More Awesome Than You!

Regarding the earlier conversation about "decent custom hair", I recently downloaded this free animated ponytail mesh from http://www.simmetrical.com/ (http://www.simmetrical.com/) that looks quite nice in the game (even though my sim doesn't seem to think so after her make-over  :D )

(http://www.ignorantbliss.org/images/sims/HairDisgust.jpg)

Speaking of custom hair, does anyone have PeggySims' donation meshes ingame? Can you guys tell me if her hairs look/work nice ingame? W/ all the talk of hairs not living up to their screenshots, I'm wondering they're really as nice as they look. Right now, from the screens, I'm seriously, seriously tempted to just subscribe to her site, since she now has a subscription area instead of individual donation items.

I found a nice animated ponytail similar to that at MTS2. It has a seperate accessory bang mesh and is for all ages. I think it might be a tad fuller than that one and perhaps juat a bit shorter. (it's definately not the same one).

cute sim by the way. She has nice freckles.

No peggy sims donation meshes in my game I'm afraid.  I have her free ones though and am happy with them. I'd guess that her newer meshes are nice, but that's just a guess.

[attachment deleted by admin]

I have the ponytail that dewshine has, and I love that mesh. It's very well done. Here are my pet peeves:

--Meshes that leave a gap at the base of the neck (don't these people test their meshes in the freaking game?!?!?!
--Different recolors for the meshes without matching eyebrow colors. I don't want a blonde Sim with red eyebrows.
--Meshes from fairly well-known people with holes, or with the back of the mesh completely looking like crap. Do they just look at the front?
--Textures just slapped on meshes without regard to what real hair looks like. Also, the obviously slapped on blurry photograph texture, instead of doing a real texture. (Does that make sense?)

I've been downloading a ton of hair meshes lately, and going through them one by one. I wind up deleting most of them. I have a few that I really like except for the neck gape issue, which I am hoping Dylan will fix for me.

OOOH...Dylan can fix those gapes? I must find out how, as sim me and all my backwards wearing ball cap guys have that issue...

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to go looking for that hair at MTS2, I'm a sucker for ponytails  :D.

The freckles are Maxis made ones hidden in the game that someone extracted. I think they are the only thing I ever downloaded from the Exchange  :D

yeah, I hate those gaps.  I really really do.  Now XM sims has some pretty good hairs. (wild colors, but cute and well done). I've downloaded a bunch that were catagorized into the color bins and all that had crappy textures. I figure that I'll look at fixing the textures if the meshes have no other problems, but there are lots of them that I look at in the game and toss, too.

really? weird the things maxis hid in the files. I'll have to dig around for those.
 

Really? Are they face makeup? I'd love that for my Angela Broke. I think she'd look so cute w/ freckles. Do you know who exactly on the exchange made them? Or perhaps you could send it to me? A search for freckles on the BBS turns out about 500 results, and I really am not looking for user made ones, which make up the bulk of the search results.


Really? I think XM Sims has really nice textures. They're all so detailed and so glossy! I dunno where they get their textures from. But they all look really nice.

Someone at MTS2 extracted some Maxis stuff, including the freckles. http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=73414

Yeah, the ones at MTS2 look exactly the same as the ones I've got. I didn't know about alien freckles, though, definitely must have those, too!

Thnx you guys!  ;D

But can I ask, is there any way to get more than one face mask on a sim? Cuz it seems right now I'll have to choose between freckles or braces...but I'd definitely love to use them both on one sim.

I was able to get two facemasks on my sim Josh. He has both custom teeth (mermaid cove rocks! lol) and earrings (the painted on kind). It was apparently a fluke, though. Weird, since I can put a billion pairs of glasses and multiple earring sets on a single sim...

Just like glasses/earrings, they would have to be in different "bins." You could, I guess, edit the bin numbers yourself. Dr Pixel explains bins on MTS2... of course he was talking about accessories, but it most likely works the same. I think there are a couple of Maxis face masks that you can combine, and I think Hairfish (Mermaid Cove) has made some combinable masks, so you could ask.

I occassionaly have this happen where I can put more than one thing on a sim from a specific category.

The braces that I have (that I also think are Maxis ones found hiding in the game) are categorized under lipstick in make-up. I don't remember where I got them, though.

Yeah, I'd like an answer to that too.  This is the first time I've been seriously considering subscribing just for her hairs because they look so nice but if they're not animated well, then I won't bother. 

Okay, so I couldn't find the relevant info for you, but I had some time this morning and decided to take a look at it. Here is what I found.

Face masks can be combined if they are in different bins. Lets use this as an example: you have Helaene's freckles which are under Face Masks, and you also have contact lenses, also under Face Masks. You want to use both at the same time.

First, make sure they are currently NOT combinable. This is just to make sure they are in the same bin at this time.

Now open one of them in SimPE. On the top-left select Texture Overlay XML. Once you select that, at least one line will pop up on the top-right. You will have to edit EVERY LINE.

Once you've selected one of the lines, on the bottom-left select bin (dtUInteger) =.

You will see a number there (in the Value box on the bottom-right), probably either 0x00000014 or 0x00000005. Simply change this number to the other one. If it was 0x00000014, change it to 0x00000005, and vice-versa.

Check to see if they are now combinable... they should be.

There are probably other bin numbers you can use, to make even more masks combinable. Play around with them.

To prove that this works, here is a sim wearing THREE masks:

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/combomasks.jpg)

The numbers I used for the three masks are 0x00000014, 0x00000005, and 0x00000003.

Thanks SaraMK, for the nice info, I'll have to try it out!

Well another way for the SimPE-o-phobic would be to go into the Body Shop, clone the old people wrinkle mask, which is in a different bin, make it available for adults, and swap out the wrinkles for your freckles or braces or whatever. I've also seen people turn blush or even lipstick into face masks that's another option, particularly for male sims who normally wouldn't be using those items anyhow.

Regarding the gaps in meshes, it is annoying, tacky and amatuerish, not to mention inexcusable for a paysite. I kept checking the damned adult and teen afro female meshes I made over and over in both 3D Studio Max and The body shop and rotated them every which angle. It was kind of a pain and it seemed like when I sealed one gap another would pop up lol but it was worth it because I absolutely will not use any mesh with any sort of gap.

Another way is to just seal the mesh. We used to do this in Morrowind. It's a lot easier and I'm not sure why no one does it in TS2 except maybe because Maxis didn't. Basically, instead of a mesh that's for example,  a half circle, you'd have on that's a full circle, so they're be some polygons that you wouldn't see that would get rendered, which generally is not a good thing, but you can minimize that and make the hidden area very low poly. I guess the only downside is that I *think* if you add extra polys to seal the mesh it will break the animations unless someone has figured them out yet, but if it's a very short hair it won't matter anyway since those generally don't have animations.

That's pretty much what I did (to get the bin numbers), since that's the only combinable mask in the game.

Using SimPE makes more sense, since you can edit masks that you have downloaded. Otherwise you would have to use Bodyshop to swap textures, and textures can lose clarity from the editing.

I know, but you know how some people are when you mention SimPE.  :o :o :o

;)

Anyway, I don't think you loose that much clarity via the bodyshop. *shrug* I think Maxis' compression algorith is pretty good. SimPE's can be kind of funky unless you use the DDS tools to do it.

Okay, okay... the SimPEphobics can use Bodyshop. :)

But you can't get more than two masks to combine using just Bodyshop. What if you want freckles AND wrinkles AND moles AND lip piercings AND contact lenses? Or what if you want to create a set of moles (like a dozen moles in various locations on the face) and be able to combine them however you want? Or face piercings. The 77 Sim Lane site has "combo" piercings that are basically just their separate piercings put on one mask. This could have been done much better using bins, letting players combine the piercings any way they want.

Oh... gee, I'm so happy to find more info!  I love you people.  :D  Combining using bins for the face masks is very cool (I'm going to spend the day on sorting those now, lol)
I didn't mean that XM sims had crappy textures... Sorry if it sounded that way. no, I meant that other sites have crappy textures. I've gotten rather spoiled by XM sims, Sunair Sims, and Peggy sims because of their good textures.
It seems that a lot of pay sites think they can give away their crappy stuff, but you know, If I judge by what I can see in the game there's no way I'll pay for those other hairs.

Guppy sims (http://guppysims.webcindario.com/hairstyles4.htm) has nice meshes for the most part without gaps, but some of the textures are really bad. It could be a UV mapping issue, I suppose. I haven't looked at that too closely yet.
There are other sites that are bad too.  I stopped downloading hairs from TSR because the images are so small that the hairs look totally different (and often crappy) in the game.

If you look around, you can find much nicer textures for Guppy hair meshes. Many of the meshes are fine, it's the textures that aren't. Elau has some textures for the long ponytail, MTS2 has some, and http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/SimmillionHomes3/ has some.

I'll do that.  I've kept most of the meshes from guppy sims with that idea so I should look around.  thanks for the site tips.
*Edit*
Here are the bin numbers I've noticed and the catagories I've seen them in:
0x0000000B (eyes)
0x00000003 (Brows)
0x00000014 (Costume Makeup)
0x00000002 (Beards)
0x00000001 (stubble)
0x00000007 (eyeshadow)
0x00000006 (eyeliner)
0x00000008 (blush)
0x0000000A (lipstick)

I have yet to locate where 0x00000004 is used. Anyone know?
I'm going to play with this and see what else works.

*Edit again*
Using those listed bins with costume makeup caused the makeup to replace whatever the bin was listed for (ie using 0x0000000A replaced lipstick, and using 0x00000003 replaced eyebrows).
Dr. Pixel and Sunair had a conversation about bins over at MTS2 and the good doctor listed the following bins for accessories:
0x0000000F (glasses)
0x0000000C
0x0000000D
0x0000000E
0x00000053

Now I have tested 0x0000000C with the costume makeup and it works. here's a pic
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v21/dewshine2003/BinCtestpic.jpg)
Note that I have not tested it with accessories/glasses that might be in this bin also.
It does not override anything, and this sim has on all the layers of makeup, normal glasses, all the face hair, and 3 costume makeups (the red dots, the wrinkles, and the football shaders).

Eyes?? Does this mean that if you put costume makeup in this particular bin, your sim will have no eyes? Or will it have the default eyes?

And another question - If you manually change the bin, say from eyeliner to eyeshadow, will the thumbnails for the makeup remain in the eyeliner bin or no? And is there a way to move the categories w/out opening up bodyshop?

Well, as for your first question I don't know.  Nearly every face texture has the eyes included, so those might show.  I'll have to check that.

The bin does not move the thumbnails. I'm not sure how to do that yet. Personally, if I could get the costume makeup fringes (bangs) into the eyebrow area I'd be happy.  Here's what I have figured out: setting the hairtone line makes the file show up only when that hair color is active even if it's a costume makup.  I have black fringes/bangs in costume makeup that only show when the active sim has black hair.

There are several other values that might control where the thumbnails show but I have yet to track down which one it is.
I'll keep playing with the files until I figure it out, though.

Okay here's what happened when I assigned 0x0000000B to a costume makeup: the eyes on the sim turned to maxis default brown which is used on the face texture.  It stayed that way even after I took the costume makeup off.  I think the layer for the eyes gets "lost" and the program can't find it. Notice that sims with custom eyes that are deleted also revert to the same color even if default replacements are used. I believe this is because there is no eye texture being used on those sims. To test this I might alter one of my skins with an odd eye color, and when that color finally shows I'll know that it's because there's no eye texture above it.

I tried altering the category values and the layer values and nothing happened... so far the only things that seem to do anything by way of altering behavior of the files are the bin and the hairtone lines.
I'll keep digging...

Yup, that's what I was going to suggest. The face masks I've made that are "layerable" are all made from the wrinkle masks. That's about the limit of my techieness.

Wow! Thank you for that link. I downloaded 3 beautiful hairmeshes and am now armed and dangerous enough to go on a townie make-over spree!  :o 8)

Dewshine-
Could you please tell me who was the creator for that ponytail mesh? I did a search using a few combinations of words but couldn't find it.
Somehow during my search I got distracted and dl'd a desktop full of stuff. Now I'm to tired to install any of it so I'm gonna go play The Movies for a bit first.
Thanks for the links everyone.

Just a bit of warning though. The last time I d/led the Jessica Rabbit-type hair from that site, not only did it have enormous gaps, but it turned out to be about 10,000 polys. Needless to say, I chucked them all. I dunno if they've updated the meshes or anything, but I personally would go over your files in SimPE to be sure.

Here's a link for the hair: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=101133 It looks gorgeous in the game, I just tried it today.

Oh, yeah... I gave Jennifer Burb that ponytail hairstyle in my game. Haven't used the bangs though. I'm thinking of actually giving sim me that hairstyle, too, since it's forever up in a ponytail these days, and the mesh I use right has that horrible gap. Can't say my real life ponytail is that glamorous, though, lol. My real life one is a little more unkempt, more like the one sim me wears now. But I don't have a crack in my neck.  >:(

Er...how would I do that? I would really like to go over all my downloads and throw out all massive poly stuff.

I second that.  I have an old video card so I can't afford high poly count.