#c:o

Morph Madness!

Fixing Exploding Morphs

Marik's Egyptian Choker is currently in production. It is the first accessory I've made that involves assignment to more than one bone and morphs for fat, fit and thin states. So there is a learning curve, and it is during that learning curve that interesting and unexpected things can happen.

As with my other content, I'm making the choker fit sims of all ages and genders--that's 8 different bodies.

Adding fat, fit and thin morphs multiples this number to 27 different bodies.

I'm also making 3 levels of detail for each of these. The number comes to 81 different bodies, 81 different bodies for which I need to tightly fit a cylinder around the neck and avoid clipping.

That's a lot of work. I can see why most custom content creators stick with one age, gender and detail level. At least, they did in the past. Our tools are getting better day by day, and that may partly be because of creative, ambitious and somewhat obsessive people like me.

There are usually multiple ways to solve the same problem. Some ways are faster than others. This I've learned from working in Blender3D. You can navigate to a button with your mouse or hit the keyboard shortcut. You can use proportional editing to fiddle around with a mesh or you can use a combination of modifiers.

If I am going to be creating 81 chokers, I don't want to be fiddling around on each one of them for an hour. I need something automated, repeatable and non-destructive so I can make adjustments later without having to start over from the beginning. I need to work smart rather than just work hard.

This is where modifiers and geometry nodes come in. After you develop a stack to work with one body, the same process pretty much works for the others as well. That is how it became easier for me to model each of the 81 chokers from scratch rather than to use proportional editing to fit a copy from one body to the next.

But I was about to confront an explosive problem…

Anyone who has worked with morphs before probably knows where this story is headed. There is a good reason to copy the base mesh and then use proportional editing to refit it to the fat, fit and thin bodies. That reason has to do with vertex index numbers.

You see, every vertex in your mesh has a number assigned to it so that the computer can keep track of it. Normally, the order of these numbers doesn't really matter much. I had never even thought about them before I loaded my base mesh and morphs into TSRW, touched those sliders to drag between morph states, and watched my mesh disintegrate into a mess of jagged, black fangs.

A morph is made up of directions for each vertex in a mesh on where to go if the sim is fat or thin or fit. The vertex index number determines which vertex gets which set of directions. If the vertices of your base mesh are numbered differently than the vertices of your morph, the wrong directions are sent to the vertices, and they end up going everywhere but the right places.

It is morph madness!

When a base mesh is copied and then the vertices are just nudged around with proportional editing, the numbering remains the same. When you make each morph from scratch, the numbering varies widely.

How, then, could I get each one of those 81 meshes to be numbered in exactly the same way?

Their structures and UV maps were the same, but their size and proportions varied a lot from body to body. Furthermore, I'd used the Edge Split modifier to sharpen edges, which results in disconnected geometry and double vertices.

Sorting the elements with native functions did not yield uniform results because of the varying proportions.

The Blender Add-On by bartoszstyperek called Copy Verts Ids presented a possible solution, but it was bewildered by the disconnected geometry and gave unpredictable results.

Fix your SHAPE KEYS! - Blender 2.8 tutorial by Danny Mac 3D

I had an idea of how I wanted the vertices to be numbered, ascending along one edge ring at a time, but short of selecting one vertex at a time and sending it to the end of the stack with the native Sort Elements > Selected function, there was no way to do this.

Of course, selecting 27,216 vertices one-at-a-time was even more unacceptable to me than the idea of fiddling with 81 meshes in proportional editing mode.

So… I decided to learn how to script an Add-On for Blender and create the tool I needed myself.

A week and 447 polished lines of code later, I had this satisfying button to press that would fix my problem.

Here are the index numbers before and after pressing that wonderful button.

My morphs are not exploding anymore, and I am so happy I didn't give up on this project or give myself carpal tunnel syndrome with hours of fiddling.

Marik's Egyptian Choker is coming along nicely now. I haven't avoided fiddling entirely, but now it only involves resizing to fix clipping issues during animation.

Unfortunately, I'll have to push the release date to next month, but now, I have developed my first Blender Add-On and maybe, after a bit more testing, it could be as useful to other creators in the community as its been to me.

Looking for more info about morphing problems? See this post.

See more of my work: Check out my archive.

Join me on my journey: Follow me on tumblr.

Trials through Pandæmonium

Traditions dictate we die by choice, we queue together, and we run the raid as many times as it takes so everyone can go

Hiya! It’s possible. Kitty Ear Sunglasses and  these recolorable glasses are examples of how it’s done. The lens and frame are on a separate group. Then you would change the opacity of lens on the multiplier layer with alphas and/or using a 50% on the texture part (hope that makes sense). It’s no different then doing glass for objects or sheer fabric on curtains for example. You can learn more here. Then you need to adjust some values in the Mesh-Group-Materials tab. The Diffuse values will need to be adjusted. The alpha value should be 199 while the others can be whatever you need. The lower you go the darker the color (I believe). My suggestion is to start with 199, 255, 255, 255 and adjust after testing. And that’s really it. It’s fiddling with the textures and the meshes materials values.

@bear-little-loss

[He figured it was late enough that his decision to sit himself in the canteen was a good one. One that would mean he’d be able to sit in silence, mope in his privacy, without having to deal with the contact of anyone else. 

He’d left his room a while ago. Left Kip with a soft goodbye and wandered, without intentional aim, to what thankfully what appeared to be an empty mess hall. So he poured himself a coffee, left out the milk and sat in the corner where he was able to sit and drape his face over the weak steam for a minute or so. 

He’d overacted like a child and he knew it. Had lashed out in a way that didn’t warrant the situation for it. He’d given into a will that he’d thought was long gone and in it’s wake potentially lost a friend. That’s what was bothering him now, the idea that Zach would likely never really want to speak to him again. Not the kiss. Not the rejection. The idea of loss. 

He sighed; the coffee steam plumed quickly to his nostrils. It was a moment later, as he bought his cup to his mouth to sip, when he felt a presence to his left. It took a lot for him not to sigh, he disguised it in the quick sip he took before turning to meet his company] Oh...[He set down his cup.] Orson, you..you alright? 

Morph Madness Pt2!

Fixing Morph Interactions

The second version of Marik's Egyptian Choker is currently in production. Despite fixing the exploding morph issue I described before, it seems that my morphing problems were not yet at an end. Creating Marik's Egyptian Armbands and seeing these two accessories worn together revealed another issue.

When several accessories with morphs are worn together, there is a possibility of their morphs interacting inappropriately if their vertex IDs conflict.

The conflicting vertices then veer off into space when the accessories are worn together like in the image above. It may not be obvious, but the bottom of the choker and the bottom of the left armband are ramping off like party ribbons, not the effect I was going for.

So what are these vertex IDs I am talking about and what do they have to do with morphs?

I gave a pretty good description in my previous post about exploding morphs, but I will recap here for you.

Every vertex in your mesh has a number assigned to it so that the computer can keep track of it. A morph is made up of directions for each vertex in a mesh on where to go if the sim is fat or thin or fit. In TSRW, the sliders can be used to drag between these morph states and view them.

The vertex index number determines which vertex gets which set of directions. If the vertices of your base mesh are numbered differently than the vertices of your morph, the wrong directions are sent to the vertices, and they end up going everywhere but the right places.

What happens when the same vertex gets two different sets of directions?

You are seeing the answer in the image. It takes some sort of average and ends up in the wrong place for both items.

How do we fix this unwanted interaction?

We know that the game allows us to wear combinations of clothing and accessory items together. To keep the morphs of these items from interacting like we see above, the game reserves a range of vertex IDs for each category of item. Stay within the range for your category, and you're gold. Exceed that range, and you'll start seeing problems.

When you import a mesh into TSRW, the vertex IDs to be used in the game are automatically assigned based on the category of item you've cloned. For the choker, I cloned a necklace, so the vertex IDs were numbered to start at 31850.

Starting Vertex ID of Range Category for Sims 3 Accessories:

Earrings: have no morphs

Necklaces: 31850

Armbands: 32300

Bracelets: have no morphs

There is a suggestion online which I will now debunk because it has lost me time and ultimately created problems rather than solving them. The suggestion is to renumber the vertex IDs to have necklaces start at 4000 and armbands start at 8000.

The first problem with this suggestion is that TSRW automatically renumbers to the ranges I gave above. Manually renumbering in TSRW is possible within the Vertices Editor, but it is a hassle. So, I wrote a Python data entry script to automate this process. I succeeded in renumbering the IDs to the 4000s, but there was a second problem: the game is not coded to recognize morphs in this range.

Imagine me being so proud that I'd figured out how to do this code and have it work for me. Imagine me opening up the game and testing the renumbered package. Imagine the item not responding to any of the sliders as if it had no morphs at all. Such a bummer!

If you want your morphs to work, you have to following the guidelines of the game. I've learned this the hard way.

So what are these guidelines?

For a necklace with morphs, vertex IDs start numbering at 31850 and you have 450 available vertex IDs. Ideally, you would fit all your LODs into this range, so that their combined total came in under this number, but there is some wiggle room. You only really need LOD1 to fit within this range to avoid interaction.

For an armband with morphs, vertex IDs start numbering at 32300. I have not tested enough to determine the limit to this range or what category may come afterward to interact with it.

Realize that splitting your hard edges will increase your vertex load in TSRW. A good rule for reducing geometry is if the camera cannot see a detail, it doesn't need to exist.

I've been recreating Marik's Egyptian Choker from scratch to reduce the load to within this vertex ID range while preserving quality by adding a normal map.

Here is a sneak peek of the custom thumbnails.

I'll also add a normal map to the armbands, so you can look for that update too.

In the meantime, I hope this information is helpful to other creators and users mystified by why their custom content is not working as they'd like.

See more of my work: Check out my archive.

Join me on my journey: Follow me on tumblr.

This tutorial shows you (kinda) how to fix black spots on conversion meshes. However. I strongly advise people who have this to go back and start again and learn how to avoid this as it is more effort to fix it! Most common causes: 

auto smooth is on in Milkshape

Delete duplicates was used

Model Clean was used

This tutorial shows you how to delete a body under a clothing mesh so that you can f.e. convert AM/AF to TM/TF or convert between body meshes. If you wish to convert between different ages or more different body meshes, please watch the Age Conversion video too! If when you import your new .wso for a different age into TSRW, the figure looks like an octopus, please use the newer TSRW instead!

I see so many pieces of CC being uploaded with seams that I thought I would make a video tutorial on how to fix these! Examples below: