Alpha mesh woes

[crystaldawn]

I've been attempting to add a belt to one of my meshes that previously didn't have an alpha mesh, and it's not going so well. I've managed to get everything straightened out (to my knowledge) on the Milkshape/meshing side, but once I try to fix it all up in SimPE, everything goes haywire.

First the alpha didn't show up at all in Body Shop. Then it crashed Body Shop. And now it's showing up as a hideous green bowling shirt (which wasn't even the original mesh I used)!

I've tried finding tutorials, but they're all unfortunately sparse on what exactly needs to be done in SimPE. I've tried going back in SimPE and adding the hula files into the original body file I was working with, but so far am having no luck. Do I need to burn it all and start again? And if I did, exactly how should I go about it, and would I be able to salvage the current alpha at all? HALP!

[WesHowe]

There is a tutorial or a discussion about adding a subset to a mesh that doesn't have one, so that may help you search.
However, one part of the solution is that the SHPE part needs to have the group name of the new suset (subset and group mean the same here) added to it, paired to your additional texture material definition. I think it is in the 'parts' tab, you should see your first group name (probably body) paired with your base TXMT name.
If you put the SHPE in from the hula, it will have two items there, one named body and one named alpha, I think. Each of the lines should point to the proper texture material name.

<* Wes *>

[exportdry]

I used the adding mesh groups tutorial to make my meshes work, but ang41187 rewrote a step-by-step screenshot version of the adding mesh groups tutorial by BluRR (BlooM at insim) for me which I found very easy to follow, unfortunatley looks like she hasn't uploaded it here.

Maybe you could PM her and she can give you the link to the file of her easy to follow tutorial.

[bLURR]

ang41187 did that too.?
They wrote a very easy one on TSR also, based on HP's tutorial here and the info i added bout using the resource files.