Greetings.

I've tried a great number of things to solve this. But It would help to know what the problem is.

As you can see from the pics, the texture is all kinds of screws up. Is it normals? UV mapping? Something obvious my silly brain has yet to discover? I do not know. Perhaps there is a talented person here who would grace me with their smartedness....

I've uploaded the file as well. feel free to crack it open.

It looks like a combo of a few things. Normals for sure. Also do your textures have...textures?

Upon looking at your file, you don't have any actual texture on your multiplier. Which is probably the main reason it looks wonky. The main spots for normal problems are the pockets on the belt, once you fix those you should be good to go. How does it look in game? I've come across problems with dark shadows in CAS but once in game it looks fine. If you need help with textures just look for meshes from the game with belts and what not and use those, that's what I do, I hate making my one textures. Good job so far though, the only thing I would suggest is adding a backside to the belt parts, for when it isn't so skin tight.

Wow thanks for the quick reply!

Yes I didn't mess with the multiplier yet. I was going to try to solve the weird lighting distortions before I did that. I've tried "align normals" and "cats normal smoother" but I guess I could always reload the police outfit which I used as a base and use "normal data merge" on each vertex. But perhaps I will fix the multiplier first to ease the pain.

As far as a back for the belt,the thought occurred to me as well. I'm a little scared though as I would do a reverse vertex order on all the morphs simultaneously and scale it back. It seems to me that this may or may not cause a discrepancy in the vertex count among the morphs, which would cause me to drive my car off of a cliff.

Hmm. Oddly it did not occur to me to test in live mode...

Thank you so much for the emotional support and the advice!

Unfortunate the uvmap is kinda screwed up, prolly because you might have welded some vertices together

Ill try to explain.
A mesh often is divided in diffrent parts wich are uvmapped seperate from eachother in order to texture them correctly.
Like the sides of the gun, the back, the bottom etc.
Those parts ech have a spot on the uvmap

Those diffrent meshparts are divided by seams
On those seams the vertices are split
When welding those seams together the vertice uvcoordinates will snap together on the uvmap.
And that is wat happened.

When diffrent uvmapped parts cross eachother on the uvmap this will result in strange lightning shadow issues when in CAS.
Same thing happens when you duplicate meshparts and leave the uvcoordinates on the same spot as the original.
with sims 3 each part needs to have its own texture.

Hey bud!

I learned a long time ago never to weld anything in milk shape, so I can assure you that didn't happen. However, it occurred to me that my problems may have started after screwing around with the UV.

There are some rogue polys inside the holster that, of course, wind up on the UV map. Do you think that could be the cause?

Dont know wat might have caused it, just noticed the parts are crossing eachother on the map.
I may be wrong on the welding part, looks like the parts still can be repositioned without pulling other parts along.
Just try to give each part his space without interfearring with eachother.

To fix the shadow issues you have to remap most parts tho.
Like the sides of the gun are duplicates on the uvmap, wich causes this.