Upload: Hair: Basegame Hair Texture Replacements

[aquilegia]

This is an ENORMOUS project that started as noodling around to see if I could salvage a few Maxis meshes and grew into an absolute monster. These replacements cover 56 non-hat Basegame hairstyles; the additional 6 hiders hide the styles I loathe too much to touch. Some styles are completely retextured, others only softened a bit and recolored.

Allow me to crow: some of these styles were absolute bitches. Maxis failmapping was in full force in the basegame, with continuous parts of meshes often mapped in completely different places, making it difficult to avoid big, ugly seams with retextures (and in the case of the Short style, even Maxis couldn't avoid such).

Through careful blending, lots of cursing, and the blessing that is previewing via Milkshape, I managed to retexture these styles in a way that minimizes the weird mapping. They aren't perfect; I had to do some blending magic with the Maxis textures to get this to work, and as a result the textures a little funky along those seams. They're good enough for my game; you'll have to choose whether or not they're good enough for yours.

I also made the mullet style workable through a mesh edit as well as a retexture. The mesh is a part of the package, as the texture really doesn't work with the original mesh.

All files have been compressorized.

Preview 1 | Preview 2 | Preview 3 | Preview 4 | Preview 5 | Preview 6 | Preview 7


TEXTURE DEFAULTS

All custom 'mirror' colors have been replaced as well as the binned styles.

I've edited some styles to texture reference the opposite gender's textures, where the styles used the same mapping. This saves considerably on file size, but PLEASE BE AWARE: this means certain age conversions (AM mohawk and AM Longdreads) will end up using Maxis textures unless you fix them.

Some files may look particularly large; this is because they had many custom colors, required large texture sizes for quality, or both.

Remember, these are DEFAULT REPLACEMENTS: You can have only one of any given replacement.

DOWNLOAD Default Texture Replacements (Acorntuck through Meg)
DOWNLOAD Default Texture Replacements (Messy through Will)



BONUS! Conversions, mesh edits, addons, and texture resources


GENDER AND AGE CONVERSIONS

DOWNLOAD Gender and Age Conversions

All conversions are texture linked and decustomized. Please replace any Melodie9 meshes you may have with my edits -- I fixed an issue with a hidden 'face' group that added 736 polygons per mesh, added a matching grey to the 'mob' conversion, fixed a normals issue with the PGSkater toddler conversion, and deflated various meshes to make them fit the head better.

I've included Layana's decustomization files for convenience; many of these have edits as well. Please replace any of Layana's files you may ahve with my versions. I changed the female mohawk conversion to work for both male and female children as tiny boys don't need huge 'hawks, changed the material definitions on the longsimple to display transparency correctly for my mesh edits, and changed the mob conversion to only have one grey that matches my retextures.

I have not included all conversions, only the ones I personally use.

All of these are in one archive because it is a relatively small file, carefully labeled and subfoldered so you may pick and choose what you like. My gender conversions are subfoldered within the appropriate age conversion folder, where it exists.

My gender conversions (Preview):
Closecrop MtF for CF-EF
Shortmop MtF for PF-EF (require's Melodie9's shortmop age conversion)
Undercut Ponytail MtF for PF-EF (requires Melodie9's toddler and child conversions)
Shortslick FtM for PM-EM (Requires Melodi9's toddler and child conversion)

Melodie9's conversions fixed by me to remove unnecessary 'face' groups, fix gaps, and deflate heads:
Female Messy
Male Messy
Cornrowslong
Cornrows
LongPonytail
Fuzzylong
Halo
Long
Longsimple
Lowbun
Meg
Mob
Mohawk
Pagepunk
PGChoppy
PGSkater
Punkflip
Rosettes
Short
Shortcenterspike
Shortcombed
Shortcute
Shortmop
Shortsimple
Shortslick
Shortspikey
Shorttuckin
Sixty
UndercutPonytail
Will


My mesh edits to game styles to make them fit to the head more like real hair and to fix gaps (included in the appropriate age conversion folders):
Acorntuck deflation for CF-EF
Longsimple deflation for TF-EF
Pagepunk deflation for TF-EF


I ONLY WANT THE MAXIS MESH EDITS!

DOWNLOAD 3 Maxis Mesh Edits

Here you go -- Acorntuck, Longsimple, and Pagepunk deflated and smoothed to hang like real hair. Pagepunk's gaps have been fixed. You do not need this file if you downloaded the Gender + Age Conversions archive!


HIDERS

DOWNLOAD Ugly Hair Hiders

I've hidden the following styles because I hate them just that much:
Feather
Flypigtails
Frontalwave
Mediumcenterpart
Ponytailhigh
Round


TEXTURE RESOURCES

DOWNLOAD Base Hair Textures

These are png files of every style I made extensive retextures to. They're in Pooklet's Volatile for your recoloring convenience. Please take care on Bowltwist and Barrette to edit in a non-recolored version of the hairclips when you're done!


Credits:
Pooklet's colors (Dynamite, Depth Charge, Volatile, Pyrotechnic, and TimeBomb)
Pooklet's v.2 and v.3 textures
Nouk's Waves, Afro, and Dreads textures
Nymphy's curls edit of Nouk's Waves
AlfredAskew for the Shortsimple retexture I tweaked, softened, and blended with the Maxis texture
Almighty Hat for the braidsup, halo, lowbun, meg, poofs, rocker, and sixty textures
Alkaloid via Almight Hat for the shortmop textures
Monoblue for the PG Skater alpha
Ja, Almighty Hat, Nymphy, and Lunar Eclipse for pilfered alphas
Biobong on MTS for the Punkflip edit idea
Melodie9's many, many age conversions
Layana's texture referencing, Maxis-blending files for the conversions

I apologize for any missing credits in the text files included with the archive.

Please feel free to use my packages to build your own replacements.

*falls over*

Comments

[eefje00704]

Awesome, amazing, perfect! And I'm so glad you managed to do the French Braid! Thank you!

[aquilegia]

It's a bit of a miracle I made the french braid work. XD It's not perfect -- the underside is definitely rather funky -- but from typical gameplay angles it's good.

[ghanima_atreides]

This may well be THE most epic thing I've ever downloaded; the time, effort and care gone into this blows me away! :O Thanks so much!

[curiousb]

You are an absolute wonder! Thank you, for taking on this mammoth task, and doing such a great job. :D

[digitaldollies]

Yessshhhhhh!!!! It's done and I can download and caress it until I can get to play my game again.

[jesslove]

WOW. I can only imagine the amount of time that went into these! They look amazing, and thanks so so much for sharing them. :)

[simlish]

Thank you for the fixed meshes and the conversions! :) I am specially thrilled because you fixed the long simple hair.

[simlish]

I just took a look at the fixes in the game and they are wonderful! (There is a huge improvement with acorntuck)

However, I think there's a bug in the child version of Longsimple. I thought it was because I am not using the texture replacements, but the other ages (including toddler) show up fine.



This is the same hair in teens and adults:
http://i614.photobucket.com/albums/tt226/simlish/snapshot_1aa759cd_9aa759ea.jpg
http://i614.photobucket.com/albums/tt226/simlish/snapshot_1aa759cd_5aa75b03.jpg

I am 95% sure I do not have a conflicting replacement or an older version of Melodie9 conversion, but I'll make sure of it now.

If this is an issue that shows up only because I do not have the texture replacement, I'll download and recolor it :).

[hat_plays_sims]

Woman, you are a GODDESS.

And now I have more things to put on my hair list, but. Goddess! Reasonably, I should only grab what I know I'm going to either full-Pooklet or not hide, but... dang, man, this is so pretty. Mullet looks eighteen times better even if it is still a very simple hair (bonus: Can be worn with accessory hats), and I got all giddy when I saw the French braid. I love that hair, I seriously do.

And mesh fixes! Just. Full of yay.

And for anyone who may 'need' this information, the extracted Castaway Stories hairs from MATY are texture-linked to halo, sixty, lonsimple, and mullet.

[aquilegia]

Haha, thanks. :D And much like any creator deity, man do I ever need a break. XD

[(Anonymous)]

thank you SO SO much.
maxis textures are fugly and disgusting. now i can actually use some of the half-pretty maxis meshes and won't have to avoid the basegame hair section like the plague. :D

[cosmetical]

Wow, thank you so much. This is great, clearly tons of work, and also kind of relieves my need for several custom hairs that are very similar now, so double thanks.

Gap issue?

[(Anonymous)]

I've looked forward to this.
It looks great!

There seems to be an issue with one of the CF hair replacements though:
http://img816.imageshack.us/img816/5073/gapissue.png

Just thought I should inform you on that.

Re: Gap issue?

[aquilegia]

Oh, that's very odd -- that shouldn't happen, it looks like the Maxis CF bun mesh and I didn't touch that. Everything looks fine in my game, and I checked the replacement package just to make sure it only has textures in it.

Try this -- it's the bun texture replacement that I just checked to make sure it only has textures.

If that doesn't work, I suggest checking that style without my replacements in, and then only my replacements and no other hair. If something didn't sneak into my files that isn't messing things up for me for some reason, it could be a custom style with a bad child mesh.

[quinctia]

Yay, it's done!

I love a lot of these. There are a few meshes I don't think I'll ever come to terms with (though I also agree about the ones you chose to still hide), but there's so much I can unhide now, it's staggering!

Now to just Molotov everything I want to use your replacements for. XD

[aquilegia]

I hear you -- some styles I did because they were easy enough it'd be worth it for the people who do use them (Maxis faildreads, I am looking at you) or, in the case of the mullet, I took as personal offense that they were so ugly and took up the challenge of making it usable. Well, the mullet is still iffy, but at least now I won't want to shriek in pure rage every time a male DJ shows up...

Let me know if there's a base texture I didn't include that you want!

[neuroticrobotic]

OH MY LORD. You are a patient, patient woman.

You deserve a holiday.

[nathanialroyale]

Thank you so much for finishing off these, now I have replacements for all of the hairs ^^

[bunheadsbuns.livejournal.com]

This. Is. Amazing. Wow, just wow!

[grobpodriguje]

Holy cow, this is so awesome! I've never used any sort of hiders or default hair replacements, but I must have these. Everything looks perfect and I'm trying it out right away. Oh lord, I just can't believe there are gender conversions too. Thank you so much!

[tea_leaf]

This is absolutely amazing! I downloaded almost everything and all of the edits are stunning! Thank you so much for doing this! I will surely get a lot of use out of these hairs now. :)

(P.S. The bangs on the BowlTwist hair are so adorable!)

Love it!

[(Anonymous)]

I love these!
Made them in all my favorite colors. :D
You've saved my sims' hair! :D

about installing.

[(Anonymous)]

I've downloaded these and placed the texture defaults, mesh edits, and hiders in my downloads folder, like normal. Once in game though, none of the basegame hairs have the new textures or mesh edits; they look exactly the same.
What should i do? D:
Are they not supposed to be placed in the DL folder?

Re: about installing.

[aquilegia]

That's very odd. They do indeed go into the downloads folder, so I'm not sure what would be the problem. Have you tried deleting groups.cache? It's in your My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2 folder (or the equivalent if you're on a Mac). It's there to improve load times by 'remembering' content in a more quickly accessible way, but sometimes it 'remembers' old files even when you have new ones installed, unless you delete it. It will regenerate on its own.

Also be sure they aren't subfoldered too far down -- too long of a file path (this includes folder and file names) or too deep of subfolders can prevent the game from being able to read content.

[lalabubus]

This upload is fantastic! I am so happy to have old maxis hair in use now as well as these gender conversion, many tbanks.

[msbarrows]

*Worships Aquilegia*

Ever since I recently redid my downloads and switched to using vast amounts of (mainly Almighty Hat's) pookleted hair recolours, I've been looking at the ugly old Maxis hairs in my game and wishing they were recoloured too. I was darn near dancing when I checked her site today for any recent releases and saw her news article about your DRs. You are a GODDESS!

[aquilegia]

Haha, glad you like them. :D I'm always happy to have shinyfied another game!

[orikes]

This is an amazing, amazing project. Thank you so much for putting so much effort into it.

My question is probably going to be a little bit dumb, but I've just started even poking at hairs, colors and textures. In my game, I use Incendiary and Explosive for the blonde and red. I know with you having Volatile as the blonde, it should be relatively easy to just get the red and blonde I want, but I'm wondering if you have any advice on the best way to do it.

Right now, I do it kind of cludgy through Bodyshop, which I doubt is the most efficient, and I'm afraid may screw up some of our elegant work here. :}

[aquilegia]

Not dumb! Everyone starts somewhere and the information about creating is really scattered around.

Hm, it sounds like you are exporting the hairs through Bodyshop to get the base textures. You don't need to do that -- the texture resources link (and then the other resources I linked in the comments) will give you the high-quality images I worked off of. :) To get them to look nice once run through color actions, make a layer under the texture, floodfill it with the darkest color of the texture, and flatten (otherwise the actions will flatten it to a white layer which can make for some weird artifacts in a finished style).

Let me know if you have any other questions, or if I answered a question you weren't actually asking. XD

[seelengeil]

You did a great job salvaging many meshes that otherwise would be fated to lurk forever in the depths of the hair catalog. Thank you :D

One question though: Is it possible to remap Maxis hairs so they are easier to retexture? I'd love to try my hand at handpainting textures (don't get me wrong, you actually did an awesome job doing this retextures and I'm VERY grateful, but after seeing Nymphy's retexture of a male Store hair in her latest hair dump, I'm tempted to learn to handpaint), but Eaxis failmapping scares me /o\

[aquilegia]

It is indeed possible, just a giant pain! I did that with the NL vampire hair (it's in the big package Ja released before she left the community) -- it requires new default textures because obviously the old ones will be totally broken, and so will any recolors for that mesh.

I don't know how other people might do it, but I did it through Milkshape's Texture Coordinate Editor. It helps a lot to have meshing experience under your belt, as I found that some meshes need to be cut apart so I could flip and adjust their parts of the UV map before I rejoined them more sensibly to the other parts (CatofEvilGenius's UV map plugins were invaluable for me).

[leaths]

First, let me say thank you for this. It's beautiful work. It must have been a real labor of love because I can imagine how tedious it must have gotten at times.

I know I'm running behind everyone else, but I hope you'll still see this comment because I'm having a little bit of a problem. I seem to be having some kind of conflict between the pagepunk and toddler mob hair, where the toddler hair is picking up the pagepunk alpha.

Here's a picture of what I mean.

As you can see, it's happening on all of the hairs except red, which is just...I don't even know. It's not just the bangs. The back of the hair is the wrong length and kind of choppy/uneven.

This happens whether or not I have the pagepunk mesh edit in. If I pull the pagepunk texture replacement out, then the toddler mob hair doesn't pick up texture replacements either, except for the red.

I've tried various combinations of the mesh edits and texture replacements in and out of my Downloads folder, but it's still the same result. This happens with only your hair defaults in the Downloads folder and a clean Saved Sims folder, too, so I'm pretty sure it's not a conflict. I've deleted my cigen.package and groups.cache in between pulling things in and out, and I'm at a loss, so I thought I'd ask.

Thanks again for this and I hope I'm not being a bother.

[aquilegia]

No bother at all! I totally forgot about it at the time, but this is something EAxis screwed up -- all but the red reference the adult textures. I should have included the fix in the packages (it's a tiny thing) but bluh, didn't think about it. :/

Fanseelamb made a fix, fortunately. It plays nicely with the default replacements. :D

[(Anonymous)]

Hi, I just want to thank you for doing this, the new textures are gorgeous and it makes Maxis hairs usable!

[tea_leaf]

Hello. :) I have been using these defaults for a little while now (I LOVE them by the way) and I've noticed that bangs on the bowltwist hair do not show up for me. Do you know if this can be fixed?

[aquilegia]

Hi! In the archive there should be two versions of the bowltwist -- one is without fringe and one is with. I can't remember what I named them exactly and unfortunately I don't have access to my gaming computer right now, I'm sorry. :(