Okay, I have MilkShape, Blender, 3DS Max, Photoshop, and all of the MTS programs, I'm just having a hard time learning all of the steps involved to do what I want to do. The tutorials are fine, don't get me wrong, I'm just not picking it up as quickly as I would like, so I'm basically asking to see if anyone with more CC experience wouldn't mind helping me out and showing me the ropes on a joint project.

So here's where I am: I want to implement a default replacement for the ghost hunter uniform. I have the mesh essentially finished. Right now, it is 5,752 triangles. I actually have no clue the limit for that. The jumpsuit mesh and the boots combine for 4,866 and the mesh for the proton pack is over a thousand triangles, but I'm getting off topic. I have the mesh unwrap and a rough texture, though I still have a lot of tweaking to do, especially on the pack, plus opening up the channels, etc, but I'm to the point where I've reached the limits of what I know how to do.



But I'm really new to MilkShape and Blender (I've been using Autodesk 3D Studio Max for the last six years) and I don't really have enough grasp on morphing to get this mesh into the game with any confidence that it will work with the sliders the way it should.

I do have other related mod ideas for this, namely I want to replace the Banshee Banisher with the Ghostbusters' Neutrona Wand, replace the ghost inventory object with a Ghost Trap, and to replace the paranormal investigation career track and related options with "Ghost Busting" but all of that is secondary to getting the morphs and everything else for this base mesh to work correctly.

If you can help with part of that, I would be more than welcome. If not, I guess just direct me to the best tutorials on TS3 morphs and texture channels.

Well, to be honest, no-one's really experienced with this stuff. There are lots of people who understand it perfectly in theory... You'll also probably find that everyone has so many damned ideas of their own that they don't have the time to work on their own projects, let alone someone else's - maybe not, you never know, but I'll give some info anyway so the thread doesn't just die.

I would suggest making this a regular non-default outfit to start with, since that will allow you to test it more easily. Once you've got it working, it's very easy to convert it into a default replacement.

The morphs are relatively simple too, just fiddly. I suggest using Cmar's tutorial in post #3 here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...239#post3113239 to get the basic idea: from there you should be able to apply the same methods to fat, fit and thin morphs.
The one thing you will have to do which will differ from that tutorial is this: because you've made a new mesh, and not an alteration of a game mesh, the vertex numbering will be wrong. You'll need to download this plugin: http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...613#post2864613 - follow the instructions there once you have your base mesh and all the morph meshes, as separate groups, in MS, and before you export and use BodyMorphMaker as in Cmar's tutorial. Note that the instructions in Wes' post talk about LOD0, but you don't need LOD0 for clothing, only LODs 1-3.
There is a specific value that you will need to put into the first starting value box: unfortunately I can't remember it, but someone else will, I'm sure.

As for channels: do you mean the different CASt channels, RGB masks and that general area? If so, there's little point in worrying about them if it's gong to be a default replacement for an occupation outfit, as they can't be CASted by normal means. If you want to make it CAStable anyway, or if you plan to do a non-default version too, I suggest this quick how-to, again for figuring out the principles: Sims 3:Basic Mask Editing^wiki.

Of course, if you have further questions/get stuck/it blows up, feel free to ask again. I hope you do find someone to help, but if not, then you'll still be able to get it working - with a little hair-pulling.

The starting vertex number you should use for a whole body mesh like this one is 5000. For the fat/fit/thin morphs you can find a game mesh with a similar general shape and use the morph meshes for that as a guide for making your own morph meshes as shown in my tutorial. You didn't mention bone assignments, but that's also an important element.

Whiterider's so right about most people not having time for their own ideas, let alone someone else's!

I can understand that. I have other art projects going on right now too, so I'm sympathetic.

Lol, maybe there should be a CC school where some of these over-worked creators use us noobs as free labor in exchange for extra help.

I really don't know anything at all about the bone assignments. I pulled this out from three different meshes with CTU and don't know a thing about the bone files for MilkShape, how to extract them, how to use them, or otherwise.

Dont want to discourage you but this is a huge project for a beginner.
The first thing you should do is check your existing mesh, has it still boneassignements?
If not, you better start over.

For beginners i strongly recommend TSRW.
Problem with sims3 meshes(GEOMS) is that EA made it impossible for us to combine diffrent parts from various meshes(and morphs)
Frenkensteining the base mesh isn't a problem but the moment you do the same with the morphs all goes wrong and altho the morphs aren't used by the game its data is, to change the basemesh its shape(fit/thin/fat and pregnant)

Making new morphs is very timeconsuming(unless you know someone who can create some Poser magnets ill be very intested!!) )
There is however a method to combine diffrent meshparts(morphs) to create a new outfit but its limited to frenkensteining 2 meshes.
You use a fullbodyoutfit for it with 2 meshgroups, in one you load one mesh(without any edits, except with deleted or moved vertices)
The 2nd group usually contains a few fingers wich can be easily copied for the morphdata, in that meshgroup you load all your custom parts
When done you duplicate that mesh 4 times and update each one to fit the morphs.

Might know a way on how to fix combined borked morphs but still have to test it out.

I love CTU as it is very user friendly but to pull this off i suggest you use TSRW(and its MS's WSO plugin) instead.
Extract all the meshes(morphs come with them) with TSRW and have a look at them in MS
In the mean time ill try to make a small tutorial on how to frenkenstein the morphs(if it works...)

I'm not actually a beginner, I'm just new to TS3 creation. I am an animator, but my experience to date is pipeline modeling and film. My specialty is mesh creation, but I do character animation as well. Depending on how well and how fast I pick this up, I may work out custom animations, but we'll see. Most of my projects never involve exporting out of program, since Max can pretty much handle everything internally, and then from that point I either render to video or email the Max file to the next link in the pipeline. But I'm trying to transition into game modeling, which is considerably more format-conscious than my video experience. An MPEG doesn't care how many polygons went into its render, after all, so a lot of my industry tricks simply are not applicable here. You can imagine how frustrating it is to know how to do absolutely each and every aspect of this in one program and have none of it matter in the slightest. The joys of platform incompatibility...

My biggest issue isn't knowing how to do the morphing or skinning so much as me not knowing the programs involved. I'm used to doing everything and anything within 3DSMax or Photoshop, so exporting and importing across several programs is a very new workflow for me. I understood going in that I would have to set the morphs manually, I'm just not clear on where to get the morph state meshes or how to do bone assignments.

For sake of comparison, my experience with morphing is more or less limited to setting morph targets in 3DSMax, wherein a duplicate of a mesh is made with exact vertex count and vertex numbering, which is then altered at the vertex level so that the original mesh can reference the changes in its geometry. This is one of the easiest ways I know to do facial expressions and lip-sync. If I understand the tutorials here correctly, the principle is much the same and there are only seven morph states for TS3 (male fit, male thin, male fat, female fit, female thin, female fat, and female pregnant), which is a fair amount of work, but I've done projects with over two dozen facial states and animated morph targets.

I have no clue how to do bone assignments because I have the hardest time navigating the forums without inevitably being redirected to the "Help" main page and have yet to find a tutorial explaining such. In Max, I tend to use Biped for skinning, which is at its core just going through a list of bone objects and weighting the vertices. If this system uses a similar concept, I'm fine. I just need to cover the basics on the programs involved. Right now, I have no clue where to get bone files or which program I'm supposed to use for skinning.

Morphing for sims is exactly as you describe. If you look at this tutorial (http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=397260), the third post shows how to make pregnant morph. All the other morphs work exactly the same. TSRW may be an easier process; I don't use it myself.

Bone assignments can be done in Milkshape using either the 'Fix underweighted bones' plugin in the Vertex menu or one of the tabs on the right (I forget which one) but Bloom is right that doing them from scratch will be a big project. There's no really good tutorial available at this time but I plan to add it to my dummies tutorial when I get time.

Doesn't have 3DSMAX a smd plugin and bonetools?
If so
-extract a GEOM with CTU -import it in Milkshape with Wes H his GEOM importer
-export it as smd (Half Life)
-Import it in 3DSMAX

Milkshape has a bonetool but i prefer Wes H his Unimesh bonetool(a part of his Unimesh sims 2 plugin for Milkshape)
Its a easy to use tool wich can handle the 4 boneweights per vertice used on sims 3 bodymeshes.

If you want to check how a mesh animates you be better of with CTU and the GEOM plugin, TSRW doesn't include the skeleton but only the boneweightdata.
Unfortunate both programs use a diffrent boneorder so meshes are not interchangeable...

When using CTU you need to extract the desired morphs manually from the gamefiles
I use Postal for it
-you write down the meshname(CTU)
-Copy the fullbuild0.package to a workfolder and open it with Postal
-slect show nMapNames from the menu
-hit the Nmap tab once so all is in alphabetical order
-search for the meshname
-export the lod1morphs in the hextab and change the format to simgeom(format used by Wes his GEOM importer)

In Milkshape you first import the basemesh, then the morphs

I actually have no idea. Typically the only files I need to import into 3DSMax are either images, .3ds files, or AutoCAD .dwg files. Beyond that, I simply haven't had much need to play with the import/export compatibility. Max does have bone tools, but it's more a question of whether that information is written in a way that Max can read it. I could skin this mesh in Biped in less than 2 hours, but there's just no guarantee that I could export the bone assignments back into MilkShape... And that assumes I have the same number of bones in my Biped.



See this is one of those things that 3DSMax handles internally. It never matters in Max the order of bones. Biped is designed so that the same skeleton and animation can be applied to other meshes and this looks to be the part I'm really going to come to hate. I have done work for Unreal, though that was a few years ago, so hopefully that comes back to me later.



I did read through that, and it's going to be really helpful, but you have one line:

...morph meshes cannot be opened in MilkShape by themselves; they must be loaded 'over' their corresponding base mesh so that the importer can use the base information and the morph information to calculate where the vertices should be....

but you don't explain exactly how to do that. You include the pregnant mesh, but you don't say where or how you got it, and since I need the other six morph states, I found BloomsBase's response on morphing to be a lot more useful for what I'm doing. Not being critical here, since the large majority of people that use that tutorial won't be completely rehashing a mesh like I did, but still, that extraction process might be helpful to other people.

Then again, since I have to extract the 3 male morphs and the 4 female morphs anyway, I may just upload the morph states for public use so no one else needs to worry about that.

I could have included this in the book I wrote above, but it just occurred to me. In any case, being separate will make it more visible.

I have Jonha's sliders installed to my game, and even if I didn't, I'd still want this mesh to be compatible, since so many people use it. So I'm assuming that I'm going to need to set morph targets for Jonha's stuff, or am I wrong? The other question I guess would be: If I don't set the morphs for the Jonha sliders, what will happen to this mesh in CAS with those sliders installed? Either the sliders will do nothing, which I imagine to be the best case scenario, or else the game will try to reference non-existent morph data and crash.


This is a non-related dumb question, but what program do I use to extract object meshes? I haven't used TSRW yet, but CTU seems to be limited to clothing meshes. I need to extract the Banshee Banisher object, as well as the Captured Ghost object, to make the needed replacement objects.

Here is some info on the smd plugin: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/3DS_Max
I dont know if it will work, you be the first.


About the morphs:
The morphs(GEOMS) themselves aren't used by the game only its data is.
When you have created the morphs you use them to build a Bgeo file.
The Bgeo file is used by the games fit/fat and thin sliders to change the shape of the basemesh.
Therefore basemesh and morphs must be 100% identical and their vertID's must match.

There are 2 types of sliders, sliders that work with the morphdata and sliders that work with the skeleton(joints/bone)
Jonha's sliders are bonesliders, they simply change the position of the joint and the shape will follow that movement
They also can be scaled or rotated.
You can use both sliders to change the shape of the mesh, they will not interfear.

You can use S3PE and TSRW for objects
sorry for not including every link to plugin or proggy but a simple search here on MTS2 will show them.

You're right about the tutorial not explaining how to extract the morph meshes - in that case the pregnant morph was made from scratch so it wasn't relevant, but I'll remember to do a complete file extraction explanation in a later lesson, assuming I ever get time to get back to it.

Finding and extracting meshes: Go to Program Files\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\GameData\Shared\Packages. (On a 64-bit system the path starts with Program Files (x86).) Copy FullBuild0.package to a work folder somewhere. Then open it using Postal or S3PE (package readers/editors). (In Postal, click Workspace and Show NMap Names before continuing.) Sort by resource long name. All the meshes start with the age and gender - am = adult male, tf = teen female, etc. Meshes are geom files; base mesh names end in _lod1, _lod2, etc. Morph meshes end in _fat, _thin, _fit, or _special. Skeleton files, if you want to get them too, end in Shape-morph-skin. In Postal, highlight the file you want, click the Hex View tab, and export. In s3pe, right-click the file you want and export.

Fullbuild0 has the base game meshes. You'll find the ones that came with patches in Deltabuild0, and for the expansions by looking in the folders for the expansions if you have them.

To load a morph mesh in Milkshape, load the base mesh first using Wes Howe's Sims 3 import plugin. (Something you may not understand is that if the skeleton file is not found, the plugin will use a default skeleton that almost always works fine for adults and teens at least.) Then import the morph mesh 'on top' of it. The import plugin will do the calculations to create a morphed mesh in a new group in Milkshape.

Wes Howe's sims 3 importer/exporter use the group comments to store information from the mesh file that has to be included when exporting a new mesh file. There's links to the skeleton, to textures, I think the bone list, and probably more stuff I don't have a clue about. The comments determine whether the exporter will export a base mesh or a morph mesh, as explained in the tutorial.

In your case you'll have to make new morphs, probably by duplicating the base mesh, changing the comments, and moving the vertices. I assume you were stuck on finding an example mesh from the game files.

BTW, there's a series of very nice tutorials on sims 3 meshing that start with the terminology and concepts here: http://www.customsims3.com/smf/index.php?board=20.0

As Bloom said, Jonha's and other custom body sliders use the bones, not meshes. As long as your new mesh has the proper bone assignments, you're good to go.

I've been wrapped up in other things and other projects and hadn't really been able to get very far. But a few more of my friends have TS3 now than in January so I'm going to give another shot at getting into CC and maybe modding.

At this point, I just need a decent tutorial on bone assignments. If anyone could recommend one, I'd be appreciative.

I still would like a collaborator if ever I can find one, preferably someone that's good at modding but needs a mesher. This Ghostbuster project is multi-faceted. The object side alone entails a lot: adding the proton pack, replacing the ghost vacuum with the natrona wand, adding ghost goggles, replacing the ghost scanner with a PKE meter, and replacing the trapped ghost object with a ghost trap. Also, for copyright reasons, I wanted to do each set in a Ghostbusters flavor and a generic form. From there, I wanted to look into maybe creating my own rabbit hole for ghostbusting and maybe moving the ghost stuff from the Science Center to the Paranormal Research Center

Good to know you haven't given up! I suggest parts 5 and 6 of this, for a theoretical overview of joints/bones: Tutorials:3D Meshing Index^wiki, and section 3.3.10 of this for a more practical (though not clothing-related) application: Tutorial:Sims 3 Hair Basics^wiki.

If your really thinking about reassigning the mesh then delete one half and assigne the other.
When done export that mesh, mirror the one in MS and rename the bones in the joint tab,
Save it as ms3d file and load that file in lithunwrap(keep MS open), flip the uvcoordinates, export as luv and import that luv back into MS.
Import back your first saved half and regroup both halves, finetune the uvmap and export again.
This will save you tons of work.

There is a handy plugin that autoassignes the other half when mirroring but its designed for sims2, so i doubt if it will work on sims3 meshes.