Tutorial: Converting standard outfits to BodyShape Meshes

[ramseyazad]

wow thanks.  what does "alpha editable" mean precisely?  And how do I tell if something  is "alpha editable" or not?  I did notice that it's hard to find textures to fit onto the china dress mesh to keep it from looking like a funny mermaid thing (with pubic hair for some reason!) so the alpha bmps that I tried to apply to it really didn't do anything except in the bodice part of it.  Does that make it partially alpha editable?

r

[Warlokk]

No, that's a standard alpha texture on a solid mesh outfit.  The default game has 2 Alpha Mesh outfits I can think of offhand, the Hula Skirt and the Maid outfits.  They have separate parts in the mesh when it's viewed in Milkshape, and the textures are arranged differently than normal outfits, to account for the parts that aren't attached to the main mesh.  Marvine and I have both also made Alpha Mesh outfits, mine is based on the Hula Skirt, I don't remember what Marvine used as a base for hers.

Basically, alpha meshes allow you to have one layer overlapping another, so you can for example, see the legs through the skirt if it's made transparent, rather than it being a solid shape like the China Dress you mentioned.

[raveshade0]

teen c turns into adult d.  teen b is adult c

[Warlokk]

Right, as raveshade said... Teens "grow into" their adult sizes, which tend to be larger.  The breakdown is as follows:

Adult A = Teen A
Adult B = Teen B
Adult C = Teen B
Adult D = Teen C
Adult DD =  Teen D
Adult DDD = Teed D

[Warlokk]

Well, technically it does only apply to the skintones, since they're the only thing that automatically uses the sizes.  Clothing you have to assign manually anyway, so you can dress them in anything you like.

[Nuga]

This isn't working... that trick that is... *scratches head* I didn't take a screenshot but I swear the textures just do not match... or then I'm doing something wrong. Seriously, if you take a long dress (with them boobies) and copy a short dress' textures in it = mess. lol.

[Warlokk]

Well of course it does... one of the first rules is the original mesh has to be roughly the same as the target mesh, or the texture simply won't fit... a little adjustment in Photoshop may be all that's needed though, really.  Best bet is, compare your texture to the original texture on the outfit you're converting from, and you'll see the differences immediately.

[exportdry]

If it weren't for me wanting to download those damn showerproof skintones GARKMAN made from your meshes & Louis skintones I wouldn't be here & I wouldn't be going mad with the limited amount of clothing about for your meshes!

So now i convert & create clothing for your 34D, 34DD & 36H Body Meshes thanks to your mini tutorial which has made everything clear along with some intuition.

Your tutorial has unlocked a door which had been giving me alot of trouble  trouble picking.

Cheers

[exportdry]

One question I've place a body outfit on to a bottoms mesh and cleared the top so only the bottom would show.
Of course renamed as a bottoms base.
Only thing is there is a small seee through gap around the waist line.

Any answers?

This does not happen if I want the top from a body outfit and place it on one of your top meshes.

[Warlokk]

Sounds like your texture just may not have covered the whole area... compare yours to a texture from the bottoms separate, and make sure all the areas are filled in.  Sometimes you have to tweak them a little, especially if you're coming from a full-body texture, since those tend to overlap the top and bottom... which is why they're full-body outfits in the first place

[exportdry]

Found out what was wrong.
Turns out your Jeans with sandal's mesh has a lip around the waistline to give the top of the jeans definition, which made it look like the waists were not joined together properly when I converted low riding pants on to it.
Is it okay to reshape your meshes?

[Warlokk]

Sure, if you're able, go ahead and do what you like with them

[Chairman Greg]

... 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. ...

Brighter is higher.  Darker is lower.
Think of bright mountain tops and dark, shadowed valleys.

What I don't know is how high is white and how low is black.

IMHO, most fan-created bump maps (including most of mine) have too much contrast, and the clothes come out looking like there were made of paper maché.  A little contrast goes a long way with these things.  For most clothing work, you want very small variations from 50% gray.

Footenote: In his notes about this, Jakov sneers at the Sims fan community's use of "bump" map to refer to the "normal" map, but it appears that he is incorrect in that bit of pedantry.  Normal mapping usings all three color channels, while bump mapping interprets the image as grayscale and does not distinguish among R, G, and B.  The algorithm used in The Sims 2 appears to be a simple bump map.  You can feed it a color image but what you'll get is the same as if you fed it a grayscale image.

[SailorZeo]

Okay, question here: New to all this, and I wanted to convert an old pale/redhead skintone I had to the 34A34 mesh.  I followed the steps in the tutorial, extracted the original skintone, cancelled the project, then extracted one of the 34A34 skins (a Louis Pale, I think), replaced the textures files....and found out the original skintone didn't have facial textures for Teen-YA-Adult, male or female!  In the original skintone, I didn't have grey/invisible faces, so the data must have been around somewhere...  Did Bodyshop just not extract them, and I should try again?  Or did earlier versions of skintones not need that texture?  Any help would be greatly appreciated, as that's one of my favorite tones to use.

Zeo

[Warlokk]

Actually most of that is in the post I released the Poser magnet set in... it's in this section.  I've got links to several tutorials I used to learn how to do the whole thing, basically you extract an .obj mesh file from the outfit you want to convert, import it to Poser, apply magnets, extract a new .obj file, and rebuild the game files.  Figuring it out the first time will take many tries, but once you get the process down it's not bad at all.  That thread also has a bit of discussion explaining things a little, too.