Is there any tutorial that tells how to get custom mesh example like ears, or tail, or earrings to work? I know how to mesh which I do with 3dmax but if I start doing cc stuff for the sims 3 like those accessorie stuff, what is the method to acomplish this from start to end?

For this I'd be using of course milkshape, CTU and all the ones noted that what is needed for cc creations in the tutorials of this site. But I thought first doing the mesh by 3dmax and importing it to milkshape. If that's possible.

There's no specific tutorial that I'm aware of for making custom accessories; but it really doesn't differ much from making clothing, so I suggest you follow this tutorial, with some caveats.

3DS caveats:
You will need to use either Milkshape or Blender, because they are the only two meshing programs which support the TS3 simgeom format. This is important for exporting your mesh, obviously, but also for importing. You must start by importing a game mesh in order to load the sim skeleton - if you just start from scratch, in Milkshape or in 3DS, there will be no skeleton and your accessory will either float nowhere near the right bit of the sim, or crash the game.

What you can do is start your accessory mesh from scratch in 3DS, then once you're done save it as a format supported by Milkshape. You can then import both your accessory mesh and an EA mesh (it makes no difference which one - it can be an accessory, a dress, shoes, whatever). This will leave you with your accessory, which won't be assigned to any part of the skeleton, plus the EA mesh and the skeleton the EA mesh brought with it. You can then assign your accessory mesh to the appropriate part of the skeleton, and then delete the EA mesh leaving just your mesh and the skeleton.

This won't work if you decide to do something more complex like clothes, since assigning skeleton bones to a custom clothes mesh manually could take weeks. If you need any help with the actual assigning of the mesh to the skeleton, do say - it's hard to gauge your experience level from this post, so I don't know whether you'd need the step-by-step idiot's guide, or just a shove in the right direction. Either way, I suggest you download wes' UniMesh plugins for Milkshape, as they're incredibly useful, and one of them is a very neat and intuitive UI for doing bone assignments.

Accessory caveats:
Lucky you! Most accessories don't need morphs, so you can probably ignore that section of the tutorial linked above. Since morphs aren't an issue, you can also ignore the adding/removing vertices section. Of course, this isn't true for all accessories - but, for example, earrings and head/face accessories usually don't need morphs, as the only part of the head/face which is affected by fat/fit/thin sliders is the cheeks. Doing a tail would probably require morphs if you want to do it properly.

Clothing only uses lod1, 2 and 3 meshes: accessories also use lod0, which is higher quality than lod1. I usually just use the same mesh for lod0 and lod1.

Even if I'm experienced user of 3dmax, there's alot stuff I still dont know well or at all. And with the sims thing I feel total noob so I dont mind at all getting somekind of step-by-step idiot's guide. AT least I will learn and in the end succeed making what I really wanted

Anyhow I'll be asking more of stuff when I get something done. But at the moment I wish to know couple of things like:
- What are these lod0. lod1 so on, ? I heard them been used with hair meshes but I'm not sure what is it exactly.
- And about Morphs, I heard of it too but still not really sure what that is exactly.
- Then lastly, when I make accessories like collars, necklaces, bracelets and something that's attached example on chest, I do need to use morphs on them right? How? By going trough the tutorial that teaches how to make bregnant morphs?

The LODs are (literally) Levels Of Detail. Sims 3 is a low poly game, and it uses only triangular faces: the average full body mesh is around 3000-4000 faces at high detail, and most accessories don't need to be more than a few hundred polys (unless you're being creative with the concept of "accessory", such as in the case of cmo's Puma shoes, which he made as accessories to get around EA's terrible rendering of shoe textures). Because of the open neighbourhood system in TS3, when you zoom out you can end up rendering several hundred sims and objects - the game renders them fully even if you can barely see them. While 3000 polys for a body mesh looks good up close, if the game starts trying to render 3000x20 faces, plus hairs, objects, world... computers with less than awesome graphics capabilities would just lay down and die.

To avoid this, every mesh has a high detail (lod1) version, which is used when the camera is zoomed in; a medium detail (lod2) version, which is used when the camera is further out; and a low detail (lod3) version which is used when the camera is zoomed way out. The lod3 generally looks awful close to, but don't worry about that - it's not meant to be viewed from close up, so it just has to vaguely resemble the overall shape, and be recognisable if you squint. Hairs and accessories also have a very high detail version, the lod0. lod3s, and usually lod2s, should generally be in the hundreds of faces, not the thousands - when doing accessories I often skip over the lod3, since by the time you've zoomed out far enough for the lod3 to kick in, you can't see the sim's earrings or watch or whatever anyway.

If you use Milkshape, you can play around with the the DirectX Mesh Tools (Tools menu) to automatically reduce the mesh quality - just remember to save first. You'll also have to realign the normals once you've used DirectX Tools.


When you use the body sliders in CAS to make your sim fat, fit, or thin - or when a sim gets pregnant - the shape of their clothing mesh changes gradually. In The Sims 2, you had one regular mesh and one fat mesh, and the sim would just switch instantly between the two. In TS3 you instead have morph data, which tells the game how the mesh should change shape to accommodate fat sims. If you prefer to think of it graphically (which I do), then I hope this will help:

When you make a CAS mesh, you make the mesh to fit a normal sim - that is, 50% fat/fit, 0% muscles, 0% pregnant. When you make a morph, you make another mesh, which is how you want the mesh to look on a 100% fat sim. This mesh isn't actually used - it's just a visual aid to help the mesher, because our brains deal better with seeing shapes than figuring out complicated numbers.
Every vertex in the original mesh has a number, let's say from 1-4000: in the fat mesh, the same vertices have to have the same numbers. Now let's focus on vertex #378, which is in the middle of the belly (it could be, anyway): we know its position on the regular mesh, and we know its position on the fat mesh - several inches further forward. We can import both of those meshes into MorphMaker, and it will take the two positions of vertex #378, and figure out the direction and distance that it has to move to get from its regular position to its fat position, then it will save that information. When you then go into the game and make your sim fat, the game will move that vertex according to the direction and distance saved in the morph info. If you make your sim 50% fat (or 75% fat/fit), then the game will move vertex #378 halfway to the fat position - and when it does this to all the vertices, you end up with a somewhat pudgy CAS mesh.

Bracelets shouldn't need morphs, since the wrists aren't affected much by body sliders. Chest or neck accessories will need morphs. There's actually another thread in this forum just now, by Anubis360, talking about making morphs for accessories - I suggest you go through the adding pregnant morphs tutorial first, or at least skim through it, and then read that thread, as it contains some useful info which won't make sense unless you've attempted the tutorial .


There's an excellent tutorial about doing bone assignments (actually it's an excellent tutorial about something completely different which includes an excellent section on bone assignments)... but it's not the one I thought it was, and I can't remember where I've seen it now :/ I'll keep looking, maybe someone else will remember in the meantime, or suggest something else.

You'll also have to realign the normals once you've used DirectX Tools.

And redo bone assignments.

To avoid creating a new similar thread, I've got some questions about accessories and facial hair.

I myself am more programmer than designer but I have experience with 3d software.
The problem is - while reading the forums, it seems there are more than one way to create accessories, and each of them has its benefits and drawbacks, and maybe even something is impossible if I choose the inappropriate methods or tools.
So, let's say, I want to create some old, professor-style guy for some in-game movie (machinima). I already have the idea, how I would like him to look like (I have made something similar with Sims 2, but there are some things I miss in Sims 3 to make it work.

So this is my to-do list:

-new glasses (could take existing and play with vertices a bit);

-a beard. It's a shame - Sims 3 does not have those big beards that Sims 2 had;

-texture for his face. I just cannot make Sims look old enough, I need more wrinkles and a bit more natural looking skin. Also the problem is that elder people automatically have crooked backs. I need a pretty strong and still standing-straight, but old professor. So It seems, I'll need to use normal adult with some elder texture on his face.

My questions are:
1.What should I use for my tasks? CTU+tools or TSR Workshop? (I prefer something, which can be used for all these tasks to avoid switching between CTU/TSRW too much).

2.Is it now safe to add some new vertices to glasses and beards, if I need more smooth look?

3.Which are the most up-to-date tutorials? I know that things change fast, some bugs in tools are fixed long ago. It would be waste of time to read some tutorial which contains workarounds for bugs which are fixed long ago or which is using some complicated tools when there are already better tools to do things easier.

4.Is the bug with sunglasses fixed in both CTU and TSR or do I need some special tool to fix problems? I mean, can I safely reshape glasses and still be assured that the glass part will not disappear from the frame?

5.I would like to use some other software to do meshing, Milkshape has some quirks which are hard to get used to. Is Blender exporters/importers of Sims3 files good enough for glasses, beards, clothes?
I wonder when we'll have exporters/importers for other free 3d programs which I consider have a bit better workflow than Milkshape.
After all, we have a bunch of free tools to choose form:
Wings3d, k3d, ArtOfIllusion, GMax (old but still good), XSI ModTool (really good, I know that Ogre3d, Unity3d, XNA and Valve have custom exporters for XSI ModTool).