ok ty so much

little devil-
did you uncheck "show skeleton" under the "joints" tab in milkshape? try that. i am not certain which blue lines you are reffering but i bet those are it. also, if that doesn't work, go to file->preferences-> and select the misc. tab, and set joint size to 0.010000.

:-)

i got it maggie ty so much i have another problem but ill work on that tomarrow will you be on

sure..i will help you as much as i can:-)

Great tutorial! Very easy to follow.

I'm having a problem though. My entire body mesh (adult male - a Darth Vader mesh) is completely invisible. From the neck down the sim is invisible in bodyshop, as well as in the Sim creation screen. I made a hair mesh (Darth Vaders helmet) which follows this exact same process, and it turned out great without a problem. I'm not sure what I could of done wrong in this case to cause this problem.

What are some reasons why a whole body mesh could be invisible? I have a feeling it has something to do with the linking between the mesh file and bodyshop file, but as far as I know I've done everything correctly. I've seen the problem around, but haven't really seen many answers. I attached the files if anybody wants to take a look. I did a lot of moving around, so I hope everything in the packages is still accurate.

Thanks!

EDIT: Solved. Attachment removed

So what did you do that fixed it? I'm about ready to burst into tears over this (seemingly) simple thing but I feel like I'm missing something I just can't figure out. I even did the tutorial from scratch with my husband following step by step and the same thing happened. I'd dearly love to give something back to this wonderful community, but I'm about ready to give up.

Sad and discouraged, :banghead:

~Corset

My first attempts at meshing weren't showing up in bodyshop either. I was deleting the blue "Pigpen" cloud around the pants I wanted to mod. That was my mistake. So I tried not deleting it and it showed up. Now, I didn't know you could uncheck that little box and they'd go away. Nice. That's going to make things much easier now.

I have a problem though. I was trying to make lower rise jeans but I just keep cropping the stomach out. I'm thinking I may have it figured out, but does anyone know how I might fix this for sure? I was going to try adjusting the texture map instead of the mesh itself, if I can figure out how to do that and reassociate it with my package. Am I close?

The number of vertices have to be the same for all groups in the mesh. There's an information window in tools that will tell you how many vertices are in the total mesh and how many are in the selected group. Some how I lose vertices while working with a mesh. I haven't yet figured out what to do if even one is lost. I attemted to add a vertex but I'm a beginner and that just didn't work. I just scrap the whole project and start over when that happens now. No use beating myself up over it.

ok new to this how do i import a skin mesh into milkshape

I have a problem when I get to step 4. When I import the resources, only the GDMC actully shows up in SimPE.

I'm 99.9% sure I followed the directions.
I didn't snag the resources with lod15 in the name.

What could I have done wrong? Is it even something I did?

EDIT

Oy! I'm a dofus! Forgot to clear the filter!

Now I know. And knowing is half the battle! :banghead:

Thanks!!!! I do my first clothing Mesh!!! :bow: :bow: :bow: :bow:

:banana:

cjanefly...i actually have this same problem at times, where one morph will have more or less than it is supposed to. i havent figured out quite what to do, either, though i have added and deleted vertices on this one mesh for hours and then finally discovered that sometimes when i weld it together it changes the number back. weird.

The BODYMOD and it's newer cousin the MORPHMOD (in the new UniMesh plugins) are mythical creatures in the sense that they are COPIES of the base mesh, with the vertices moved to new locations based on data from special parts of the GMDC.

On a really custom mesh, it might be best to create a new BODYMOD/MORPHMOD from your edited mesh (in BodyChop reassign the bones) than to struggle needlessly with mismatched vertice counts.

You would delete the original bodymod/morphmod, and then select the base mesh group (in the group panel) and use MilkShape's "Duplicate Selection" function (in the Edit menu) to create a new one. Rename the duplicated group to the original morph group name (e.g. BODYMOD.1 in BodyChop or ~00MORPHMOD.0 in the newer UniMesh plugins), fix the comments, and make a custom morph by only moving existing vertices (you could make fat as big as you want, or leave fat the same as fit by not moving anything).

The exporter plugin looks at the location differences vertex-by-vertex between the base model and the morph to rebuild the data tables associated with the morph process. That's why it gets upset when the vertice count doesn't match. But nothing prevents you from substituting your own morph for the original one (provided you get the name and comments right).

<* Wes *>

Dear NeptuneSuzy (or Everyone who knows the answer),
This is maybe a stupid question,but when I open my clothing mesh file in Milkshape,I see also hands..does that mean that the clothing is attached to the body in the file? like that there is no body underneath it because the body is replaced by clothing? Because I thought the file was only the clothing,so in the file you have got only the pants for example and the legs are in another file. I want to delete parts of the clothing. Is that possible or will I have a girl with no body then??
thanks in advance if you answer

There is no 'body'. When the sims change clothing they switch from one entire body mesh (from the neck down) to another body mesh. The idea that they have a 'body' and 'clothing' separately is not so.

So indeed, if you delete the 'pants' or 'sleeves' from a sim, there will be nothing there. You need to change the shape to look like properly formed bare legs (or go get them from another mesh and then go through the steps to attach them and reassign all the bones.

hi, I am following your tutorial and i have just loaded the mesh into milkshape. I notice that the mesh is very squared off and i was wondering if this squareness is permanent or did I do something wrong?

Not sure what you mean by 'squared off' If you're noticing that the mesh is made of polygons and not actually 'round', that is because the mesh *is* made that way. It's a display thing that smooths things out (called normals). Try making one very obvious change to your mesh and save it out (just as a test) and load it into your game and see if things look right. If they do not, post some pics and more explanations.

what I am talking about is there is a line between the front half and back half. It might not be noticeable in the game but it is simular to the squareness around the shoulders in this mesh

Okay, well, there's two different issues going on here.

The first is that using bodychop, you need to weld along the seams - that should eliminate most of what you see going up the legs and arms. As milkshape doesn't actually show you the seams, just select the points along those edges that you can see on the mesh and use the command. You probably don't want to weld the very center point at the crotch or under the arms.

The second is a flaw in the tutorial. While indeed you do need to have the two bodies be identical in their vertex count, the 2nd body should be the 'fat' morph **and** it stores the secondary bone assignments - some of the vertexes in the sims' meshes have 3 (and in nightlife apparently a few have 4) assignments. By deleting and replacing the 2nd body, those assignments are deleted, which will give you a sim with rougher animation behavior and more pointed shoulders.

---
My best suggestion is that you switch to the unimesh plugin, which is Wes' newest. You have accomplished the basics here. If you use the unimesh plugin the bone data is stored differently and replacing the 2nd body won't mess up the bone assignments. ALSO with the unimesh plugin you will NOT weld any seams. You can adjust the 2nd body to look 'fat' as it actually should, or ignore it and the sim won't get fat.

Wes provided a guide (it's not exactly a tutorial) with the Unimesh plugin. You can start over with the gdmc and meshfile you already have saved, make the changes again, and export using the unimesh plugin - which will create a replacement gdmc just like for the plugin documented here.

You will need to start from your original gdmc you saved, so that the unimesh plugin will get the right bone assignments and also upgrade to milkshape 1.7.7. If you do go this route, post any questions you have in the unimesh thread.

---
My other suggestion is that if you saved the milkshape file *before* you deleted the second body, you can check it for bone assignments and write down where they were and make the same changes to the one you replace it with. But the animation will still be less perfect than with the new unibody plugin - which really is going to be the plugin of choice. It's just that it's very new.

Single bone weighting does that. The transitions between body parts is too abrupt to render well without multiple assignments... but until recently there were few options available to fix that.

Update to the UniMesh plugins. They are much newer and can handle multiple bone assignments for a smoother looking mesh in-game.

<* Wes *>

thanks it looks basic enough but i hope i will manage, since i tried dozens of othes and it always turned out really bad.

Thanks for a great tutorial, but I ran into a problem. When I open MilkShape, I can get my mesh, but it is so small, that trying to zoom in on it takes forever. What can I do? Also, is there anyway to zoom in on one particular part? I went through the Milkshape tutorial you suggested, but I didn't see anything. Thanks

This is from memory, but to zoom in what you can do is go to the select tool, and select whatever parts (or all) of the mesh you'd like to zoom in on. then right click on the window... and there's a command that's something like 'frame selection' that will appear on that popup menu.

Thanks so much!

hi, i have a little problem in milkshape: when i select the vertices and i try to delete them, i only undo the selection and the vertices don't go away. am i doing something wrong?