Hair retexture tutorial

[deedee_sims]

So I've been asked if I could write a tutorial about how I retexture hair. I use Simgaroop's textures, but I'm pretty sure this method is also useful for other MM textures that don't have multiple shines to place. Let's start! :D

Warning: Possible grammar mistakes and occasional Hungarian words on the pictures

What we need:
Bodyshop
Photoshop (or you can also use other photo editing programs, but I'm not sure what colors are available in GIMP curves)
Textures and color actions (I linked Simgaroop's)
Cat's Hair Binner Program



First, open Bodyshop, and start a new project



Find the hair that you want to retexture (I usually choose the red one, don't ask me why) and export it. Give the project a recognizable name.



Go to the Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Projects/"the name of your new project" folder and you can see what have been exported. There are textures, alphas, and a bunch of black whatever that we don't have to care about.



Open your photo editing program (Photoshop). Open the adult textures (that starts with afhair or amhair). Open the alpha too, and copy the alpha layer to the top of the texture layer. Change the opacity to 30% (well, you can change it to other number too, but it worked the best for me), so you can see both the alpha and the textures that are located under the alpha.



Open the blond texture and copy it (don't worry, it's the same that I linked, just cropped out a part of it that seemed useful). For other textures, you might have the volatile colored texture that you have to use, and then color it with the actions.



Copy the textures between the texture and the alpha layer, so you can see everything



Then move and adjust the new texture to match the alpha parts



Tadaa!



Uncheck the visibility of the alpha layer (or you can also delete it). I usually apply an adjustment layer with these settings, just to make the textures a bit brighter
And fill the background layer with black



Then save it as the adult texture



Refresh the project in Bodyshop, and you can see the new adult textures. Check if everything looks okay. Sometimes you have to poke with the textures a bit if the lighter parts are located in strange positions. But that one looks nice to me :D



After that, I always set up a saving action, using the adult bmp file that we just saved and not the psd. Unfortunately, I don't know how to make actions relative, so I have to set it up with every single hair I retexture. But it makes the saving process so much easier, so I recommend doing it! You don't have to care about the elder textures now, except if you want colored elder hair.



Because now we'll make the elder ones, with desaturating the whole texture.



And save the elder texture. You don't have to care about it after that (despite if you want multiple elder colors)



Refresh the project again, and check if everythink is okay. Give it a nice tooltip, and import the thing to game



Now, we'll make the other colors. Just run the color action on the desaturated texture (or for other textures, it's the volatile one sometimes - it depends on the action)



Then run the saving action



Reload the previous project, we don't have to start a new one or anything. And import the hair to game



Then go back to the desaturated texture, and run the next action. Be careful, don't just desaturate the new colored texture, because it would be darker!
Run the saving action, then import the hair to game, etc. Repeat the steps until you finish all the colors



Annd, you can see everything in the custom bin, if everything looks allright, close Bodyshop



Then go tho the SavedSims folder. If you arrange the files by the date of modification, you can see the new hairs on the top. Copy them to a new folder in your downloads folder (it's in a working folder in my case)



After that, name the files. Again, if you arrange them by the date of modification, you can see that the first one we made was the blond, the second was the maxis red, etc.

Open the hair binner program. Since we have 6 files, we'll bin in twice, but with the same black and blond. Choose the first set.



You can choose the color you want to attach the gray to. You can also make a separate gray file, but you have to make another package for this in Bodyshop. Check if the ages are correct. I always uncheck make backup files, but of course you can make backup files in case if something goes wrong.
Hit the Bin button. The binning process may take a few moments



Yay, it's done!
If you have only 4 colors, you can skip the next binning step, and you're done



Then do the second binning. Make sure that you choose the same gray button. Hit Bin, and you're done!



You can see that the binning chopped off a few kilobytes from the filesize, good!



Fire up your game and enjoy your new, shiny, properly binned hair retexture! :D

So that's all. If you have any questions, feel free to comment here, or on my simblr ^^