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 Tutorial - Meshing (Objects, Body, Accessory) in Milkshape |
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So you want to graft a phallus to the Virgin Mary? You want to make skirts you can look up for gynecological simulations? You just love Meche's acerbic self-loathing voyages into discovery? Well, Welcome to... Meche's World Famous Hints and Tips -to- The Sims 2 Meshing (Objects, Body, Accessory) in Milkshape I'm writing this assuming you got through my other tutorial intact and can at least grasp the concepts of assigning verts to bones, adding and subtracting faces, and importing and exporting your finished product. Since it would kill me to explain how to stroke and lick the basics (that you need to learn by exploring a little anyway) I'm going to focus on the tweaks that'll make your mesh just a little more special. For this you'll need:
Removing the Cockblock Alright, there's a few little things people who probably come to this site and download my stuff like to see and one of them is skirts without the Maxis cockblock in place. What is this? It's a single vert in place on a skirt so that one can not view up it when the Sim sits or does some weight lifting. The best example is going to be in the hula mesh, which is also your new friend (Also check out the rave mesh in Nightlife with the fuzzy legs - any mesh with at least two pieces including the body). Even if you don't use the skirt as a base it is endlessly useful (as with the env groups in the reflective meshes - the Nightlife male vampire and the female super-villain). Delete the flowers and shit and leave the base skirt or be a glutton for punishment and start with a cylinder. A word here on reversing verts - If you've meshed for ten minutes you probably noticed that a Sim mesh is only viewable from one side. This causes issues because no one wants to look at the back of an apron or up a skirt and see clear through to the horizon. The "Reverse Vertex Order" or Ctrl+Shift+F command comes in here. You'll want to make a duplicate of the area that is only viewable from one side. Try going Select -> Faces and select the area, hit Ctrl+D and it'll give you a copy. Reverse the vertex order on that copy and then regroup that shit all back together. It'll already be assigned to the right bones even, as long as you don't move it or fuck with it too much. Also replace your comments, do everything you'd normally do when adding a new piece. You'll notice that in Milkshape this'll look like shit, especially after you reweld everything together. You did remember to weld, didn't you? Also be careful you aren't doubling the entire poly count. Closed areas like cocks, bodies, and other aren't going to need this. In the game it'll look fine, even fantastic if you bother to use a reflective mesh. And you are at least experimenting a little, I'm sure. This can be used on anything, objects and all, and expanded a little more with: The Advanced Cockblock Removal This will up the poly count a bit more so keep track of that, but it?ll give you some tasty goodness. Scale down the inner reversed area and use Ctrl+N to stitch it together. Move down the inner area above this area (try hiding the other piece) and you'll get a thickness effect as if there was cloth there. This requires some tweaking and no one will notice or ever thank you for doing all that work. This brings us to: Scale: For Professional Looking Paddles and Whatnot Don't be intimidated by having to enter numbers. Go with a .95 for smaller and a 1.05 for larger. Hit it a bunch of times to try to get the right amount. Try using a 1 in one or more of the boxes to expand and contract the mesh in different ways. I would now try to explain how a 3d plane works here, but since you're at least 18 you should've had a good math class by now. Scale should not be abandoned in favor of Move. God's honest truth is that I have no idea how other people mesh, but I use the Scale button like a motherfucker. There are a few drawbacks - don't use it on two different pieces at once such as feet or hands. You're going to have to delete one side, do the work on it, flip right to left and then reassign that bad boy. And if you've assigned as many hands as I have you'll be doing your best to find a way around that. But if you're creating larger breasts, bigger muscles, boots, butts, anything form fitting - you get the idea. You'll want to use Scale to make sure you're even and then select areas from the right or left, front or back, to move. This is how I did the baby doll see-through mesh so that it had more of a fabric quality. This is when you start to focus on how the clothing falls on the body. Maxis just said 'fuck it' with those shirts in Nightlife though. Use this to make shapes, base it on the cylinder or geo/sphere and you can snap together one end, use some scaling smaller to make a tear drop shape, put a small post on it, copy and flip and you have some ear rings. Use scales to line up some chunks to make a square, scale smaller the top and bottom vert sections from the front - add a handle and you'll have a smoothed out paddle. Pig tails, whips, it's all possible with Scale. Advanced Scaling: Not an STD I went to the bathroom and forgot what I was going to write here but I'll give it a shot. You can select pieces from the front or back of a mesh, say the ass or boobs, not an entire slice through the mesh. Experiment a little with how the Scale works and then with it still selected use the Move function to realign the area in a decent way. Take a pair of feet you want to make into some basic boots. Use 'select faces' to grab and copy the feet. Delete one, enlarge it, and delete the body's feet one extra section below where you got your duplicate feet. Scale the foot up, tweak it a little, copy and reassign it to the other side. Take the extra verts left over on the body and use Ctrl+N to snap 'em together and line them up properly so it looks like the legs are going into the boots. Lift up the top of the toe and bring it forward and you probably have enough polys here to play with making some platformers. Using that you can also do shirts, skirts, halos, hair, whatever by taking a part of the body, enlarging it and realigning it. With accessories and hair you'll want to import the base object nude model I talked about before but you get the idea. With any multi-sectioned base cloned mesh that you started with (take a look at the hair with the little crown for women, any mesh with any reflective sections, usually curls, ribbons, or parts with see-through alpha sections) you can enlarge part of the nude mesh and use it as clothing or whatnot with a very cool effect. Tools: Direct X Mesh Tool This one is a little harder to use, a little more than just annoying, and endlessly helpful in object creation and to a lesser extent unintentionally high-poly body and accessory meshes. There are drawbacks, you can only do the entire mesh at once, so if you're importing a high-poly object or whatever it is you kids do then you'll have to scale the polys all at once. Otherwise I suggest exporting smaller groups as objects and focusing on one main huge mesh. This is going to fuck with assignments, so you have fair warning. It's best on objects because that isn't a real worry. There are tricks. Hit the W/S right when you start to get a view of the shaded version. Use your middle and I FUCKING HATE GAIM POPPING UP FIFTY FUCKING TIMES WHEN THERE'S A DISCONNECTION. WHAT IN THE LIVING FUCK WHERE THEY THINKING? Where was I? Right. View the shaded version and use your mouse to zoom in and focus on a bit of the object's detail that you want to keep. This should be something that can't be done with texturing or bump mapping. You might be able to drop the quality a little bit more than you think and then move the remaining verts a little to suggest the lost area more. The top limit you should consider (other than cars and beds) is around 2000 (use the Tools->Show Model Statistics to find out what your poly and vert numbers are). Beds and cars can go higher because there are usually so few of them on the lot, but try not to go above the poly count of the original item. And you did make a copy of the original item in case you fucked up. Drag the scale thing down and watch the numbers and the detail. Try to find a balance, remember you can move verts later to recover curves. Don't listen to the communists either and go as low as possible. Just remember some person somewhere is going to want to view your wonderful work and they'll be incredibly pissed if you crash their system because you really think a sphere looks better with 5,000 polys. This isn't the Xbox 360, you aren't being tea bagged by Gates, spend some more time on your textures and your objects will look better. There is an opposite to this, when you have a small object or group that you want to get more detail out of. I've used it before with accessories that I needed more control over that were on the lower end of the poly spectrum (see, I'm considerate). Hit the triangle button with the 2 beside it to double the polys, 3, 5, 7, etc. You probably won't need more than 2. Tools: Model Cleaner Yes, it is tempting, isn't it? A tool that will clean out all those needless triangles so that everything will be smooth and crisp yet without that laggy aftertaste. This, again, is more of an object tool and it will come in handy. It does work, it does work well, but it does not work that way all the time or for every kind of mesh. It can take out a thousand polys without and degradation and will let your sister dump him instead. No hard feelings. SAVE YOUR WORK FIRST. SAVE IT ONCE THEN USE SAVE AS TO SAVE IT AGAIN TO SOMEWHERE ELSE. This is fucking atomic in what it can fuck up. So experiment each time as if you've never seen this tool before. And usually it's not a good idea to separate the verts for the sake of the texture like it asks. Ctrl+T: Texture Map No, I don't use that UV Map classic or whatever people are shoving up their noses now-a-days. I know, I know, I'm very old school about how many different programs I want to involve in one simple fucking task. Yes, you should probably use UV Mapper Classic. Go ahead, I don't care. For accessories no one gives a shit about that are reflective and won't show a good texture anyway - or for body parts from one Sim grafted to another that are already mapped to the right place - for simple flat objects or objects that don't need a huge amount of crap because the detail is in the mesh (I did say not to do it, but fuck it, I did it with the riding crop) - THINK OF THE CHILDREN. Texture maps stick with stuff, even exported objects, so use that to your advantage. Just select the group, go to 'materials' say New, open up the project texture from the Bodyshop window or export it from the object in Simpe. Click 'assign' and right click on the window that shows the 3d rendering of your work and choose 'Textured.' Got that? Now it should look a little something like it does in the game - minus the lighting effects and tasty backgrounds. This will save some time as far as loading up bodyshop or the game fifty times to see if that one annoying pick is gone. You can see holes and stuff here if you look carefully, also try using the alpha to see what won't appear - everything that you want showing should look white. Hit Ctrl+T and then select the group that you are interested in. It should show up as a flat wireframe on top of the texture or alpha, cool. For some reason this really shocks some people, but relax, remember all those tests they put you through in junior high? The ones where they showed you a flat wireframe and you had to tell them what it'd look like put together? I have no idea what I'm talking about either. If it's on the alpha (feel free to switch) you can see what parts you're going to need to color in white. You can also take a screen shot and use this with the opacity layer bit in Photoshop to make that quicker. I know there's probably more robust approaches, but we're not talking about remapping a full body mesh here. You shouldn't need to do that anyway. If you've added parts you should probably do this step before you regroup to the other pieces of the mesh. If you already regrouped or whatever you can tray selecting and moving the piece you want moved to a new location. I'm sure you noticed that there are actual empty spaces in the texture. This is where you should place new additions that you want to add new textures to. If you're crafty/lazy you can also take advantage of the texture to do this for you. Keep in mind you can easily piss off anyone trying to recolor your work this way. But you should be asking for permission anyway or at least cracking this open to take a look-see if you're still just learning. Well. That's enough of that. Some Crap and Troubleshooting Now for some final thoughts in whatever order I think of them in.
Seriously: Try all the tools. Don't stick to one or two, use combinations of them and you'll get a better effect. Don't be that guy that posts objects that are shit. Try to stick with the Maxis style so someone can use it in the game and it won't stick out like a sore thumb. Challenge yourself a little. Find a picture or an idea that seems almost out of your reach and do your best. Honestly, there are enough of the basic body mods and a little creativity will be your ticket to limited fame and fortune or whatever it is I should have. Since you can't remake all the content then try to stick with what's there and it'll be more appreciated by the casual players. Don't use the actual texture from a real object (for clothes it's fine - otherwise blend it to match the game) and don't scale up the polys or anything else without considering copyrights, quality, speed, and assholeness of your actions. Don't steal other people's work. Ask for permission or just look at it and make your own - you might do it better. I'm not going into some bullshit PLUR thing here either. I don't care about the hippy granola emotions side of it. Most people will work with you and gladly hand over any help or files you need. Fuck the people who won't. But at least try to make it yourself first. Seriously. I know we're in the instant gratification age and looking at a wire-frame boob for an hour gets old, but grow some character. God I'm tired. I thought my new graphics card was coming today so I was all excited and now it's just sitting at some hub waiting for the volcanoes to come. Contact/Questions/Comments If you've read this and the other tutorial and have a question, addition, comment, or just want to tell me that my thighs are shapely shoot me an email at meche colomar a-t gmail with the whole dot com thing going on. I'll also take a look at your meshes if you need help, but remember I CAN TELL IF YOU READ THIS OR NOT. Be verbose about the problem and wait for me to ask for the mesh. There's a different between asking a question about what you don't understand and not bothering to try to understand it. My last job was shit because no one read my instructions so don't remind me of that.
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