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Instructor
Original Poster
#1 Old 23rd Apr 2016 at 12:16 AM Last edited by Butterbot : 23rd Apr 2016 at 12:33 AM. Reason: Amended title.
How to adjust UV map?
I'm mapping a pair of pants in Milkshape. In TCE, the waist part (where the skin is mapped) does not seem to correspond to the normal way TS3 bottoms are unfolded. I've marked those places with arrows in the attached screenshot. The waist is split into two parts instead of being a continuous "strip" of faces, and there's are extra faces on the right-hand side which should have been attached to the left. It's kinda hard to explain--I hope this makes sense when looking at the screenshot. As a result, I can't map the waist skin exactly to the S3 UV template, causing some texture seaming in-game. How can this be fixed?

It's driving me nuts; any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Screenshots
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Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#2 Old 23rd Apr 2016 at 11:18 AM
When it comes to the sims 3, you're kind of free when it comes to UV mapping. Just as long as you delete the skin part/ ts3 body, that might be under your mesh, you're fine with wherever you place it. ( a lot of people seem to forget this, but this is due the fact that you'll have more space to place your UV map on, and lowering the polycount)

With 'kind of free' I meant, there are areas you should keep your UV maps on. There is this template I still use every time I have to UV map my creations:



**Note, For full body meshes, just use both Top and Bottom.

So as long as you edit the textures just the same way as your UV map, you're fine. So you don't need it to exactly look like the bottom of a sim ^-^ Mine are usually straight like this too, because I think it works easier when it comes to drawing the textures.
Instructor
Original Poster
#3 Old 23rd Apr 2016 at 7:41 PM
That template is great--I use it too!I know where to put the map for the pants' texture; my question is about mapping the thin strip of skin above the waistband (sorry if I didn't explain this correctly). It's the circled the area in the attached screenshot. I can't just delete that part of the body mesh since it's what connects to the torso (these pants are not high rise.)

Currently, there's a seam in-game on the left and right sides of the waist (see attached image.) I've already checked that the normals and vertices match, that the bone assignments are OK at the seams (using Mesh Toolkit), and ran Fix tangent. The seam only got a bit better when I mapped the waist strip more closely to the skin UV template, but it persists on either side of the waist.
Screenshots
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#4 Old 24th Apr 2016 at 9:53 AM
Oooh wait yes! I see. Yeah it looks like the UV map is overlapping the body. You should be able to move some vertexs with the selection tool and the move tool. But moving them all to the right dot is going to take a while though >-<
Milkshape isn't really the best program to uv map, but even doing this in Blender would have mean, you have to do the same progress of moving the vertexs on the dots.

What you can do, is adding a sims 3 body texture to it, Uv map the parts that shows the seams and keep editing that part until it's fine. I usually do this when my normal texture (Not the skin, but just the regular clothing texture) Looks fine in Photoshop, but not in Blender/milkshape.

If this problem is only in-game. Well, it could be CAS, because it's lighting is a bit different than the rest of the game. So it's good to test it in game as well. But it does looks like there are 2 skin parts here. I'm not sure if the fact that your pants has more faces than the regular sims 3 body would be the problem, but it could be the issue as well. But I would just start with adding the texture and keep editing the UV map.
Mad Poster
#5 Old 25th Apr 2016 at 3:12 PM
Green is skin and white is your mesh right? What I see is your own mesh being a bit higher than the green one, for the same part...if you'd lower your *stripe* (front and back) just a tad, you might get rid of the seam, that to me anyway, just looks like not corresponding..if that make sense?
I can clearly see it showing a line like that just because it is higher.

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Instructor
Original Poster
#6 Old 26th Apr 2016 at 6:02 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Greenplumbbob
If this problem is only in-game. Well, it could be CAS, because it's lighting is a bit different than the rest of the game. So it's good to test it in game as well. But it does looks like there are 2 skin parts here. I'm not sure if the fact that your pants has more faces than the regular sims 3 body would be the problem, but it could be the issue as well. But I would just start with adding the texture and keep editing the UV map.


The seam is not only in CAS. The mesh has more faces than usual probably because it's from TS4.

Anyway, after much fiddling as you suggested, I managed to make the seam barely noticeable, though not entirely gone. It's now mostly visible when zoomed up very close to the skin at certain angles, so I consider it at least a partial victory. I took Rosebine's advice too (thanks!) and lowered the skin strip a tiny bit on the map and it helped. As well, there were a couple of faces on each side of the waist that didn't flow well due to how the TS4 mesh's vertices had been moved to match the TS3 torso (the mesh surface had a shallow "dent" along the edge where the two faces joined.) I had noticed that at the very beginning of the project but hoped that it would not result in any visible problems, not wanting to change the mesh too much seeing this is the first time I've edited meshes in any significant way. Now that I know my way around a bit better, I deleted and recreated the faces, so that the mesh conforms more to the curve of the waist. Since these faces needed to be mapped anyway, I also remapped the "gap" between the waist skin strips and ran Model Cleaner so the vertices get welded.

I then regenerated the morphs with Mesh Toolkit, using as references the existing morph meshes where I've already fixed clipping geometry around the cuffs. Happily, that was good enough for the auto-generated morphs to not need further manual adjustment, so I didn't have to restart from scratch.

Thanks for taking the time to help this noob!
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