manly male hair for manly male manpixels, yay!

[seelengeil]

Right, I wrote this stupid post before but DW ate it so... glennisonfire requested some male hairs from TS3 to be converted to TS2 and as I'd love to have those as well for my game, I decided to give this request a go (posting this here and not at GOS because I don't feel like making a GOS account now) and here's the hair I chose to begin with,

Comments

[le_plat_du_jour]

I think it's looking great! And really, package building, new alpha and textures isn't a lot of work at all. You should just extract the texture from the game. It'll look like this and it's probably called amHair(...)_d_, if there's any consistency in the way EA does things :) Try loading those in milkshape and check if the hair still fits nicely.
And as for building the package: I usually use an old hair package rather than starting from scratch every time. Wait, have you got a mesh file yet?

[seelengeil]

Yay, glad you like it! :D

And that's what I tried to do, but oddly enough there were two textures for the hair, and they were only for certain parts of the hair. I mean, if I assigned one of them, only part of the hair was visible, and so happened with the other. So I dunno...?

And yes, I've got a mesh file. As Trapping had already converted a male hair, I asked her for permission and she allowed me to use her mesh file. :)

What leads me to a question: when I use another person's mesh package if I only change the name it won't overwrite, right? Or will I have to change something inside the package so the game will recognized as a different mesh?

[le_plat_du_jour]

Ehm.. what do the two textures look like? If you merge them, will they overlap? If not, you should make one image out of them. I've done that before, but then the mesh itself also consisted of two parts.. Did yours?

It's not necessary to use someone else's mesh, and they will overwrite if you do. What you should do is in SimPE choose Tools > PJSE > Body Mesh Tool > Extracting stage then browse and select any male hair recolor. Then delete everything but the adult files, so you'll be left with 4 parts, a GMDC, GMND, SHPE and CRES. Then choose Tools > Object Tools > Fix Integrity and type something descriptive for Model name like "seelengeil_amHairShortWavyMessy-am", click on update and then OK. Now you'll have a new, unique mesh file. After that, right-click the GMDC, choose 'Replace...' and replace it with your exported hair.

[seelengeil]

Ehrm, I just opened the textures in Photoshop and they look like various groups of a TS2 hair, just like it would appear when you make a bodyshop project out of a hair, with many different textures, one for each group (three different textures):/ But the hair has just one group, so...? And I can't combine the textures because they will overlap :s

Ahh very easy, it seems! Fortunately you told me this before I did a very stupid thing XD

[le_plat_du_jour]

Pff, that's weird. Could you send me the texture files? I don't really know how to help without seeing them, and I'm sure it'll be fixable, somehow

[seelengeil]

You can download the .zip with the texture files here:

http://www.4shared.com/file/sfw2y8c8/ShortWavyMessyFiles4Marja.html

And yes, it makes sense. Actually, before your hair defaulting tutorial, I was scared of 3IDRs and such like "OMG if I touch it I'll screw it all up!" and limited myself to only minor Simpe-ing such as texture defaults, lol.

[le_plat_du_jour]

Fixed it! :P Just use the first texture, but in the 3D projection, right-click and put transparency on depth buffered with alpha reference. The other two textures are for the scalp, but I usually don't use any texture on that myself.
Your 'hair' group doesn't fit the face at the moment, so it's probably best to use the scalp, like in Yuxi's tutorial. And then rename your GEOM02 'hair_alpha5' and replace the comments with the comments on trapping's hair_alpha5. And assign your entire hair_alpha5 to the head bone.
I couldn't help but do all that quickly, so here is all that.
Oh, and I noticed the black inside of your mesh, which is fixable by choosing Face > Smooth All, but that I'm not sure if that's preferable. If the black part doesn't show up in bodyshop, you might as well leave it as-is.

[seelengeil]

OMG THANK YOU! \o/ You're a sweetheart! <3

Seriously, you're awesome in so many ways but I have to highlight how amazing you are as a teacher - I love how you explain everything you did even after fixing things up for me. I owe you so much!

This week I may have lots of spare time and I hope to put something up for grabs until the weekend.

[le_plat_du_jour]

I don't think it was proper teacher etiquette for me to do it instead of explaning you how to do it yourself, but I wasn't sure if just explaining it would make enough sense :) And don't worry, I'll think of something you can do for me :P

Just wondering, are you converting the hair for teens? That's not very difficult to do at all. Kids an toddler is more difficult (which is why I tend not to bother)

[seelengeil]

Anyway, I'm most thankful to you :) And I'll be more than happy to give you something in return :D

And well, I tried to put the mesh ingame accordingly to your instructions and although I had no doubts during the process, it doesn't show up in Bodyshop :(

If you want to take a look...it's here:

http://www.4shared.com/file/5ZHcCGb9/this_shit_doesnt_work.html

I'm so mad for screwing this up and totally upset for having to bother you once again :(

[le_plat_du_jour]

Don't worry hon, it never works the first time :) And you're not bothering me, so there. I checked the files in SimPE. and I can't really say what's wrong with them :/ Let me check in bodyshop, though...

[le_plat_du_jour]

Not sure if this makes it better or worse, but it is actually showing up for me just fine :/

See?

[seelengeil]

Now it works in my game! :D I don't know what I did for this to happen though. I just emptied my DLs folder leaving only the hair files, deleted the Groups.cache and the cigen.package and then it worked! \o/

Off to work on the teen mesh! :D

[le_plat_du_jour]

Oh great! I did notice it wasn't working for elders, though.. There was something weird with it's hairtone string, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, when converting to teens, I find it easiest to do this: First, import a teen mesh (in order to import the right skeleton). Then import your adult mesh. Select it's hair_alpha5 group (hide the rest) and in the Model tab, select 'Scale'. Set Scale options on 'Origin'. Put 0.94 for all three axis and hit scale.

That way you're immediately pretty close to fitting it. Delete the teen groups (except 'hair') and the adult 'hair' group. If the teen 'hair' group looks misshaped, use the Dr Pixel bases instead, like in Yuxi's tutorial.

[le_plat_du_jour]

Crap, no, don't replace the hair like that. Sorry, instead, open the correct texture are right-click the image itself and then use 'build dxt...' You have to have DDS utilities installed for that to work.

[seelengeil]

Right, I already have the DDS utilities. Which compression should I use? I'm never sure of which one to choose :/