will retain the basic shape of the cothes even though it is showing the 'skintone' from underneath.

Some outfits will have a material normals.bmp  This is basicly a grayscale that is used to produce bump mapping on machines that support it.

The outfits with body3 and body5 .bmps (both texture material and Alpha) have an additional mesh layer known as an alpha editable mesh.  What this means is that where the alpha .bmp is black, the mesh will be completely invisible.  The best example of this is Marvines Alpha skirt, and alpha dress.

And you were a moo bunny because thats the title you get for the number of posts you had then.  You've since made enough posts you are now a site monkey