I'm having a problem with some meshes adding a bit of manly bulge to the male brief underwear and swimsuits. There's a seam along the inner left thigh that appears to be a mismatch of the muscle definition bumpmap. It's also present in all the penis meshes, but I can't post those pics. Basically it seems to show up in any altered male nude bottom when muscle definition is applied.



I didn't touch the area where this seam is appearing, so I'm really stumped as to what's causing it. Does anyone have any ideas?

yes, it is a bumpmap issue
I know TSRW struggles with it since those muscle sliders came out.....
Always thought Wes his plugins were better than the ones from TSRW, but both seem to give the same issues.
It is one of the reasons i dont do CAS stuff for the last year

You're right; when I import and export the nude bottom to/from Milkshape with no changes, I get the same seam. Looking at the file data, the tangents are all different. I already have a program to copy normals from one mesh to another; I'll add a tangents copy to put the original tangents in the modified mesh, and see what happens.

Hope you get it fixed, TSRW(dont know about CTU) also has this with the tops(well, every mesh were the nude skin shows....)
I always thought the normals got flipped or something like that.

Success! Looks like the tangents are indeed the problem - when I copied tangents from the original EA mesh that fixed the seam. Works for the penis mesh too.



The tool I used can copy the tangents from an EA mesh based on the sequential order of vertices in the mesh or on the vertex ID - it needs to match up the vertices in the meshes and I've set up those two methods. I guess I could also copy based on the vertex location. However, if you've taken an EA mesh, added or removed verts, moved verts, and renumbered, it's not going to be able to copy everything correctly. You might be able to copy based on location and it would get most of the verts at least.

I'm going to post this in the meshing forum and see if Wes can look into it and hopefully change the import/export functions.