thornowl

First, why does this happen?

Each CAS part has a vertices ID range, and when two parts with morphs have vertices containing the same ID, conflict happens and this is what make some meshes to explode. And this tends to happen when we put high poly shoes with morphed high poly necklaces because the shoes verts ID range is too low. Shoes verts ID starts at 30000, and accessories starts at 31500. In the pícture below there's the information provided by the Hint button at Mesh Toolkit with all the verts IDs, but it erroneusly says that accessories start a 0.

With all that said, we can try to renumber these parts verts to a different IDs to try to bypass that.

But let's go to the tutorial!

Again, your shoe/necklace package should be ready to do this, so you won't need to go back to your project in TSRW!

For this tutorial, I'll be using Arltos 109, converted by @rollo-rolls. You can do this tutorial with any CC high poly shoes/necklace, just please respect the creators TOU and do not upload it.

Note how there are tiny gaps showing when the shoes are worn with necklace! In this picture they quite imperceptible, but with some shoes/necklaces more distracting distortions might occur.

👠Step 1:

Open Mesh Toolkit, click on Package Tools tab, and in the Name Those Files tab open your package. Click on Add names, and then type a unique name for the CC part you're working on and save it. Here's what I named mine:

👠Step 2:

Open your package on S3PE, and select the LOD1 (or the LOD0, if you're working with some accessory that might have it) GEOM plus the four BGEOs (they're the morphs) and export them to a folder (just click on it with the right button, and select Export > To file...)

(see? this is why we added the names ^^)

👠Step 3:

Back in Mesh Toolkit, go to the GEOM Tools tab, then to [Re]Number Meshes tab. There, open your base GEOM mesh and BGEOs morphs accordingly.

In the "Number to start with" box, type the number which you want to start the verts ID. I'm usually going with 57000 for shoes, and with around 40000 for necklaces (so they won't conflict with old shoes that aren't renumbered).

Click on Renumber and Save. When asked, select the according number for the LOD you're working with (in this case is 1, but again, if you're working with LOD0, then select 0), and click in Continue.

Then the program will prompt you to save the renumbered mesh and morphs. It's good to create a new sub-folder for them to avoid any confusion.

These are the files we get. LOD1 is my base mesh, and the others are the morphs.

👠Step 4:

Go back to your package on S3PE. Right click on the GEOM mesh you exported before, then click on Replace, and select your new base mesh. Save and close your package.

👠Step 5:

Go back to Mesh Toolkit. Go to the Package Tools tab, and then to the Add Morphs to Clothing/Hair tab, and open your package.

Tick "Use GEOM morph meshes", untick "Change morph blend TGI".

Then tick the morph you will add to the package, and then in the according box (in my case,LOD1 box, but again, if you're working with a LOD0, put it in the LOD0 box) open your new morph.

Then click on "Add morph to package". A box confirming the action will pop-up.

Repeat this step with the other morphs, reminding always to tick the according morph or otherwise you might make some mistake (as adding a fit morph in the place of the fat one).

After you finished, save your package (either the current one, or save as new package).

👠Step 6:

Now test it in game! If everything was done right, you should see no distortion in the shoes and necklaces. Also check if the morphs are working as intended, because sometimes we can make mistakes!

Non-recolorable presets:

we obviously know that ts4 lacks a CASt tool, so ts4 creators rely on recolors. In my conversions, I do include a couple of the item's recolors. these usually are patterns that CASt does not have.

one thing I've noticed more and more converters doing is putting such item recolors in the 'Overlay' tab in TSRW.

let me show you what that looks like for a non-recolorable preset:

it looks over-saturated, and almost crunchy. but there's another place you can import the recolor into: stencils.

stencils will be found at the bottom, under patterns. hit the plus sign next to stencils to open it.

opening it will show you this:

by default, it will be enabled as false. import your recolor into the texture tab as you would do for any other texture tab. make sure you tick the 'false' to 'true.' stencils override overlays, so if you want to use an overlay, enable stencils back to 'false.'

here's what the recolor imported into stencils looks like:

here's the two side by side:

see how different they are? let's see how they are in game:

click on the pictures to really see the difference in quality. since TS3 uses DDS. format, it compresses the texture, which results in the crunchy texture. importing the recolor into the overlay tab makes the DDS. compression more noticeable. it ultimately is up to you and whichever one you prefer, but do keep it in mind.

the overlay tab is good for small details that you want to maintain on all recolorable presets, like zippers, buttons, tags, etc. just look at EA clothes for reference, especially their shoes and male clothes.

another thing you can see from the images are the bumps on the mesh. doing normal maps can help you keep those same details on the recolorable presets without importing the recolors.

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DDS. settings:

something I also see and used to do myself is bloat package files with large file sizes, specifically normal and specular maps, as well as masks. the Sims 3 Tutorial Hub provides a link to plain maps, but the file sizes are unnecessarily big.

let's look at some of EA's maps in TSRW:

here's the specular from one of the basegame sweaters. notice the image size, DXT format, and compression size.

a lot of converters don't want the shine on regular clothes, so we use a plain, black specular map. but ask yourself, why do you need a 1024 x 1024 purely black specular map with no details?

let's try sizing it down:

notice the difference between the image and compression size. instead of bloating the package file, we can keep it down by using a 32x32 plain black specular map instead, since there aren't details we want from the specular map.

same goes for normal maps:

and masks (meant for 1 channel only):

now, notice how I underlined the info about DXT MipMaps. see how the normal map has a different number there compared to the specular map and mask.

the reason these textures use different DXT is because of the colors and alpha channel.

here's how my DDS. settings appear when saving:

DXT1 (no alpha): this keeps only the 3 color channels and has the strongest compression. it results in half the file size as DXT3/5. 3 channel masks should be saved with this, as they don't need an alpha channel.

DXT1 (1 bit alpha): this includes an alpha, but only black or white. it also results in half the file size as DXT3/5.

DXT3: this one is rarely used for TS3 textures. it really is only used for overlays. it compresses the same as DXT5, but may not be the best for images with smooth-blended alpha regions (Neely).

DXT5: multipliers and normal (bump) maps should only EVER be saved with this. it's best for colors but has a larger file size. this is why it's important to reduce the multiplier and normal map image size, especially if you don't make a normal map.

if you DO decide to do a specular and normal map, they should be regular image size, 1024x1024, and saved in the right format.

here is more information on which textures should use which compression.

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Adult to Teen Conversions:

the default for converters is obviously AF and AM. a lot of people want the items for teens too. I've seen several converters just enable it in TSRW:

please don't do this. it's honestly the lazy route. you can hardly ever get away this, specifically because of the body differences between adult and teen.

some major issues with this include gaps, seams, and unnatural body characteristics:

so please, either skip the teen mesh entirely or spend the time reshaping the mesh. @/sweetdevil-sims has a great tutorial on converting meshes from AF to TF here. the inevitable seams on TF meshes are also now fixed, thanks to @/thornowl with their new version of mesh toolkit.

@pis3update

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here are reduced file sizes and corrected settings of the plain mask, specular, and normal:

download

Sources:

If you tried to work with a mesh that had less than 100 verts/tris (converting an OBJ to WSO, for example), the app would throw this exception. It's a default warning, not one made by Cmar; seems like she wasn't aware of that issue (if she were, she definitely would've fixed that, it's really simple lol)

It says that a parameter "Value" can't be equal to 1, because it has to be between parameters "minimum" and "maximum". I checked the code that caused this, and...

It's how MTK draws the progress bar (using default Windows components). It sets a range from minimum (0) to maximum (polycount divided by 100), a starting value of 1, then increases that value until it reaches the maximum.

So if a mesh had, say, 77 polygons, and we divided that by 100, that sets the maximum of 0.77.. And we're starting from 1.. You can see why it broke lol