Top Only Dress Tutorial
Warning: This tutorial is not a beginner meshing tutorial, so you'll need some basic meshing experience. I recommend the Tutorial Database, where you can find beginner meshing tutorials too :)
Other warnings: Crappy language and occasional Hungarian words on the pictures.
So, in this tutorial, we'll turn an existing dress into a top only dress! I think it's quite easy, and I hope this tutorial makes sense XD
First, we have to extract the GMDC from the original mesh package. My victim will be a teen dress, but I hope it won't be confusing (the process is mostly the same for an adult dress - maybe it has a pregmorph too)
Next, we have to open Milkshape, and import our extracted body mesh with the uni mesh importer. If it asks about blend groups, click yes.
You can see, our dress already has 3 alpha groups: body, body_alpha and shoes. We won't need shoes, so just delete it. It's important for our top only dress to have another alpha group, because the textures could "bleed" into the textures of the bottom. If we move our dress to an alpha group, it will be fine.
So if the base dress doesn't have an alpha group (like that one on the picture), we have to move the dress to an alpha group, and leave a part of the body on the body group. For example the hands.
Back to our project, we have to chop off the legs. And fill the holes. Hide the morph groups first.
Select the vertices around the hole, and use the vertex data merge to merge them.
Well, it looks quite crappy, so align the normals, to smooth these weird shadows.
Repeat it with the other leg and the morph groups too (you might have to rename the morph group to make vertex merge work, then just change it back to it's original name - otherwise the morphs won't work)
If it's done, we have to fix the group names and the comments. Rename the body to top.
Click on the Comment button, and change body to top.
We don't have to care about the name of the additional alpha group. Just memorize its name.
For the morph groups, we have to change all the "bot" words to "top", which means, we have to leave topmorphs fattop and topmorphs pregtop in the appropriate comments.
I have a habit: I import an existing top only dress, and I try to adjust the new mesh a bit, so it'll have less clippings (it usually clips around the butts)
Export our model with the uni mesh exporter.
Open bodyshop and start a new project (I recommend choosing a top that doesn't have normal maps, so we don't have to remove it manually in SimPe).
Export it back immediately, and close bodyshop.
Open SimPe, start a new package, and go to the extracting stage.
Choose the new recolor we just made (it'll be the newest file in the Saved Sims folder).
We have to fix its integrity, so it won't interfere with other meshes.
Type a unique name, click update and then ok.
Replace it's GMDC with the model we exported from milkshape.
Yes to all the popups, and save the new mesh file we just made.
Open our recolor package (the newest one in the Saved Sims folder). Click on the GZPS line, because we have to add a new alpha group (since our mesh has two alpha groups, the top and the body_alpha).
Change numoverrides to 2, and clone the 3 lines above it. Change the 0 in their names to 1, and change the subset's value to the name of our alpha group (which is body_alpha in that case). Don't forget to click commit!
Click on the 3DID line, and go to the linking stage. Select our mesh package.
Okay to every popup. Click on another line, so the 3DID could commit itself, and then save.
Open bodyshop. The new mesh has to appear at the beginning of the tops. Start a new project with it.
Since the top group doesn't have to have any textures, just fill the top texture and alpha with black.
Give it a creative (or not so creative, it depends on you XD) tooltip, and import it back to game. Don't worry about the textures, we'll change them in SimPe (because bodyshop tends to blur them a bit).
Make as many packages as many recolors the original dress had (or as many recolors you want to make).
Move all the new stuff to a folder in the Downloads folder. If you arrange them by date, it'll be easier to find them.
In the next step, we'll extract the original textures from the fullbody dress's recolor packages. Open them in SimPe, click on the body_alpha textures and extract them. Repeat it for all the recolors.
Open one of the top only dress recolor packages we just made. Click on the body_alpha textures and click build dxt.
Click open, select a texture that we exported previously, change everything to these settings, and hit build.
Save the recolor package. Repeat it with all the files.
If it's done, rename all of them!
Open bodyshop and check if everything is okay. Test the morphs too (you have to test the pregmorph ingame). If it clips, just tweak the mesh a bit, and change the GMDC (you don't have to relink anything).
And it's done! :D If you have any questions, leave a comment here, or send an ask on my simblr :)