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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 31st May 2020 at 5:52 AM
Default Fixing hair recolour?
I did a recolour of a custom hair style, which I converted from blonde to blue, and added black tips on it, which turned out how I wanted, except for the fact that part of the back of the hair texture apparently uses the same part as the sides of the hair where I added the black. Is there a way to change which part of the texture image, or add a separate texture image for the back of the hair, so it won't have random black hair spots?

Black side tips that I wanted:



Black spots that should be blue with the rest of the hair:


Is there a way around this? I have very limited knowledge when it comes to this sort of thing. I have a basic understanding of SimPe, so if it's possible to edit something in the package file to fix this problem, would there be a tutorial or something I could use? Or is this something that's completely unavoidable?
Screenshots
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 31st May 2020 at 2:39 PM Last edited by simmer22 : 31st May 2020 at 3:17 PM.
Most likely the back parts of the hair would need to be remapped so they don't overlap with the parts you want to add color to. It involves editing the mesh, and would either need a UV-map fix for the existing mesh, or a new mesh and recolor that wouldn't affect existing recolors.

UV-mapping in Milkshape is not particularly easy (marking hair parts is difficult, and marking overlaid UVs is even more difficult), and hairs are not the easiest meshes to UVmap to start with, but it could be you just need to mark and shift over some parts to a different part of the mesh. It's not impossible, but it can be a bit tricky to get right.

There aren't any good tutorials on UVs in Milkshape - these were the ones I could find:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=135136
http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=145153
http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?tit..._and_UV_Mapping
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=135139

- Add a mesh
- Select the mesh group and give it a material with a texture, or the texture coordinate window won't work.
- Mark either the parts you want to change, or the entire hair (whichever works, remember hairs tend to have a front and a backside, so you'll want to mark both of them).
- Open the Texture Coordinate Editor (either Ctrl + T, or "Window --> TCE")
- Find and mark the coordinates you want to remap (this can be a challenge, because they're often overlapped in multiple layers in hairs).
*Select - Selects UVs. Left + drag mouse button to mark. Left/drag + Shift to add, Right/drag + shift to subtract.
*Move - moves UVs, use constraints (Lock X OR Y) to move just horiz/vert.
*Ctrl + mouse click (R/M/L button) to move map around.
*Dropdown list lets you select a group if there are several.
*Scale lets you scale the size of the map relative to the window (only view size).

In the picture I basically just selected a random part and moved it upto the next level. I honestly have no idea what it did in the mesh, but I'd probably have given it a better effort if I was actually doing an edit and not just showing you how the tool works.

Ask if you have questions (I've probably forgotten at least ten things because today I keep getting disturbed every 3 minutes... )
Screenshots
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 31st May 2020 at 3:42 PM
... a lock trickier than I expected, but I'll give it a shot at least. Like I figured, and like you said, it won't be easy, and as I have no experience with this, it looks like it "being a challenge" is an understatement. I do have Milkshape installed, and working, but I only tried it once, and got fed up after 20 minutes of trying to figure it out. I did not look at a tutorial, I just thought I could wing it, and that didn't go well. I'll see if I can manage it at least, and if not, I'll keep trying until I get what I want.


And will do! I know the feeling, it's hard to get even a few minutes without someone needing something


And thanks again for the help. You are a god send!
Mad Poster
#4 Old 31st May 2020 at 4:56 PM Last edited by simmer22 : 31st May 2020 at 5:27 PM.
Another way is to fix in Blender, because separating the mesh and UVmapping is easier there - but you'll have to reimport back into Milkshape to finalize it there, which means fixing bone assignments, comments, and all of that. Wouldn't say it's extremely difficult, but takes a while to explain if you're not used to Milkshape and you haven't used Blender before (Blender can be a bit overwhelming and is not intuitive, so you'll have to hit some beginner tutorials just to get the hang of the user interface and basic controls).

Hairs aren't the easiest meshes to work with. They tend to be on the difficult level on meshing from scratch, and on the intermediate level when it comes to editing and converting them. Having some basic knowledge of Bodyshop, Milkshape and editing CAS items in SimPE is a good idea, or you're probably going to get stuck. They aren't good beginner projects, especially not if you want to tinker with the meshes. Not saying you should absolutely stay away from tinkering with hairs if you really want to try, but just so you're aware it may not be easy.

---

"Just winging it" tends to be my method when dealing with a program and I'm too lazy to look up tutorials. Sometimes it works (if it goes by the rule of using general shortcuts and a mix of alt/shift/ctrl and mouse buttons) and other times it doesn't. Most of the time it's a bit of a mix. Milkshape is a bit of a mix, but is very simplified and lacks a good workflow. Blender's shortcuts don't make any sense what so ever and the workflow is quite horrible, but I'm still trying to "save the workflow to the harddrive" in my memory (thats' not going very well - It's possible the 2.80 and out versions are better, I'm working with 2.78 or some such because it's linked to S4Studio). Still, it is a better meshing alternative than Milkshape. I used to have another program I much preferred (an old student version of 3D Max), but no longer have access to it, and it's probably outdated long ago anyway. My "harddrive" still has remnants of the 3D Max controls saved, which occasionally messes up my Blender workflow. I guess the first program learned is what sticks best to the memory...
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#5 Old 31st May 2020 at 6:15 PM
Well, thanks for the heads up. I might get lucky and make it work, but I won't get my hopes up. You'd think the game designers would have made it a little easier consider the game was built to allow custom content. Either way, I'll do my best.
Mad Poster
#6 Old 31st May 2020 at 6:41 PM Last edited by simmer22 : 1st Jun 2020 at 12:38 AM.
The game desigers made it easy to recolor (basically anything that can be done via Bodyshop or Homecrafter alongside some or another image editor that can work with BMP files - some of the first recolors were probably made with Paint... even some of my first recolors were made with Paint. They looked ghastly ).

Meshing - not so much. That's 100% thanks to the community. No idea what made them choose Milkshape as the "preferred" meshing program, though. They could probably have chosen a better program, though I'm not sure if there were a lot of good options back in 2004-2006, let alone any good free options (Milkshape wasn't free, but cheap-ish)...
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#7 Old 1st Jun 2020 at 12:11 AM
Yeah, that's true. I never even thought about trying to find a better or easier program to use.
Mad Poster
#8 Old 1st Jun 2020 at 3:51 AM
For most from-scratch meshing projects, you can use another meshing program and then do the finalizing in Milkshape. Objects, hairs, accessories, that sort of things.

Anything using parts of the EAxis bodies or anything from ingame is usually best to edit in Milkshape, because it seems to be the only program that kind of understands normals exported from SimPE. Other programs tend to end up with ugly seams and all kinds of strangeness when meshes are imported in there (also a problem in Blender, which is why I've not yet converted over to bodymeshing there, even though there are working plugins - so much fixing required! ).
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#9 Old 4th Jun 2020 at 3:40 PM
I wish meshing was a simple task, but for me, it's nearly impossible. If I had the time to learn, I would, but I doubt I'd have the patience for it. I'm sure it would be a little easier to edit a premade mesh, compared to starting from scratch.
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