I have made a new hair mesh, and I have it for adults, but I don't know how to make it available for teens, children, and toddlers. Can someone help me or lead me to a tutorial so that I can do this?

Also, when I was making my mesh in SimPe, I didn't make it for Young Adults or Elder, so is there an easy way to go back and make it for Young Adults and Elders in SimPe?

1) You can link your mesh in to the other ages of the hair recolor file that you had made (for young adult and elder) Same procedure as for the adult

2) You make new meshes for each age, and then link them in appropriately to your recolor file (which hopefully was of an all-age hair)

info is among these articles:
http://www.modthesims2.com/article.php?t=139819

In very short -
gather the parts for a teen hair mesh with the same number of groups in the mesh, make the mesh, fix integrity, link it to the teen hair ref
import your teen mesh with unimesh
now import your adult mesh
replace parts of the teen mesh with your adult parts, scaling and moving them as necessary, in the end you must have the same groups and comments as the teen mesh originally had

Which tutorials have you done here? You posted this message in the skinning area, I moved it to meshing.

I used Dr. Pixel's tutorial. Are you saying that I have the remake the entire hair mesh for each age: toddler, child, and teen?

You said: You make new meshes for each age, and then link them in appropriately to your recolor file (which hopefully was of an all-age hair

How can I tell if it is an all-age hair?

In short, yes - the teen, child, and toddler each must have it's own complete set of mesh files.

Fortunately the Adult, Young Adult, and Elder can all share the same mesh.

Actually, unless you have altered the BodyShop hair color files, all the Maxis haircolors will be "all ages". But in many cases they are not all the same hairstyle, which can make converting a hair mesh for other ages into a tricky thing.

In many cases, the teen hairstyle is the same as the adult, and in some cases the child is the same too - but the toddler never is, so that is the most difficult one to convert.

For this reason, I would recommend doing the teen's hair first. Then after you get that working, try the child's. Save the toddler's for last, so you will have some experience by the time you get to it.

Dr. Pixel, I was following your tutorial on Converting Hair Meshes for Different Ages. I made the teen mesh up in SimPe, and I now have it in Milkshape. You said in the tutorial:

" I don't want to repeat all the editing again, so next I open my final version of the adult's mesh in MilkShape. I delete the "hair" group, which in the case of this mesh is simply the top of the Sim's head. I also rename each of the remaining groups by simply adding an "a" to the beginning of the name .Then I export this as a wavefront .obj file Why did i delete the "hair" group? Because I am going to keep the original "hair" group of the other meshes to avoid tricky alignment problems. The "hair" group MUST be aligned EXACTLY as Maxis has it, or there will be problems with the mesh. Slight mis-alignments of the other groups won't hurt anything".

Well, my mesh has only the "hair group" and no other groups, so what do I do? I'm sure I'm not supposed to delete that. This mesh has nothing but the "hair group", so where do I go from there?

If you have only a "hair" group no you don't want to delete it.

But you will have to make the adult version of the mesh fit up exactly to the edges of the teen's "hair" group.

Using the example faces posted here can be very helpful for that, and also the "extended manual edit" tool.

Then once you are sure it is perfectly aligned, you can delete the original teen's "hair" group and the example face mesh, and you should be all set.

So I need to download a teen face?

You don't have to have it, but it will make it much easier.

They are posted here:
http://www.modthesims2.com/article.php?t=135300

With the new mesh I am making that originally came from a Maxis mesh, I am recoloring and retexuring my mesh. The thing is is that I want to recolor and retexture, do I have to select each hair part and recolor and retexture, or can I just paste the color and texture on the photo?

For Example:

This is the bmp image that I am recoloring and retexturing:







This is the bmp image of the color and texture I want to apply to it:





Can I just paste the entire image over the original Maxis image to recolor and retexture it, or do I have to select the different hair sections (somehow) and then paste the recolor and retexture over each piece? I don't know how to select each piece seperately. I am asking because I plan on uploading a new hair mesh soon, and someone may want to recolor/retexture the scalp hair a different color/texture from the other sections (besides the scalp) of the hair, and if I do it like in the second image, they couldn't do that, I don't think.

There is a very good tutorial here:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=148742

It explains all about recoloring hair. It is using a regular Maxis hair mesh, but it is exactly the same when you are doing your own new mesh.

Easier, actually, because you already know where you have uv_mapped all the parts.

No, that tutorial didn't help me at all. I've seen that already. I am talking about applying a texture to it. I know how to recolor. I was asking about applying a new texture to it. The 2nd photo above is how the bmp photo looks after I applied the recolor and retexture. The separate hair pieces are no longer visible like in the 1st photo. I do not know how to select each hair piece so that I could apply the recolor and retexture to each one, so I just applied it to the entire photo, and now the pieces are no longer visible in the photo.
What if I wanted to recolor one piece brown, and then another piece blonde. That is no longer an option in the 2nd photo, so I'm asking is there a way to select each piece to retexture?

Rainncandy, whatever separate pieces of hair you have are going to pull the textures from the individual areas on that part of the graphic. You have got to make that connection in your head yourself, because ALL hair is done the same way.

The stupid, you don't need to understand anything, answer is that you can just replace all the graphics with your new graphic (as it has no details) and the sections will all use that graphic. If you do want more detail, then you need to use the UVMAP for the hair you created.

I'm going to assume you're using Unimesh. If you don't know what the uvmap is, then you didn't do all the unimesh tutorials as is suggested repeatedly before tackling hair. Your answers are in the unimesh tutorials, and if you do tutorial #2 and you actually _understand_ the hair recoloring tutorial, then you'll know what you need to do next. If you altered the hair mesh and didn't check the uvmapping afterwards, then it's likely going to be stretched and you should fix it.

Now, if you happen to not be using Unimesh, then you need to learn about uvmapping in the program you're working with, but the answer is still the same.

It seems that you are working on this hair as your first complete project. There are four Unimesh tutorials (3 body, and then 1 hair) and I strongly suggest you do them as written, and then come back to this. I know none of the projects are necessarily _that_ exciting, but they all focus on teaching different aspects of bodyshop meshing, most of which you will need in order to properly get a hair working in the game, and get your new textures on it, etc. If there was a quicker and more effective way to transmit all the information, believe me, we'd use it. There are just _so many_ complexities to meshing boned/animated meshes, that it takes time to cover it all.

Last edited by tiggerypum : 16th Nov 2006 at 4:13 PM.