Hello

After a few days reading every tutorial i could find i made my first sim object (ever) and i chose to do a conversion from sims 2 to 3. In the next pic is the chair that i´m converting (from simparis):



(planning to convert the mirror when i figure out the chair)

Well, this is the conversion and i don´t know why it looks black!! on game i can change the color from the part that looks gold but i can´t modify the black part.








I have checked the alphamask on milshape and it´s ok. I have checked and modified every texture file but i can´t find the cause...



Any help?

Try opening de mesh with a 3d proggy and look on the uvmap if the parts are mapped properly.

Which game version do you have? I've never seen solid black objects in my own game (1.8.25) no matter how broken they were, but with one object that had an "unusual" material definition, WA users had it show up solid black. It was recolourable though and everything works except the initial view, so I'm not sure how that would compare to yours.

Did you do anything with the presets or modify the OBJD in some other way? Or is this supposed to have the same presets as the object you cloned it from? What did you clone it from?

Let´s see... i did the mapping stuff with the uvmapper, here´s the preview at the milkshape.



I have the lastest version 3.1.7., base game, wa and the stuff pack.

I cloned an armchair, they are similar in the basic. The only files i modify where the mload and modelload orwhatervertheyarenamed files and the textures files

I guess I´ll do everything again, i had to mess up at some point.

The only time I've seen something solid black like that is when there has been a problem with the alpha. If you've got the alpha wrong the game doesn't know you want the black part of the IMG to be recolorable and so it comes into the game unrecolorable and taking the black of the IMG. I know that sometimes editor programs like PS and PSP (and also GIMP I think) have, at times, removed the alpha without the creator being aware of that.

Before going to the effort of re-doing it I would export any IMG's that are supposed to have alphas and make sure the alphas are still in place and the correct color. Which chair was it that you cloned?

Well, to confuse the matter further ( ), I'll add that the only time I ever had an object come out with a black part was on my very first attempts, last autumn, when there was just the base game, one single meshing tutorial, and we were barely discovering how to mesh for sims 3. (I also got the black ball of doom at some point with the same object).
It was a painting, and for some reason the frame (which I didn't even touch since I changed only the canvas image) would come up pitch black, but on half of my attempts it was still recolorable anyway. I never posted about it at the time so I have no idea why it came out that way, and a second painting I made with the same tools and the same clone came out perfectly right.

I know I'm not helping, but I've always wondered about that.

I cloned the chairlivingfranceversion from world adventures. The alpha is ok i just checked it again.

I think i´m going to put that black-gold chair at the museum i´m creating for Riverview

Hazuitokage, i use milkshape, uvmapper, s3pe, s30c, s3objtool... i guess that i don´t forget any...

Is there a difference if you use MilkShape's built-in UV editor instead of UV Mapper?

ielena, when you apply the alpha to your object in Milkshape is the entire part that you want to be recolorable disappearing? Are you intending for the gold part to be recolorable or not? If not, then that part should be the only part visible in Milkshape when you apply the alpha to it. Is that what's happening?

HT, the issue you describe with the painting you made is exactly what happened the first time I made one. The reason the painting was black and unrecolorable was because your editing tool had removed the alpha from your IMG. You can check that in Milkshape by applying the IMG to your painting as a Material. The entire frame, the recolorable part, should disappear while the painting picture should remain visible. That lets you know the alpha is in place and is where you want it to be.

I had that exact same thing happen and when LC told me about the alpha, I looked at my IMG and the alpha was gone even though I hadn't done anything to remove it that I know of...PSP just sometimes removes them if I open the IMG and try to change it. I've had the same issue trying to change Speculars...sometimes PSP just removes the alpha and then I have to go back and replace it using a different editing tool.

This other thing which happened, that your painting was solid black but still recolorable, sounds different though. I wonder if that was a cache issue.

ETA: I've cloned this chair and looked at its IMG's and I can't find one that has an alpha on it that should be causing your problem.

What process are you using to get the gold decorative piece onto the IMG?

I thought this chair had two recolorable parts and a built-in alpha for the decorative part but it seems not to so the issue I described above isn't the problem.

I just had a thought. Your multiplier. If that's black, It will cause your object to be black. Check that and make sure it's not.

Let´s see, the part in the chair that looks gold is recolorable and is the same recolarebla area than the legs as you can see in the mapping stuff (don´t know how to call it). I can recolor the gold part but the others area that should recolor with it don´t.

Dj Music, excuse me, english is not my natural language and reading techinical stuff make it a little harder. What´s the multiplier?

The mutliplier is what gives the object it's texture. If you want your object to say, always have a shaded line somewhere, no matter what pattern is applied, you use the Multiplier to do that.
But if the problem is that it won't recolour, than that's a different issue, and as OM said, It's possibly to do with the Alpha.

ielena, if you post the package file I'll take a look at at it and see if I can help.

lol BabaYaga...I was just about to post the same thing

Please don´t laugh at me... much...
You just don´t expect your first time to be perfect.

Looking at your multiplier image, everything except the chair carving detail is black. The multiplier image is kind of overlaid on top of the other pattern in the game, making parts of darker and lighter to make it look like it has more three-dimensional detail than it does. So in the game the black part is overlaid on top of your patterns and that is what is making everything but the carved gold detail show up black.

Try making the parts that are black be something more like 50% grey. I can show you in more detail what I mean if you need me to, but I'm on my way out the door right now, so it would be a couple of hours...

Edit-- oh, and you have way too many joints in your mesh. I think you need to re-clone/ re-export your meshes.

Ielena you will probably have to change the Specular also since it looks like you used the same IMG for both Specular and greyscale map.

And BY, if you look at the original WA chair that this was cloned from it has 12 joints. The chair ielena made also has 12 joints. I think it might be the case that if you wanted to cut down on the joints in this object you'd probably have to clone a different object.

What I'm wondering about is the vertex and face count for this chair. It has a vert count of 2996 and a face count of 2014 which seems a little high for a dining chair IMO. The original Sims 3 chair it was cloned on has a vert count of 788 and a face count of 1068.

I guess much of the problem is the original mesh the chair was made from which has a vert count of 2693 and a face count of 1924. Still I think some of the extra numbers come from the EA Sims 3 shadow which has a vert count of 80 and a face count of 90 for some odd reason...it seems you ought to be able to make a passable shadow without all that.

Anyway, the chair is cute and perhaps Sims 3 can tolerate numbers like this better than Sims 2 could. Still, if I posted this chair somewhere I would let people know it's pretty high poly. The mesh was high poly for Sims 2 and it still is for Sims 3 if used as-is.

Oops, I should have also said... Ielena...in order to change your greyscale IMG (also known as the multiplier for some reason which I don't know) and the specular (which is the one that looks like the greyscale but is brighter and whiter) take a look at an EA greyscale and specular and use those as an example of how you want yours to look.

The lightness of the grey on the greyscale IMG is going to tell the game how light your object appears in the game (so if it's solid black your object will be black). If you kind of borrow the range of greys that are on an EA object's greyscale IMG it can help you judge how to get the greys on your map so they appear correctly in-game. The same is true for the Specular IMG...the brightness on an EA spec can help determine how bright you want your object's specular to be.

And no one's gonna laugh at you...don't worry about it.

Oops, sorry, my mistake on the joints then. I hadn't encountered that phenomenon, how odd.

BabaYaga, orangemittens, thanks a lot, now i will try to figure out what you said first... and second... i will fix my chair i´ll upload it again for you to see it.