Solved/redundant problem with polys and coloring

[bakafox]

I made a new post about this in the workshop section, because I fixed most of what the problem was here, and then ran into the brick wall again ^^;

Well, I'm working on another project alongside the painting- I'm turning one of my meatspace metal sculptures into a wall sculpture for Sims! But...I have NO idea how on earth I can keep the poly count low enough.

I'm using Blender, and I *did* do the modification "Decimate" and that chopped things down quite a lot at first- but then I had to add a few more bits and extrude it for it to look 'real'.... and now it's up to a total of about 14,000 and I can't Decimate it again, it says it is now a "Non Manifold Mesh" so the option won't work.

I tried deleting edges by hand, but it took away the 'skin' of the object, so I'm at a complete loss as to what on earth might be another option =( I am including an .obj file export of it in case anyone needs/wants to check it out and tell me how to fix my project's insane poly problem. I tried taking screenies too, but for some reason at this moment my clipboard seems to not be working for screencaps.

And there's ANOTHER question/issue as well. (I might just be trying to run before I can walk here, really) I am trying to make this object have two recolorable fields. I tried following Numenor's tutorial, but it was written with an old version of SimPE, and I couldn't find any model names that seemed to need changing or even be changeable.

I cloned the propeller wall sculpture (from Pets I think) which has 2 zones/models for coloring, body and tips, and I imported the new objects for those, and also when I cloned I cloned all the color schemes- but when I tested it in my game a few minutes ago, all there was was one default color for both segments, and I couldn't choose the other texture schemes either from catalog or when it was on the wall. I'm including the package file along with the other things in the .rar file. I have NOT done anything with the shadows yet either- I was trying to work with those on another project and I can't figure them out at all... but I do still have the old maxis propeller shadows in the package.

I also still haven't checked the object for base gamecompatability- I have all the expansions.

[HystericalParoxysm]

Okay. Well, I took a look at your object, and tbh, when you're creating it, you're putting FAR too much detail into it. For example, there's an "orb" type shape up at the top which is over 1200 polys just on its own, and, though it's a wall hanging, is highly detailed both on the front side and the back side. There's a "doughnut" shape about halfway down which is similar - WAY more detail than is required.

The whole shape looks like you extruded it twice so that it's got two columns of polys along the side. You only need it extruded once, to whatever thickness you need it to be. That whole extra strip of polys all along the side adds quite a bunch.

Same with the "posts" in back which I assume are for mounting it to the wall - they're cylinders but they need to only be one stack high, not the 8 or so you have them, and they only need a max of 8 slices, not the 12 or 16 they are now.

It's not so much that you need Blender to reduce your polys for you, but that you're over-modeling your shapes. I know you want it to look nice, and especially if you've made it IRL you have an idea of how you want it to look, but you're putting WAY too much detail in for a TS2 mesh.

IMO, I think it would be better to start over with a simplified version - you can still do the overall shape, but don't try to model every bump, lump, and divot. I've got a tiptorial under my profile on how to do low-poly modeling that you may find helpful, just to get you in the habit of low poly modeling.

Or even easier, since it's basically just a flat shape with very little thickness... just do it as a flat "painting" type thing. Pixelhate here on MTS has a wall mask mesh that can be recoloured to any shape you want by changing the alpha. That is probably the easiest option (as well as a likely one to get it downloaded - most people nowadays try to keep their custom content to a minimum, and a recolour of a mesh they probably already have is more likely to be used than an exotic, high poly new mesh of something they may only use once).

BTW, if you cloned a Pets object it definitely won't be BG compatible - and even just cloning a BG object won't give you automatic base game compatability. I think Numenor has some info on it - you'll need to clone from base game, with all other EPs unchecked in your SimPE file table.

[bakafox]

Thank you. I'll try to sort out how to simplify today and redo it.