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deedee_sims
In this tutorial we’ll attach a robot arm to an existing clothing piece. I tried to write this tutorial as a beginner one, but feel free to tell me if something is not clear (it’s not easy to think as a beginner after years of meshing :P). Okay, let’s start!
Warnings: Weirdly resized pictures, bad jokes and occasional Hungarian words
Warnings: Weirdly resized pictures, bad jokes and occasional Hungarian words
SimPe
Milkshape
Sims 2 Uni mesh and Vertex/Normal data merge plugins (you have to plop them to Milkshape’s install directory)
Robot arm resources (female) (and I quickly uploaded the male one here)
A clothing that we’d like to attach said robot arm to (I’ll go with a custom one)
NVidia DDS Utilities (you can find how to install it to SimPe, here)
Lots of patience (less, after you get the hang of it)
1. Extract the clothing!
Okay, at first, we need to extract the 3D model of the clothing, so we can work with it! I’ll use that steampunk underwear thingy for now. Search for the mesh file, and open it in SimPe (you only have to double click on it if SimPe associated itself with these files after installing). You’ll see 4 lines (if you see more it’s probably not the mesh file).
Right click on the GMDC file and click extract. Save it somewhere where you’ll find it (preferably outside the game files – I have a folder named creations with a bunch of project subfolders in it). Okay, now we can close SimPe just fine.
Okay, now open Milkshape. The first and the most important thing we have to do is…
Untick Auto Smooth! This is important! It’ll mess up your mesh. Thank you.
Now we can move on to the actual meshing.
2. Import the stuff to Milkshape
Go to File…/Import…/Sims 2 UniMesh Import. If it’s not here, you didn’t install the plugins correctly.
Okay, now search for the file we extracted, and import it (if you saved it to a separate folder it’ll be easy to find it). It’ll ask you if you want to make blend groups (if the original clothing had morphs, because these are the morphs), hit yes.
And here’s our clothing! If you see a huge blue mess, untick Show Skeleton on the Joints tab. Okay, the proper thing would be to go to File…/Preferences, and shrink the Joint size on the Misc tab (about 0.010000). But for now turning off the skeleton would be enough, because we won’t work with it now. Because yes the blue mess is the skeleton, just sims meshes are so small, that the in default settings it looks weirdly huge.
Back to our meshing! We need to import the robot arm too! I hope you downloaded the resources, because we need to import it just as we did with the original mesh.
It’ll ask you if you want to import another model, Ok, we want!
Then it’ll ask you if we want to include more bones, NO! It’d mess up our mesh. (also, sorry for the Hungarian words XD At least now you know how to say yes and no in this language :P)
Okay, import is done, but it doesn’t look very good yet. But before we start chopping parts off like a madman/woman, I’d like to explain how alpha groups work (because we have to put the arm to a new alpha group, and it’s important)
Look at the Groups tab. Now you see 3 lines (maybe more if you used another clothing). The ones that have names are the groups themselves (it’s the body and the arm in our case), and the ones starting with a tilde (~) are the morphs. In this case, our body group has a fatmorph. That’s okay. Maybe yours has a pregmorph too. Not all the groups need to have the morphs, because the other groups will use the base one when morphing (okay, that’s maybe a bit confusing. But if you check this clothing piece, you’ll see that there’s differences between the base and the morph around the shoulder area, so we’ll have to make the fatmorph for the arm too. (it’s not that common in case of female meshes, so if you see no difference, just the base arm group would be fine.)
3. Bye-bye arm
Okay, now, we can start chopping off the arm! (I know you've been waiting for that moment :P) As you can see, this line will be the meeting for the body and the arm. So hide the arm group for now (you can still see the base group and the morphs), and select the arm, starting from this line (hit F1 or Select on the model tab, and drag your mouse over it, until it turns red. Then hit delete. Congrats, you successfully removed the arm. Goodbye arm, you will be missed (or not).
Now, hide the morph group(s), we’ll work with the base group first. And un-hide the arm.
4. Match it!
Maybe it looks like it fits (maybe not, depending on the clothing you use), but you still have to do the following steps to avoid animation issues. You can see the vertexes (little dots are overlapping each other (or close to each other), so select a pair that should be together.
Go to Vertex…/Sims 2 UniMesh Vertex Data Merge, then Sims 2 UniMesh Normal Data Merge (the first will merge the dots, and the second the normals, so you won’t see a „line” or whatever, I can’t explain it properly. Just do it).
After that, I usually fix the bone assignments real quick for these vertexes, just to avoid any problems. While it’s still selected, go to Vertex…/Sims 2 UniMesh Bone Tool, and just click Commit, Apply To All, Commit All, in this order, we don’t need to touch anything else.
Okay, one is done, let’s do this with all the other vertex pairs!
Well, we’re done with the base mesh then! Time to tackle the morphs!
5. Fix the morph states!
Hide the base mesh, and unhide the first morph (in our case it will be our only morph) You can see it doesn’t fit with the arm we just attached (if it fits, then your work is done here).
Double click on the arm group in the Groups tab, you’ll select it this way and will turn red. And hit Edit…/Duplicate selection. You’ll end up with another arm, on a group named Duplicate01.
Hide our original arm group, so only the morph mesh and the Duplicate group is visible.
If you start the same method that you did with the base group, you’ll get an error message about morph groups can’t be used for reference. Don’t worry! We can fix it in no time, we only have to rename our morph group (I ususally just remove the tilde, so Milkshape won’t recognize it as a morph group anymore). Just highlight the morph group, remove the tilde on that tiny box, and hit rename.
Okay, -now- you can do the same as we did in the previous step (vertex data merge, normal data merge, but we don’t have to do the bone tool this time, because morphs use the bone assignments from the base group – that’s why they should contain the same amount of vertexes) We’ll end up fixing it.
Now, we have to re-rename the morph groups. It’ll need some more explanation.
All base groups has a number (at least the ones that has morph groups attached to them). You can see it if you click on the base group in the Groups tab, then hit Comment. See, the body group is our 0. That 0 is the first number in the name of its morph groups. You can see, the first morph name should be: ~00MORPHMOD.0 in my case. It means it’s the 0th group’s 0th morph. If your clothing has a pregmorph too, you’ll have a ~00MORPHMOD.1, which means this is the 0th group’s 1st morph. If you have more base groups (for example a noblend, which is common in case of converted clothes), you’ll see more morph groups too.
Go to the comment of the arm group! But you see no number here. We have to add the number, so instert MorphRefNum: 1 (or a number which is not used, so maybe it’s 2 in your case). Okay, then we have to rename the Duplicate group to ~01MORPHMOD.0 in my case. Because it’s the 1st group (I marked the arm group as 1), 0th morph, which is the fatmorph in my case. If you have a pregmorph, you might have to name the morphed arm attached to the pregmorph as ~01MORPHMOD.1.
I’m sure it sounded hella confusing, so here’s a picture, where I color coded which numbers should be the same.
We have one more thing to do: we have to fix the comments on our arm morph groups: for the fatmorph it’s MorphNames: botmorphs fatbot, for the pregmorph, it’s MorphNames: botmorphs pregbot.
If we’re working with only a top mesh (not a body mesh), they are MorphNames: topmorphs fattop and MorphNames: topmorphs pregtop.
These are important, unless the morphs won’t work.
6. Finally export the stuff from Milkshape.
Probably it’s a good time to save our Milkshape project (if we haven’t already). And then go to File…/Export…/Sims 2 UniMesh Exporter. Save the stuff somewhere where you can find it. The name doesn’t matter.
If you get an error message about non matching group/morph names (or something like that), check your morph group names and numbers again.
Now, we have to finally open bodyshop and start the actual clothing project.
7. Bodyshop fun
Okay, all we need is to start a new project (preferably using the clothing we used as a base).
So go to Create Parts../Start New Project…/Create Clothing. Search for the outfit we used and hit Export selected textures. Give it a name (doesn’t matter now)
Then, we have to Import it right back to the game, without touching it (don’t worry, we do it, because we have to use a recolor file to link our new mesh to).
Then close bodyshop.
8. Back to the
Time to open SimPe again (Bodyshop needs to be closed, unless we end up with an error message). Hit new (it’s the little blank paper thingy, or File…/New. This will start an empty package. We’re gonna put our new mesh together!
Select Tools…/PJSE…/Body Mesh Tool…/Extracting stage, then hit Browse.
Search for the „recolor” we imported back in Bodyshop. It’ll be the newest file in the Saved Sims folder. And open it.
You’ll get 4 lines now. These are the parts of your mesh. If you remember the mesh we opened and extracted in the beginning, it had the same parts. Select Tools…/Object Tools…/Fix integrity. Because we have to make it unique, so it won’t clash with other meshes.
Give it a unique name (*clothing name*-robotarm-*age*, or something, you can include your creator name too). Hit update, and then OK. It changes all the lines.
Then we have to replace the GMDC with the thing we exported from Milkshape in the 6th step. Right click on the GMDC line, select Replace, search for this file, and hit open.
It’ll ask you if you want to reload stuff, yes, we want to reload stuff.
The line changed, and you can see the main groups of our mesh in the boxy, here.
Now, it’s time to save our mesh. Probably somewhere in the Downloads folder. I always advise that, because I almost gave up my first meshing, because I didn’t put the mesh in the Downloads folder, and I thought I’m pathetic, and it’s not working. I always tell that story, don’t mind me.
9. Link the mesh to the textures
Let’s open the texture file we made (this is the last one in the Saved Sims folder again). First thing first, we have to add the new arm group, so it’ll be recognized.
Select the GZPS line. The lines under the numoverrides will be interesting for us.
The numoverrides means that how many base groups we have. In my case, I have a body group and an arm group, that’s 2. If you have more groups, than it’s more. We used a recolor of the original clothing, so we only have to increase this number with 1. Because the other groups are registered already (I hope that makes sense).
Now, look at the lines above the numoverrides line. You can see they’re grouped in 3s. In my case, it’s just one group. All we have to do is to duplicate these groups, change their number in their names to the next number, anc chnage the subset name to arm. The picture might help. Then hit commit! (ok to the popup)
Select the 3DIR line (it might load a bit). Go to Tools…/PJSE…/Body Mesh Tool…/Linking stage.
Hit ok to the popup. Search for the mesh file we made in the previous step, and hit Open. (ok to the popup). Then we have to select another line to commit it (doesn’t matter which one), then we can save this file too (just save it, don’t have to save a sor anything).
10. Bodyshop… again
https://i.imgur.com/bWsqzMv.png
Yeah, it’s time to close SimPe and open Bodyshop again. Start a new project, and look at the first clothing you see – it has the arm! If not, then we messed up something.
Export it as a new project, and now if you go to this project’s folder (in the Projects folder), you can see that it has separate image files for the arm! Give it a pretty name, then import it to the game, because we’re going to change the texture in SimPe!
You can find the final clothing in the Saved Sims folder (the newest one here). Move it to the Downloads folder, and rename it.
11. The Last
We still have to fix the arm texture. Open the final recolor file in SimPe. You can see that it has more lines that the one we modified earlier. It’s because we added the arm group successfully, and the new lines are its resources. Search for the image file which has „arm” in its name.
Right click on the image, and select Build DXT… (if it’s not here, you haven’t installed NVidia DDS Utilities).
Click open, and search for the arm’s texture (it’s included among the female resources). The format should be DXT3 (or 5, I don’t know if there’s really any difference between these two), and the Sharpen should be None. If you set everything, hit Build. If it’s done processing, hit commit, and save thie file. Congratulations, you’re done! :)
12. One last thingy
I usually increase the reflectivity on the arm, to look more… reflective. Yep.
Search for the TXMT file that has „arm” in its name. That’s the one that applies to the arm group. You can see, there’s a reflectivity line in there. Change itt o 0.5, and hit commit. Then save. Well done, now your clothing is perfect!
So, that’s basically it, I hope it wasn’t that confusing. But you know, practice makes perfect, so if you do this more than once, it will be easier! Of course, if you have any questions, if you stuck somewhere, or whatever, feel free to comment, or message me on my simblr. Happy simming! :)
