Magpie's Stash

THAT. See that? That's ANIMATED.

:D :D :D

What's even better is that it's working for Child through Elder, male and female. Tomorrow: Making more recolours.

Things I Have Learned with this project:

1. ALWAYS import first a mesh of the proper age and the same number of groups as the mesh you want to convert, and ALWAYS use a mesh with the groups numbered exactly the same as the mesh you want to convert. Otherwise, the animation-if-any goes kerblooey.
2. ALWAYS check the UV map before you get too far in. Chop-and-adjust is often better than trying to texture crazy damn mapping.
3. Starting with quick, rough adjustments to the mesh and then making fiddly adjustments is faster and easier than starting with fiddly adjustments.
4. Always check your bone assignments.
5. If you can't get fancy animation, go for smooth. It's not too hard... even having to go through bloody Extended Manual Edit because the Bone tool crashes Milkshape if you try to use it more than once in a session. *grumble*
6. Always make incremental saves, even with exports of the changed mesh.
7. When it doubt, rebuild packages from scratch.
8. DON'T MESH OR BUILD PACKAGES WHEN YOU'RE TIRED.

My most recent project is this:



It's the female Vampire hair from NL, which I'm converting to AM and TM sans stupid diamond thing. I know there are like fifty billion FtM mesh conversions of long hair out there, but they're all frilly poofy ridiculously high poly things. The only thing I've seen that's even close to this is a MYoS mesh that clips pretty badly with anything but the most femmy-femme of faces.

Except it isn't really the Vampire mesh, as poking at the actual Maxis mesh gave me all sorts of warnings about unweighted bones despite nothing appearing when I told Milkshape to select unweighted bones, and of course that meant Weird Things happened in bodyshop (namely, a bulge at the back of the head that looked like an alien growth).

So rather than reinvent the wheel just to prove that I could, I grabbed VETTY's hair mesh and converted from that.

From there followed a few days of misadventure, like finding out that on my computer the Unimesh bone tool crashes Milkshape regardless of my updated drivers, and getting almost done with the mesh--only to realize I had one of the two alpha layers unselected the entire time and now it was completely misaligned. I managed to do that twice! (Can you tell I'm new at hair meshing?)

BUT. I learned how to do it and how to make the animation smooth (even though I have to do it via endless copypasta in Extended Manual Edit. Sob). And lookit that. That's the teen mesh, almost done. \o/

I'll probably also tweak the original VETTY meshes for UV mapping and animation, as I'm pretty sure they're still kind of crunchy. It won't be fancy animation, just making sure the hair doesn't develop sharp corners when the sim looks around, but.

Then I'll have to make new textures to fit the new UV mapping, which will probably make me want to cry. :D At least it's an excuse to make pretty Neena-fied textures for them, right?

Right...