No, it's not what it sounds like.

I've downloaded these lovely shirts from Bunhead, but unfortunately the chest (skin) area is mapped to the shoulder. This wouldn't be too bad - a bit of flat skin, noticeable lack of neck and chest detail - except that on my default skins, there is a whopping great divide right down the middle of that area, between the detailed, shiny shoulder texture and the flat, dull background texture.

I've remapped the offending area, and it works fine, however; the textures have the whole chest area white on the alpha. I really don't want to have to edit every single texture to get this fix looking right, especially as I'd like to be able to redistribute the mesh fix.

But there is hope! The skin parts of the mesh are a separate group, with a separate texture. Replacing the texture for that group with a blank (transparent) texture fixes the problem - but again, that means I have to edit every single recolour file to replace the redundant texture with a blank image.

So what I'm wondering is, is there a way that I could edit the mesh file to force it to use a specified texture for that group - one that would be part of the mesh file - instead of allowing it to look for a texture in the recolour files?

Hope I've made some sense, and I hope even more that there is an answer .

You might try making it a separate group, it works in objects, not sure about skins but technically they work the same way. Regroup the area, rename it, open the mesh file and add the group to the gmnd and the shpe. I was just trying to do this with an object and I was having trouble getting it recolorable, but I did manage to get it to map separately. Include the new txtr and the mmat and the txmt in the mesh file.

Well, the group is already mapped separately. All of the recolour files contain a texture for the clothing group, and one for the skin group - I want to override the latter with a texture contained in the actual mesh file itself.

Well, best I've got is break the original linking to the skin group and make a new one linking to one in the mesh. I think it's doable. If you can't get it to work, post it up and I'll look at it.

That's what I'd like to do, I just don't know how . The downside of having an automatic tool that does things for you... you never know how to undo them afterwards.

Well, find the original unimesh tutorials and follow it backwards. Or find the recolorable subset tutorial and sidestep a few of the steps. I kinda know what you need to do, but without seeing the package I can't really give you good directions, one of those situations, ya know? I'd definitely suggest trying the unimesh tutorial backwards first, or take it forwards and create your new skin recolor and then try to link it to that recolor instead. Something should work.

I did have a go at doing Unimesh backwards - but the Unimesh tutorials involve editing the recolour files to link them to the mesh, when what I'm hoping to do is edit the mesh file to override that link, which isn't covered. I can attach the files if that will help make sense of things, once my game isn't running and I can load SimPE without getting hit by a bajillionty errors.

Well, technically, you can't actually edit the mesh file to do anything, but what I think you can do is link the skin area group to a new recolor, leaving the rest of the outfit alone, and then just include that skin area recolor resources in the mesh package. Or maybe check in the shape and see that that group is set to SimSkin, the thing that head groups on hair is set to. That might work too.

Ahh, now that makes sense. I will try that.