hiii! would you mind sharing a tut for how to add/make morphs for hairs over the normal poly of 11k?
It's all in the vertex ID's!
My "discovery" comes from some things @thecardinalsims said in their hairtutorial on MTS (recommended read/overall workflow!), some things @virtual-hugs told me, as well as a fragment from @bellakenobi's vertex id renumbering tutorial, that told me the vertex id range for hair is in between 20k and 30k, a range of 10k:
Basically: Cardinalsims said somewhere in their thread that the max amount of vertex id's for hair is 10k, the range being between 20k and 30k, and then I also saw this by Bella - a bell started ringing and I had to confirm for myself (cardinalsims generally does very low poly hairs), and VH said something about a 10k limit and vertex id's...
How I understand it, vertex id's are the "positions" in which there are vertices, aka the corners of poly's or faces. Vertices that are in the exact same spot, will share a vertex ID.
Lots of hairs are above 10k vertex id's. This, even when there aren't deliberately morphs added, will make the hair deform when morphing 3D accessories or slightly higher poly shoes are worn, because the hair gets in their range - above 30k or 31,5 k respectively, starting from hair's 20k - I've seen this with a couple of hairstyles. they started deforming when I put a necklace or cc boots on a sim.
To counter this, most creators clone the cursed pigtails in tsrw. They aren't morphed and EA gave them a very odd vertex id range, starting at 240 000 or something (or add another zero). (Edit: It's actually from -1 to -1) This vertex id range being miles away from everything will make it not clash, but I guess also makes it unmorphable.
Then we come to: how to make many more hairs than expected have below 10k vertex id's?
Very simple, it's all in the backfaces. Out of respect for those creators I won't randomly share share pictures of those cases, but basically; in most cases, the backfaces of hair will either be sized down slightly, repositioned slightly, or have less faces and have a different shape (often resulting in a sort of "checkerboard" look). Aka, not all the backface's vertices will be in the exact same position as the uppers their vertices, resulting in more vertex id's.
Left is upper (blue) with backface (red) not the exact same shape; the only shared vertices are the white dot, the grey dots will have different vertex id's
On the right, the upper and backface have the exact same shape without resizing, just copypaste and normals flipped. All their vertices are in the same spots, sharing the same vertex id for each "pair".
That the backfaces are different isn't always bad, as it can cut down on overall polycount. Newsea Spotlight for example it's backfaces were much lower poly, enabling a curly hair to be below 13k. but even with the different shape, lots of the vertices (basically those on the edges of the strands) still shared the exact same location, so after recalculating vertex id's (see further) they were below 10k, and the hair morphs well. So with hair that's below, say, 13k polycount, it doesn't hurt to just click the vertex id button and that's it and it might already be morphable.
So when making my anto angele edit, I wanted to reconfirm it with a 15k+ hair.
I first deleted all the backfaces, and did what I wanted to do (reshaping it to fit the male head and edit the bones)
With "face orientation" on in blender, it will show up in blue, with the backside of the faces in red. What's red will show up invisible in the game, so some hairlocks won't exist from some angles, and we don't want that of course.
At that point, it had 6693 vertices, with 6519 vertex id's. This I saw after changing the "start-id" to 20 000, and clicking "recalculate vertex id's"
I duplicated the mesh. I deleted the strands that don't need backfaces (the bits covering the scalp and some of the ponytail), and did Mesh -> normals --> flip, so the red side is facing us now, the side that will be invisible. So other than deleting some strands and flipping the normals, I don't touch it.
When I make both the upper and backfaces visible then, the places that have backfaces will either be purple or magenta, very pretty shades!
I selected both in object mode, first the upper, then CTRL -> backfaces (basically, whatever keeps purple on the outside and not the magenta), and clicked CTRL + J to join them.
i then clicked "recalculate vertex id's" again, and tada! still 6519 (my final thing actually nded up more cus I had deleted too much in these obj's, they're whatever I found that was the backface and upper still separated in my blend file to illustrate) while being almost 16k faces.
Basically - when backfaces and uppers are the exact same shape and position, the amount of vertex id's can never be more than the amount of vertices before backfaces are added. If you consider adding backfaces tends to double the vertices, and often more than 2 vertices share the same spot, hair up to 25k might have below 10k vertex id's. it will depend on it's exact structure and style (aka, how many of these poly's are part of backfaces)
That's also obviously where the supposed 11k limit for morphed hair comes from - some vertices will be in the same location, accidentally bringing the amount of vertex id's below 10k without the creator ever looking at them.
I would also recommend creating (hatless) hair in DABOOBS rather than TSRW. It's a very intuitive, non-overwhelming software, and hair tends to behave better with it. The aforementioned Newsea spotlight was glitchy and did, in fact, explode in the morphs when I made it with TSRW. I thought my "theory" of hair above 12k being morphable was wrong, but then I made it again in Daboobs with those very same geom and texture files, and it was fine!
For the actual making of the morphs, I'll refer you to cardinalsim's tutorial again, as it is very well explained there.
