I am having a spot of trouble doing this. I can create a beard which is not recolor-able by starting with eyebrows and switching the part category, but this is not what I want to do, obviously.

However, when I start with a beard and try to replace relevant texture, not only does CTU cough up hairballs all over the mesh, the package doesn't show up in CAS. When I look at recolor-able beard packages around MTS, I see that they were made with TSR Workshop and contain a lot more files than CTU creates.

Is it not possible to create a beard with CTU or am I doing it wrong?

I wasn't aware that it was possible to create meshes beards at all, only flat ones - with the exception of Esme's charlatan beard, which is an accessory. D'you have some examples?

I wasn't attempting to create a mesh beard. I should have attached a picture of what I meant about CTU doing strange things to meshes. So I do that now--That's what CTU looks like when I try to "Add A New Blank Design" when using a beard as a base. When I tried to replace the diffuse texture with my edited one, nothing happened. Committing and saving resulted in a package with just that texture and a _KEY with very little information, or it will make one with one _IMG, a _KEY, and an _KXL with some inf. Neither worked in game.

I tried replacing all the textures with unedited extracted overlays and controls, along with my diffuse, but it still wouldn't work. When I examine beards made with TSR Workshop, they have quite a number of other parts to them, _XML and VPXY included. I've got no idea if those are actually needed for a custom non-default beard, I just know they work and CTU made beards don't...at least, they don't the way I did made one.

So, dunno if I did something or if CTU is doing something--I know CTU is doing that to the mesh in the 3d Preview.

TSRW reads from those xml files, CTU doesn't need them(not all of them)
Esmeralda prolly knows better but if you want to create a custom beard clone the elder full beard for it
You can not change category Type of the beards, it makes them non colorable. CTU also can not display the alpha edited layer, it will show the solid mesh layers

As Bloom says, the Elder fullbeard is the ONLY beard mesh you can clone from if you're trying to make a basegame compatible beard mesh, and even then, I've not been able to make it recolourable. There seems to be something weird about the base game beard CAS part in TS3. That's why I made my Unsavoury Charlatan beard as an accessory, which works fine but of course having to have a beard as an accessory is not ideal!

However, it seems possible to make proper beards if you have World Adventures or Late Night, and use either the Fu Manchu style moustache that comes with WA or the biker-style beard that comes with Late Night. I haven't had a chance to try it yet myself, but Sage was able to make a meshed beard successfully using both of those CAS parts - we were discussing it in another thread here a while back, and here is the finished product: http://s3sage.blogspot.com/2011/08/...s-ln-or-wa.html .

So give it a try if you have WA or LN and maybe you'll have better success!

Ah! I understand the problem. Interestingly, though, when I try to clone a beard in CTU, most of them throw an error on the Find a CAS Part tab. Can I ask which one you cloned?

Thanks for the advice. I wasn't trying a beard mesh though, just an overlay. For whatever reason, CTU wasn't working for me (perhaps I saved the files incorrectly)? I'm unsure, but as TSR's program worked to make the beard (I'll use CTU for as much as I can), I'm loath to beat my head against it too much : )

well, you can not use a overlay file and attache a mesh to it.(wich is prolly wat you did?)
You need the elder fullbeard

Using the WA or NL beards work just fine using TSRW, That's how I converted this one. http://omegassims3stuff.blogspot.co...d-wstubble.html

Sounds like the OP wasn't trying to make a meshed beard at all - they were referring to the normal face mesh in their first post.

Sorry, I missed this--I was trying to clone amBeardThin. I tried a few others and it did the same with all of them, so I gave up trying with CTU. It works fine for eyebrows though.

And yes, I was referring to the normal face mesh, which is perfectly functional for other items, just not beards.