The Sims 3: Clothing age conversion (how I do it)
PAGE 9: Observations from the future
Returning to this tutorial after several months and many more conversions under my belt, I will now share what new things I've discovered that both helped streamline the meshing process, and produced better results overall in terms of aspect.
I will probably update this page continuously as I find more things to comment on.
1. If doing age conversions, use the adult mesh as a bone reference.
Having tested this on many occasions with meshes made up of multiple groups, I can confidently say that it is the best way to get the most accurate and smooth bone assignments. Now, the game really doesn't like it when one mesh group has more than 60 bones and will explode your mesh to spite you, but this is not a problem when putting together your bone reference mesh. What does that mean? Well, it means that even if you have a mesh with multiple groups and more than 60 bones, you can merge these groups together only for the .WSO file that you will use as a reference to assign bones with the Mesh Toolkit.
2. If you need to separate a mesh into multiple groups, have only the hands in the second group.
With more complex outfits, like long dresses, you will need to do this — because if you try to assign too few bones to a long dress it'll look like absolute crap when the sim moves. There are two perks to doing this:
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the way I separate them, the hands group has 32 bones assigned to it. That leaves you a lot more freedom for the rest of the mesh;
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the hands don't morph, so you can simply duplicate the base group and rename it to fat, thin, fit and special without worrying about bones or morphs.
I normally separate the hands around this point, by selecting the areas in Face selection mode:
3. Always check the normals, morphs and bones in CAS and in-game.
Sometimes if I do "light" things like only adding a maternity morph to an outfit, I will simply use EA's morphs instead of creating my own. However, this can be bad since some EA clothes are poorly made in terms of normal data (leading to black spots or weird shine on sim's skin), UV mapping (leading to textures showing up on areas they shouldn't), or bone assignments (some tops and outfits are notorious for having "spikes" on the index fingers).
TSRW can also be unreliable in terms of showing bad normal data, but you can use it to test bones by going to Tools \ Load Animation. The dance_together and Extinguish ones are particularly good because they have sims moving their bodies in different positions.
Bad normals can be...tolerable on clothing at times, in the sense that a weird shine will show up only in CAS but disappear in-game. However, bad normals on skin usually lead to misaligned skintones, especially around the neck seam.
Do NOT forget to check the morphs (fat/fit/thin/special)! Just because they look fine on the mid-slider setting, doesn't mean they're fine on extremes. EA seems to have this issue with the fat morphs in particular, on several basegame and EP clothes.
To the right, you can see an example of an unaltered EA Store outfit (afBodyFairyDressPetal - "Petals") with bad normals on the calves:
4. Change the main XML's type to _XML 0x0333406C [see Step 11].
TSR Workshop exports .package files with the _XML resource set as a _XML 0x73E93EEB type for some reason. The problem is that if you leave it like this, TSRW will throw up an error when you try to import the package into it (for example, if you need to fix something and don't have the original working files anymore).
By switching it to _XML 0x0333406C, you will be able to open the package files without any errors.