More Awesome Than You!

Is there a simple way to recategorize a clothing item from set (both top and bottom) to just top or just bottom?  I have some clothing where I like the top or bottom part, but the rest of it I would just as soon alpha-edit out.

I was poking around in SimPe trying to figure out how to do it and saw that there was a field called override0subset (dtstring) which is set to "top", "bottom", or "body", depending on the clothing category.  Googling for more information about override0subset didn't net me much.  The only link was to a promising thread, old and since deleted, on Insiminator.net, titled Shirt Ideas and Techniques, where people had speculated that it might be enough to just change the two propertyset fields, overridesubset0 and outfit.  (The only way to read the thread is through the Google cache).  I tried changing those two fields, but that wasn't enough.  Bodyshop still showed it categorized as a set, and when worn on a Sim model, the body turned green.

Has anybody worked out a better way to do this?

Doing such a thing would involve mesh-remapping as well. You would need to map the texture onto a compatible "bottom" mesh, or else you end up with something that is a lot like dress-as-top crashware.

But I have seen clothing like this.  Here are two pics,

Ordinary top:
(http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/7886/m2mv6.jpg)

A top by Dr. Pixel:
(http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/7622/m1jh2.jpg)

Notice the fishnets in the pic of Dr. Pixel's top.  This "top" covers the whole body, with the exceptions of those parts covered by the bottom.  Other skins of his that use the same mesh don't have the fishnets because that part was alpha-edited out. 

It seems like there should be some way to do the same thing in reverse, i.e., to recategorize something from a full body set to a top-only and then alpha-edit out the bottom part of the texture so it doesn't show.

Even if it doesn't work, how can I recategorize and  catalog something as top or bottom, so I can test it for myself?

That type of thing shown in the pictures can easily be done without any special tools or complex editing.  Just take a full body outfit, like an underwear set with stockings for example, open it as a new project in Bodyshop, then save it as a top.  The type of thing you are describing should be very easy to do assuming there is no overlap of the top and bottom portions of the full outfit being used, but overlap with other normal tops or bottoms you might want to use them with could be problematic.   Overlap is where things get more tricky, and is why clothes with overlap are much better as full outfits.  It seems as if typical game behavior gives priority to the bottom part of the split sets over the top, which is why the underwear as tops works and is perfectly stable and easy to do.  In contrast, a dress simply saved as a top would display underneath the bottom normally by the game, so a new mesh would be required to get it to show above.  Therefore, any top that would need to overlap the bottom would need to be somehow re-meshed to function correctly.  The whole dresses-as-tops fiasco sort of passed me by without much notice, so I don't know what went wrong there, but I can not see any way around some sort of re-meshing, at least for tops that need to always overlap the bottoms.

Yes, this is the idea behind the "dressastop" meshes that Pescado and Khan referred to.  It is definitely possible, but could cause your game to crash during certain scenarios.  Here is a link  (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,5242.0.html) to the original thread about these crashes.

Ah...  Well, I can verify you can't do this at all with Bodyshop.  Bodyshop does NOT allow you to recategorize a clothing item from top to bottom to set.  The new project always retains the same top/bottom-ness as the original it was cloned from.  That's why I was screwing around with property sets trying to find a way around that.  (And I never figured that out either).

Too bad it's flaky.  It really would have been a nice solution to a number of problems.  I have meshes like this that I downloaded and have played in my game for eons it seems, that are like this and have had no problems to date, so I'm not going to remove anything, but I shall keep my eyes peeled.

Yes, I realize now that I did forget part of the description.  It has been quite some time since I last did this.

For the outfit as top conversion you have open another suitable top project and overwrite all of the first project files to the new top project file names, then import.  As far as I know it only works because of the way the game prioritizes bottom separates over tops, and because otherwise you are not actually altering the mesh files at all.  Any part of the bottom mesh that would otherwise show skin, like the legs under the skirt in your example picture, or is partially transparent, will instead or in addition be rendered with information from the top, as long as the alpha for the top is long enough and there is graphical information there to render.

Presumably, if you wanted just the top part of a full outfit, you could edit to black out the bottom part of the alpha and that portion would not ever be rendered.  Note the top will always be 'tucked in' to the bottom by the game, though.