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TS2: Burnination => The Podium => Topic started by: cristalfiona on 2005 December 01, 10:57:53



Title: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cristalfiona on 2005 December 01, 10:57:53
I have couple of questions, and was wondering if anyone could help me. I used the information that was posted on here a couple of weeks ago, and started to recategorise all my hair. But I have some problems.

It said to change the hair colours to whatever colour it said in one of the strings in the property set (sorry, im on my work computer and dont have the information with me), eg black for all the colours and grey for the elder hair, but shouldnt that colour be whatever colour the creator used as their base point, and not necessarily the colour it is now?I have one hair colour, where it said black for all the property sets, but when i go into CAS and look (have never used bodyshop), all my colours of one hair style are now in the black hair section.

So I thought, what if there's a picture somewhere in SimPE that I can use. I went back in and looked, and the only thing i could find was the template. But this started to confuse me. On most, there is one colour, then a gray, then another colour, which i assume is base, mesh and recolour. But some have base, mesh and 2 recolours, or even 3, and still 5 or 6 property sets, which doesnt match (again, all say (eg) black, even if the recolours are blond etc). Also there are some without gray colours. I would say they were maxis recolours, but the only maxis recolours i have are things like pink and green for my coloured skins, so i know its not these.

I cant use the name of the package file to help me, as it usually doesnt include the colours.

So, is there anyway to find out for definite what colour each one is, so I can categorise them correctly, or do i have to clear out all my packeage files and unrar each of my rar files separately so that i can do each one right?

I had another question, but cant remember it now. Will post it later when my brain kicks back in.



Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: Twiki on 2005 December 01, 12:57:11
Recategorizing hair is the ONLY thing I don't do in SimPE, because there's too much little stuff to remember. I use Datgen because it does almost all of it for you. (Except putting it into the right families - that's broken in the release I downloaded, so I do just that part in Simpe.  It's a somewhat optional step anyway.) If you need a walkthrough of how to do it in Datgen, I'd be happy to help. Datgen is available from http://www.datgen.info/default.aspx .

As for telling which hair color is which, this is made more difficult when creators only change the style for one or two age groups. For example, let's say they clone a black hair style, then recolor the adult and teen hair to be burgandy. In this file you'd have at least five textures:  black toddler texture, a black child texture, a burgandy teen texture, a burgandy adult texture, and a grey elder texture. It gets confusing fast. What I would recommend doing (at least in the beginning) would be to recategorize one complete hairstyle at a time, all four colors. Doing it in a batch should make it easier to tell which color is supposed to be which, and you can move on to your single hairstyles once you get the hang of it.

I'm sure some of the resident geniuses (genii?) will be along with more info - just didn't want you to think you were being ignored.



Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cristalfiona on 2005 December 01, 13:58:56
I did have Datgen, but i got rid of it because i never really liked it and it was just taking up space.. Ive always preferred SimPE. The walkthrough for SimPE seemed so simple, reading it, and it is easy to do, its just that the creators of the hair make it more difficult.

If you're happy to do me a walkthrough, ill give it a go in Datgen, i think i read somewhere that it can show you pictures of the hair you are moving? If it does I could make notes and then finish later in SimPE. I did go back to the Datgen site, but its been pretty much abandoned now, and it doesnt tell you whats included in each of the versions.

I would try to recategorise complete hairstyles, but in my download folder its all called stupid stuff like 'myhair0000007' or something, i renamed all my rars when i downloaded them, but wasnt sure if renaming the package files would change anything in them or not.

I have managed to do most of the ones i tried right, but when i went into CAS to check it, that one was totally screwed up, and it kind of put me off carrying on. Also, the only way for me to find out which one it is is to go through all the ones ive already done, try changing them individually, and loading my game after each to see if its right (due to the whole crappy name thing). I would be ok with it, but my me sim has the hair that is in the wrong category, and now shes genetically black haired.

I went into bodyshop to see if i could do it from there, but the interface is totally foreign to me. And it takes almost as long to load as my game!


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 01, 14:03:45
well, I'm also catagorizing my hairs into the correct bins.
Here's what I'm doing:
1) ignore what the creator's original base was that they used for the recolor (because most of them will use black as the base for all their colors and I don't want my blonde hair in the black bin)
2)use clean installer to look at the color of the altered layers.
3)sort hairs into folder based on actual cololr.

This was before even using SimPE.
Because I don't want 100 styles in toddler and elders that are all the same I'm also deleting the info for those ages that are not colored to match.  I picked one set of colors for my elder "base" for all the styles.  (I decided that the blonde hairs would be the "host" for my elder slot, so for the the black, brown and red's I'm deleting the "*grey" textures and whatever files I can remove without breaking the package. ) If the elder shade in a certain hairstyle is different in one of the other colors I'll keep it.

The reason why you are seeing lots of texture and property set files is that there is one for each age connected with the hair.  For a few of the new meshes the creator made it so that all the ages use the same texture, but Maxis wasn't that clever.
There is a picture of the texture in simPE, it appears in the "plugin view". Each time you want to look at the texture you have to click on the name and make sure you are in plugin view.  It won't show the texture how it looks on the mesh or sim but the raw texture layer.
At the very least if the mesh/style changes from one age to the next there will be one for toddlers, one for children, one for teens-adults, and one for elders.  If the style stays the same of course there will only be 2 texture files (tot-adult and elder).  You will find though that in many maxis styles that there will be far more of these files and the many are exactly the same. I asume they are set up that way because of how Maxis packaged the files for the game in large bundles of textures instead of having each mesh with it's own file.

Most hairs that are new or recolored are done for Teen-Adult. Clean Installer shows the preview of the "template" too, but you can use that to help sort.  If you sort first then you can do each color group at a time and have the go into the correct places.  Still you'll have to decide which color will host the elder files so that you don't end up with 4 copies (or more) of each elder color that are the same.

I don't use datgen either, as I like to know exactly what is being altered inside the files.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cristalfiona on 2005 December 01, 14:10:36
I bever even thought of doing it like that- i've only ever used clean installer to check for hacks. Ill try it that way tonight, hopefully by tomorrow i will have a nice collection of categorised hair. If it doesnt work, ill be on here later asking for more help.

Where do you delete the elder multiples? In Clean installer? And how do you delete the ages that havnt been recoloured? I wanted to know that, but figured i would just leave it if i couldnt find out.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 01, 14:15:48
I do in in SimPE.  Because the elder hairs are linked to a color set you can't do it in clean installer.  Just go to the grey texture file and delete it. then go to the property set with the "Age" line that has the value of 0x00000010 listed and delete that. If you have all the colors for one style with a matching "family" value then the other colors should "link" to the remaining elder texture.

you can do the same thing for other ages that are not recolored too.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: Motoki on 2005 December 01, 14:22:31
I also used Datgen. It's too complicated in SimPE for me, too many manual steps.

Here's a tutorial for doing it with Datgen:

http://www.datgen.info/tutorials/sm_hairtone.aspx

I believe the latest debug version/developmental release from 10/19 does fix the family issues. Their server has some serious issues though and it took me many tries to get that file and when I finally got it, it was SLOW to download and I'm on broadband. :P


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cristalfiona on 2005 December 01, 14:29:37
Thank you!! Datgen actually looks fairly simple. Ill try to download it later on my horribly slow dial up, and if dewshines way doesnt work, ill try that. Or I might just try it anyway, to familiarise myself with it, in case I ever actually need Datgen for anything. You can never know too much!

Edit: Just read through the tutorial, and where it mentions grouping into families, it doesnt mention any specific data, but the figure looks similar to the one for SimPE. Does that mean I can just use the family value that i was using there and set all my files to the same? Thats the only bit i didnt understand.

Although i never understood why the family value always had to be the same in simpe. If anyone could explain that to me, id be happy.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: ElenaRoan on 2005 December 01, 14:40:59
could I beg for a more detailed explanation of what to do in SimPE?  I'm kinda a novice at it and like to make sure I understand before going in and messing about...


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2005 December 01, 15:53:33
I've been doing this recategorising of hair for quite a few days now.  I have one problem that I can't seem to find an answer for.  Some of the hair files don't have the text list in the resource tree.  (I'm putting the file name in all the text lists so it show up on mouse over.) So far, every one of the hairs that don't have the text list don't show up in the game.  Is there any way to add this to an existing file? Or should I just delete those ones?

I'm doing this in SimPe, would Datgen solve this problem?


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 01, 16:04:50
Well, I can try ElenaRoan...

First of all, the family number tells the game that the colors are related so that if you switch from say brown to blonde the same style shows up. Without that info the game will spit up a random hair at the age transition of the sim.  If you don't care about that, then save yourself the extra work and leave it alone.

Okay... using SimPE to catagorize hairs:
(please sort them by color as suggested above first, it'll be easier that way)

click on the package file you want to recatagorize to open it.
The resource tree is where you want to start. That sorts the files inside the package so that you can just click on what you want without wading through everything.

So in the resource tree, click on "Property Set (GZPS)"
All the property set files will appear in the window to the right.
Make sure you have the plugin view active (if it's not, look under the window tab and there will be a plugin view option on the dropdown menu)
Click on the first property set file in the right hand box and the infomation inside that file will appear in the plugin view.
you will see that on the left is a series of lines with numbers. It looks like this:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v21/dewshine2003/YAFSS_023.jpg)
(note that the order of the lines will change depending on what version of bodyshop the hair was made in, so you will have to look over the property set for the correct lines.)
 
Here's a close up:
 (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v21/dewshine2003/cloeup0.jpg)

Now the Age line tells you what age group the property set is for (I'm going to throw some numbers around...)
0x00000001 is toddlers
0x00000002 is children
0x00000004 is teens
0x00000008 is adults
0x00000010 is elders
If you have University then you have young adults too. the age number for them is 0x00000040.
These numbers can be added too, and if you want to know how I'll post that later.

The Family line will have a long string of numbers and letters behind it. notice that all the property sets inside the package will have the same family number.

But it's the Hairtone line that you really need to alter, and you can get away with only changing it if you want.
Notice that the custom hairtone line values usually look like this:
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v21/dewshine2003/cloeup1.jpg)
What a mess, huh?
But that's what bodyshop does, and that's what we have to fix.
Click on the line and notice that on the right side the info will appear in the boxes. that's where the numbers are changed.
To sort the hair into the correct bin replace that long string of numbers and letters with the following values:
00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Black)
00000002-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Brown)
00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Blonde)
00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Red)

The Elders property set will say "a*hair******_grey"
If you want those to sort into the elder bin then change the hairtone value to 00000005-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (grey).

After you alter the haiirtone value remember to hit commit before moving to the next property set.
once you have all of the changed then save.
By default SimPE will make a .bak file.  If you are not sure that you have done everything correctly you can revert the bak file to .package and restore the original file. Once I test the hair in CAS or Bodyshop to make sure that it is showing up where I want it to I delete the bak file.

really that's all there is to it.
 
And yetyak, I think that those files without a textlist were made without bodyshop.  I'd figure they are broken. Try contacting the site where you got them and tell the creator that they don't work. If you have the mesh showing up in the game you could reapply the textures in bodyshop to "fix" the files.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2005 December 01, 16:10:54
Thanks, dewshine.  Unfortunately, I have no clue where I got them. And so far, none of them have any indication who did it.  I started this project with a little over 1,700 hair files.  (addicted? no, not me!!) I did get rid of quite a few crappy ones, and am now down to only 483.  I feel pretty good about that, but it seems like I haven't played forever because I took out all my non hair downloads to make checking up on these much faster.  And restoring the .bak file does work, had a few I really messed up on.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 01, 16:20:42
wow, that's a lot of hair files!  I thougt I was bad at 800...
I'm down to about 600 now and expect that to drop as I edit and sort my files.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2005 December 01, 16:29:03
Guess I should have said 576 are done, and 483 left to go.  I think any new meshes I get I'll put that file name in the recolors, too. I know it is more work now, but will be worth it in the long run.  Deleting something I no longer like will be much easier then.  When I get this all done, I think it will be easier to sort out which one of the ten recolors of each style is best...


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: idtaminger on 2005 December 01, 17:30:47
When I started w/ this, I used one set of hairs that I messed up repeatedly b4 I finally reached the result I wanted. After fiddling around w/ Datgen, cuz it seemed easier, I'm now using just SimPE. DatGen has issues w/ the selecting, so you can only select one file at a time, and some changes don't stick, and dragging dumps everything in one bin, which is problematic for customizing elders. Correcting the little issues takes more time than just straightforward editing in SimPE. So now I just manually go over everything in SimPE when I d/l it, and on top of that manually prune my files to delete the non-edited textures. I wish I'd have discovered how to categorize earlier, though, cuz I've got tons of hair files in my d/l folder, and I'm waiting for the day when I'll feel like editing them all.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2005 December 01, 17:57:41
It is a time consuming project, but the results sure are worth it!!  I can do one in less than a minute, but the sheer volume is what makes me wonder if I really am crazy to even be doing this.  I wish I'd heard of this sooner, too.  I think my next project will be to add the file names to the clothes, to make pruning those easier. Over 3,000 files there, and that is after I got rid of the crap!


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 01, 18:29:51
yes, I've been doing the renaming thing too.  I hate the strings of numbers that bodyshop uses.  I know the program is designed that way to avoid overwriting files, but what a pain in the arse.  I have loads of clothes and genetics. The objects are not too bad beacuse creators have to name them in simPE anyhow but the bodyshop files are a horror.

I've been renaming my files I put up for download too, eliminating the numbers and doing the catagorizing so that downloaders don't have to do it. I love the fact that I can tell the game what color bin the facial hair should fall into also.  ;D


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: angelyne on 2005 December 01, 23:43:11
So what is the prevailing opinion then.  Should I use Dategen or SimsPE.  And could someone point me to the original thread, I did not manage to find it with a search.  Recategorizing hair would be awesome.  I am currently not using custom hair because I hate the way it messes up the genetics.  You might inherit a hair color from your parents but whoever heard of inheriting a hairstyle.

On the subject of file namesI never extract packages using TS2 default installer for just that reason.  I systematically use the multisims2packextractor program to extract sims 2 files and manually move the file into an appropriate directory.  If I want to check out a premade simmie for example; i'll extract the files to a directory that corresponds to the character name.  Then I'll check her/him out in SimsPE and decide which of the custom content I like.  I'll clone the character using only the content I want.  Then I'll manually move the custom content (assuming I am keeping any, which is fairly rare) to its appropriate folder. Then I'll delete the character folder.

The same applies for houses.  I'll extract all the content to a folder and place it in my download directory.   I'll remove all the custom content from the package using clean installer and save it under a different name.  I'll install just the lot segment into the game.  If I don't like the house, then I only have to delete the house and after remove the folder.  The house is completely gone from my game.

This way I have very very few numbered files. 



Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 02, 01:51:01
well, there were several threads over at MTS2 about doing this, which I read.  Personally, I perfer doing it the slow, hard way... which is SimPE. I like it because it puts me in control of what goes where, and I know why the game is doing what it's doing.

Also datgen is now unsupported as darkmatter is shelving the project for the time being. It's kind of sad in a way because folks do get a lot of use from it. So if you want to use datgen remember that there's nobody to go back to if you have problems.  That said, datgen is a nice program as motoki will attest. if the numbers bother you then datgen is the way to go. backup your data, sort with clean installer first (and rename each file so that you know the color it belongs to because I think datgen tends to sort by whatever the base color was that the creator used originally (the proxy color?) and that's why people say it sorts stuff wrong. 


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: ElenaRoan on 2005 December 02, 01:53:25
thankyou dewshine  :) that was a big help


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 02, 02:05:36
Hey ElenaRoan, I love your white lion avie.
I hope that it did help you, because I know when I was looking around for the info I had to read through pages and pages of posts over at MTS2 to figure it out.
If you decide to sort your other files... (like facehair??) you follow pretty much the same steps but with the following changes:
look in either "texture overlay XML" or "mesh overlay XML" for the hairtone line
and remember that the numbers to be altered for the sorting is slightly different than what is used for normal hairs:
00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Black)
00000002-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Brown)
00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Blonde)
00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Red)
00000005-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Grey)

Yes, oddly enough maxis switched the blonde and red bin numbers for the facehair.

I've sorted my eyebrows, custom stubble, and beards as well as my hair styles.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: ElenaRoan on 2005 December 02, 02:20:37
Hey ElenaRoan, I love your white lion avie.

thanks :) I seem to have a thing for big cats at the moment :D

makes a note of the differences thanks, don't have much in the way of custom facial hair at the moment but since I just downloaded some beards that's going to change


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 02, 02:26:03
 ;D
If you look in the thread about the site owner's sim you will find that I've made a series of beards that are already sorted... Just in case you decide you want some more.  LOL


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: ElenaRoan on 2005 December 02, 02:39:30
that's actually the beards I have, figured they were already sorted but now I know how to do it myself I can get some more...and hope they actually look decent...downloaded some eyebrows shortly after I got the game and they were a brown smudge in the general vacinity of the eyebrow ridge...turned me off facial hair downloads until I saw those beards :D


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 02, 02:57:01
hahaha...

if you get a chance head over to MTS2 and look for beards by allenABQ.  He's used maxis textures and alterd alphas to create some cool combos of beards, mustaches, and sideburns.  SimderZ has some wonderful eyebrows (at http://simderz.moonfruit.com/). Helene (?), who is hosted by MTS2, has very nice eyebrow sets.

I'm very picky about face hair and har textures so if they don't look good I won't use 'um.  My avie, who is a Vin Diesel sim, uses Helene's eyebrows.   


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: ElenaRoan on 2005 December 02, 03:13:15
cool notes down the names thankyou  :)


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cristalfiona on 2005 December 02, 13:15:23
First of all, the family number tells the game that the colors are related so that if you switch from say brown to blonde the same style shows up. Without that info the game will spit up a random hair at the age transition of the sim.  If you don't care about that, then save yourself the extra work and leave it alone.

Had a random brainwave at some wierd hour this morning: Does this mean that if i gave all of my custom hair the same family value, the game would pick the right colour hair, but choose a random style from within all the styles that have tha same family number?


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 02, 13:17:39
yes.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cristalfiona on 2005 December 02, 13:45:15
Thank you, now I can give all my sims custom hair, and never have them use maxis styles again, but still be genetically correct colour-wise. Which i still havnt done because im lazy. Decided id rather go to bed last night than actually spend time doing my sims hair!


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: jennydeenyc on 2005 December 02, 17:39:05
Inspired by this thread, I downloaded DatGen to recategorize my custom hairstyles. For the most part, this has worked out well, and I really like having the custom hair in the right color bins rather than all glommed together in one place, but I have a question. Mostly what I'm doing is using the Bulk Hair Updater to drag the hairstyles to the correct color swatch, then dragging the "grey" skin to the grey swatch after that, but I find a lot of hairstyles that have a "grey" skin noted, but the image that shows up in the browser isn't grey at all, but brown or black or blonde like the rest of the hairstyle's skins. Should I still drag those skins over to the grey bin anyway? I've put off on recategorizing those hairstyles until I figure out what to do with the greys. Thanks in advance...


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: dewshine on 2005 December 02, 17:52:55
If you want the elders to have access to non-grey hair then yes... drag them to grey.  If not then don't.  Elders are the only age group using grey.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: jennydeenyc on 2005 December 02, 18:00:04
Good point. I never let my elders have non-grey hair...at least so far! Now to figure what to do with the hairstyles that have no skin textures visible in DatGen at all! :-P


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2005 December 02, 18:14:20
After I'm all done with the recategorising, I'm going to go thru and keep only the grey or partly grey ones.  The no grey at all on elders just looks funny, imo.  I'm *practically* an elder myself, and have (according to my taller than me daughter) a "whole shitload" of grey hair. I especially like Hairfish's distinguished line.  Very real.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: Swiftgold on 2005 December 02, 19:24:18
You'll want to be careful with using DatGen, unfortunately. I had gone through and categorized most of my hair using it. However, now some of the scalps of my custom skins have been replaced with a random categorized hair texture (I can even identify which one it is is most cases, particularly now that there's a painted-on flower on some of my Sims' scalps). So I'm going to try the SimPe way and see if I can fix that. Unfortunately I sent things to DarkMatter about it around the day he decided to shelve DatGen so I don't think the program itself will be changing soon.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cwieberdink on 2006 January 12, 15:02:08
Okay, I know necromancy is bad, m'kay, but I have a further question.  Dewshine, could you be more specific on deleting the extra toddler and child hairs?  I have loads and loads of identical looking toddler hairs and I don't have a clue which I can delete or how.  Sorry for being so dense!

C


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: MokeyHokey on 2006 January 12, 15:43:44
I followed this easy tutorial at MTS2.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=89652


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cwieberdink on 2006 January 12, 16:00:44
I followed this easy tutorial at MTS2.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=89652

Thanks MokeyHokey.  I've used cleaninstaller to try and sort them (although some are showing up differently colored than what the name says, and some are greys for elders to use, which I'll have to do when I feel more confident.... but my downloads folder is slowly getting organized, I deleted a boatload of hairs and lipsticks and clothes that I'll never use and then went and downloaded more at simpathetic and I'm hoping to get everything in order before too long.

C


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: angelyne on 2006 January 12, 16:31:38
Oops I've read the tutorial and I haven't been doing it the way it's shown.  I've only been deleting the textures and the property set reference.  It seemed to work in any case, as the Maxis hairstyle was gone for the ages I didn't want but I wonder if that will cause a problem.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: Swiftgold on 2006 January 12, 16:57:38
Oops I've read the tutorial and I haven't been doing it the way it's shown.  I've only been deleting the textures and the property set reference.  It seemed to work in any case, as the Maxis hairstyle was gone for the ages I didn't want but I wonder if that will cause a problem.

That's what I did, and it seems to work okay for me. It appears to mess up things if you're trying to clone and recolor those hairstyles, but since I'm not, I'm fine with it.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: cwieberdink on 2006 January 12, 17:22:32
It's working!  I'm so excited.  LOL.  What a dweeb I am.  Anyway, my next question is, if the name doesn't say what color it is, and the picture that pops up in clean installer is indecipherable, how can you tell which color it will show in the game?  For instance, I have some backwards hats.  The hats are different colors, but so is the hair that peeks under the hat.  But in cleaninstaller, the hair under the hat looks gray.  I know it's not gray, but I don't know how to tell what it really is.  Also, sometimes the pic in clean installer looks blonde, but the color name says red.  Is the picture always the right color in clean installer?

C


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: Swiftgold on 2006 January 12, 18:02:51
It's working!  I'm so excited.  LOL.  What a dweeb I am.  Anyway, my next question is, if the name doesn't say what color it is, and the picture that pops up in clean installer is indecipherable, how can you tell which color it will show in the game?  For instance, I have some backwards hats.  The hats are different colors, but so is the hair that peeks under the hat.  But in cleaninstaller, the hair under the hat looks gray.  I know it's not gray, but I don't know how to tell what it really is.  Also, sometimes the pic in clean installer looks blonde, but the color name says red.  Is the picture always the right color in clean installer?
C

You can click next on the preview in CI to see all the texture files in the package. When I was sorting my collection I put all the ones that weren't all one color plus elder in a seperate folder. Oftentimes, especially when there's a new mesh that's only for adult, the child/teen hair won't be recolored to even match the adult hair, so you'll find all sorts of colors in there and even with the name in the file it's not exactly trustable. I have quite a few filenames in my red hair folder that say blonde or brown...


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2006 January 13, 02:47:04
That's where having the file name in mouseover is so handy, you can write down the file name of anything that looks weird in CAS, and change it with SimPE quite easily.  That helped me with the few child and toddler hairs I forgot to delete, or didn't do when I first started and didn't know it was ok to delete them.  And some of the colors, it is just hard to tell till you get the game loaded up. I've had probably 30 or so files that I've put into a different color just because it looked more like a different one.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: Zeljka on 2006 February 04, 03:44:58
Thread necromancy again, but this is a great thread and I have a couple more questions.

I've been using PE to bin hair and delete the unwanted ages but apparently I'm confused on the family part. I just can't seem to get it to work.

I tried copying the family code from the first hair to the others, (ie. Family code from Black Property Set copied to Red Property Set(s) and Hair Tone XML) as well as copying to either and not the other but the 're-familied' hair never shows up. Obviously I'm missing something...

Another question, is it possible to have hair that's not available for all ages point to a specific existing hair?

I downloaded Melodie9s hair from MTS (extracted from Maxis and converted for toddlers/children)  unfortunately, it puts duplicate copies in age groups that already have it. I can delete the dups, but I'd prefer to have it point to the same hair for the existing ages. (ie. shortcute as a toddler will transition throughout a life unless hair is changed somewhere in between)

Either that, or I'd like to make a default hair replacement so that every half decent Maxis hair is available to all ages, possibly over ambitious for someone who can't even get Families to work, but I'd rather do it all now and get it over with so I can just play.







Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: angelyne on 2006 February 04, 03:59:51
All I did is copy the family string from the black hair and paste it into the family string of all the other hair.  They it smoothly transitioned across all the colors.  The hairtone should have the code that corresponds to the correct color red, black, white, blond.  That code you can find upthread.  Could that be your mistake?

Not sure about the rest of yoru question. It's beyond my feeble abilities. 


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2006 February 04, 05:11:52
I ended up deleting the others and keeping the ones that Melodie did for all age groups; just seemed easier that way to me.  Most of the hair that I did, had the family numbers ok so I just left them alone.  There were a few that didn't transition correctly, but not enough to make me want to fix it...


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: Zeljka on 2006 February 04, 10:15:15
All I did is copy the family string from the black hair and paste it into the family string of all the other hair.  They it smoothly transitioned across all the colors.  The hairtone should have the code that corresponds to the correct color red, black, white, blond.  That code you can find upthread.  Could that be your mistake? Not sure about the rest of yoru question. It's beyond my feeble abilities. 

Darn, I was afraid of that.
I binned it first and made sure it worked before trying to make it 'family'. I pasted the 'string' (not code, heh heh) into the other colours and it disappeared. Then again, my game turned into a fiery ball shortly after, so who knows?

For the second part (sorry for such an incoherent post - too much coffee and no sleep ;))

What I'd like to do is have Melodie's hair replace the Maxis hairstyles so they will show for all age groups instead of 'in addition to'.
I'm not thrilled about Maxis hair but it looks cute on toddlers, don't want to fill my bins with excess Maxis teen/ya/adult elder stuff just to get it for them.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: angelyne on 2006 February 15, 21:25:37


I'm very interested in how the programs work and how to change details at will. Could anyone maybe also tell me how to change the family name so that, when inherited, the child get the right color but hairstyle totally random - both maxis styles and custom?

If you bin the hair color correctly, then this is what will happen.  Children (and new townies, NPC's) get a hairstyle taken randomly from your color bin custom or Maxis.


Quote
Another thing I've tried to do is to change the hair so that only one version will show up in the "elder's bin", but then the transition doesn't work as supposed to, only for the color that I used for the elder's version, if I make myself clear. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?


I'm not quite sure how you have done it, but you need to copy the family number of the color you used for the elder version ( I always use black to be consistent) and paste it in all the other colors.  In this way if you click on a hairstyle and change the color, it will transition smootly to all the other color, in the same style.  If you have not done that, if you click on a different color, it will pick a random style. It sound like you have deleted the gray texture and the elder line in your other colors but not added the family number of the hair style


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: angelyne on 2006 February 16, 01:48:19
Glad you made sense of that answer, because re-reading, I can barely understand what I meant lol.

One caveat that I can see; I have removed most of the toddler hair that wasn't custom from the custom hair package, to avoid multiple instances of default maxis hair in the toddler bin..  So that leaves very few real custom styles, there are less chances the game will pick a custom style.   That doesn't bother me however, since the first thing I do after a baby grows up is use the mirror and change their hair, and put on lyran.net healthy blush.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: jmtmom on 2006 February 26, 18:36:40
When I started w/ this, I used one set of hairs that I messed up repeatedly b4 I finally reached the result I wanted.

Sorry to bring this thread back to life, but here's a moronic question. How do I use the .bak file to restore the original?  ???

Feel free to laugh and point.  :P


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: ari_ on 2006 February 26, 19:26:58
delete the .package, rename the .bak to .package. That's it.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: yetyak on 2006 February 26, 19:38:44
And it works like a charm, as I had to do that more times than I would like to admit!!  ;D


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: BlueSoup on 2006 February 27, 16:13:43
Now the Age line tells you what age group the property set is for (I'm going to throw some numbers around...)
0x00000001 is toddlers
0x00000002 is children
0x00000004 is teens
0x00000008 is adults
0x00000010 is elders
If you have University then you have young adults too. the age number for them is 0x00000040.
These numbers can be added too, and if you want to know how I'll post that later.


Ok, Dewshine, I recategorised my hair (thanks for the great tutorial).  I only did the hair bin categorization so far, and next I will sort out the family thing.  I tried putting one of my male hairs that was made for an adult onto a teen, just to see what would happen, but the hair mesh was raised off the head like a few inches, lol.  I was just wondering if there is an easy way to convert the hair so it works for a few more ages?


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: nectere on 2006 February 27, 18:26:41
Easy? Hair? Heh...sure.

Should be easy enough though, I mean if everything else fits its just a matter of lowering or raising the mesh a bit...if you need to stretch it to fit or uh, remove gaps, you just have to do what you already know how to do, move vertices.


unless you are trying to make a base game mesh fit another age, and its not included in the current package but only referenced...thats a slightly different story.


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: BlueSoup on 2006 February 27, 18:29:34
Heh, well I was hoping there was just some sort of hair categorization thing I need to change in SimPE, because the mesh is already fine for adult males.

And yes, I know how to do it, not that I ever want to touch a hair mesh again.  :P


Title: Re: Recategorising hair with SimPE
Post by: nectere on 2006 February 27, 18:32:37
well if everything else fits and the mesh is in the custom package already, you just need to extract the gmdc and move it down a bit in milkshape (and then throw it back in the package as before), that is all. Not that big of a deal really, no vertice movement or anything. Just select all and move it down a tad or however much you think you need too. Of course if its nicely animated hair you might want to reconsider as you may lose the animations.