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Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
Original Poster
#1 Old 8th Jan 2018 at 9:29 PM
Default Replacement mesh not showing up
Hi all!

Yep, even I have questions about things! So I've been working on a mod that basically replaces the butterflies in-game with a more accurate texture and mesh so they don't look like cigars with wings, and... just because some of the butterflies (at least I thought they were) were just utterly unrealistic and maybe a bit ugly too. Anyways, I managed to replace the textures, all that's working fine, but the mesh won't change to the one I made. I check the butterfly's (and the insect package too that S3OC generated, although both of them seem to use both the same VXPY files and everything linked with that, except for the OBJK/OBJD files)

Anyways, I also noticed that I wasn't able to find the actual fireflies mesh that came with Showtime, which makes me wonder, are they actually in the deltabuild/fullbuild packages? (That including the \The Sims 3\GameData\Shared\DeltaPackages deltabuild packages).

So my question is, do some (most?) visual effect that have meshes included with them, stored somewhere else? or some sort of data thing that links it all together, because what the package is telling me isn't really helping me out on figuring out why the MODL is still showing the old one.
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Scholar
#2 Old 15th Jan 2018 at 3:42 PM
Man no one has answered yet. I don't know anything about meshing as of now. A long time ago I saw a mod for fairy wing replacement http://modthesims.info/d/526872 Maybe your mod is similar to this? Since it has both visual effect and mesh? There's also this mod http://modthesims.info/d/531744 which is like that.
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
Original Poster
#3 Old 27th Jan 2018 at 6:18 PM
Thanks! I'll look into it! Although through my searches I got to something kinda interesting? So I cloned the butterfly effect, or well, the cleopatra butterfly effect. checked the resourceKeys which led me to find a MODL file of an ordinary plane... which given the default mesh could be good, and then, well... a texture map of 'salt' which I know butterflies will not like. So I wonder if these resources are actually helpful in the first place.
Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
Original Poster
#4 Old 24th May 2020 at 2:13 PM Last edited by Lyralei : 25th May 2020 at 1:26 PM.
Years later, today I actually found out what it is.
All effects that can be added to a sim's inventory all have a "shared" mesh (A MODL in this case). This shared mesh only shows up, in this case at least, once the butterfly has been caught and put in a sim's inventory. The MODL is then used to display the thumbnail of the butterfly. But if you are as insane as me and want to replace the actual mesh of the *flying* butterflies, then you gotta do some extra steps. This same thing counts for fishes and such IIRC.

Now, the *actual* meshes of their bodies and wings you can apparently find inside of the SWB. So, here's the grinding part of it all. These are all the effects and all of these have different MODL/MLODs, despite it being the same mesh:


To find the linked meshes to an effect like this, all you need to do is:
1. In S3PE you see the preview screen, make sure to first find your effect. For the sake of an example, I'm using: [0x000000E0]0x2FA5E5BA):butterflyblue
2. Now, the number  [0x000000E0] is important here. (or E0 rather). If we click on our SWB resource and then go to GRID, we see 4 options. 
3. Expand VisualEffectHandler and find, in my case, entry E0. When you find your entry, expand it.
4. We're now seeing the index and Effectname. index here is what you need. For me the index is 35. (or 0x00000035 rather).
5. Go allll the way to the top and now we are expanding EffectSections.
6. Usually, it's in the first [0]EffectSection, if not, try finding it in the other one. But what we do now is expanding the first [0]effectsection. 
7. Expand Items and find our index, 35 (Or anything you have). 
8. Expand [035] item and you see all sorts of gibberish and floats. What we need from this list is ResourceKey. Expand that.
9. If your effect uses a mesh, then you should see the line 'instance'. Copy that instance in notepad somewhere.
10. Now, you can do this 2 ways. Either find it in S3PE by opening the Deltabuild0 package and have it find anything with that instance, or search it through S3OC's "Tools> Find Resource" option. I'd recommend using the S3PE method for this though, it's quicker
11. Once you found your resource (Assuming you've used S3PE), then simply export the MLOD and our MODL. Import that into your override package and voila!

Hopefully, this will help someone out! I'll continue extracting a crap ton of MLODs now :p 

EDIT: If you're missing effects from specific packs in the Fullbuild package, but opening the deltabuild SWB doesn't preview anything, see post below
Warrior Gryphon
site owner
#5 Old 25th May 2020 at 12:10 PM
Here's a list of all the Particle effects, taken from the DeltaBuild file.  

First part is the effectName
Second word is the instanceId reference
Third is the SurfaceMap (if applicable, 0 otherwise)
Attached files:
File Type: txt  effects.txt (660.3 KB, 4 downloads)

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