How to fix uneven edges?

Well, it is awfully high poly. I was messing around with checker deselect tonight and it was sort of effective. See the last post in the link. Basically, you're selecting every other edge loop that you can delete with X > dissolve edges. It seemed to work well with the chain links. I think you could run your mesh through Zbrush to get that polycount down, however. Decimate will wreck your topology so it's best not to use it. You should also delete any part of the body that is covered by your mesh; that will free up some space for your UV islands.

The weight painting looks rough to me. Like it needs to be blurred.

The bodysuit's UV islands look oddly stretched. Not the other parts. Just the three islands for the bodysuit. That will affect how the texture looks. You'll need the CAS map below to place your islands. Try to avoid the area under the hands as (I'm told) there could be conflicts with other people's custom content.



Enter face select mode, in the UV editor, enable Keep UV and Edit Mode Mesh Selection in Sync (the arrow in the screenshot below shows where it is. Ignore the rest of it), make sure you're in face select mode in the UV editor, too. Using L, select one of the three bodysuit's islands. U to unwrap. Move it off the map somewhere. Repeat for the others, unwrapping one at a time. If the UV islands are not assigned to the CAS map, press A to select all of the UV islands, then open the CAS map (Alt + O). Do it in that order. If the islands become stretched press S, Y, 0.5 to resize them. Put the islands back on the map. S to scale, and R to rotate, if necessary.



The uv_1 isn't right either. It sits too high on the CAS map (it covers the head area). The uv_1 is responsible for how your mesh responds to the CAS sliders; it works hand-in-hand with vertex paint. Did you see the clipping when using the sliders?

To fix the uv_1, first, separate your mesh from the sim's body. Select a face here and there, Ctrl + L, and the rest will be selected. P to separate. Append your reference EA mesh. File > Append > navigate to the blend file > Object > select the s4studio_mesh (hold shift if there are more than one) > Append from Library. Delete the extra rig and bone_bone_shape if they get appended. If your reference mesh has more than one mesh group shift-select each group, Ctrl + J to join them. Select your mesh, make sure the uv_1 has been selected in the side panel, add a Data Transfer modifier. Source Object: choose the EA mesh. Checkmark next to Face Corner Data. In the dropdown menu choose Nearest Face Interpolated. Under All Layers and By Name choose uv_1. Click the UVs button (see screenshot). Click Apply.


You may need to transfer the weights (not sure). If so, then hang onto the joined EA mesh for that. If not, go ahead and delete it. After transferring the uv_1, and possibly the weights, join the body with the bodysuit with Ctrl + J. 

I have a tutorial in my signature I put together for myself that lists all the steps. 

If Mauvemorn chimes in be sure to do what she directs. She's better at this than I am.

Hi. Yeah, too high-poly, there's nothing you can do to make it work as is. It would be faster to remake the swimsuits and the chains ( and manually reduce the polycout of other accessories)

- do not delete your high-poly version. You can bake textures from it to the low poly;
- reducing polycount manually on the swimsuit will take forever. Decimate will ruin everything. Its best to go back to zbrush and zremesh the swimsuit only with much much lower number. It does not need to go past a few thousands;
- ts4 cas textures are rectangular while the uv space of any 3d modelling software is square. When you apply rectangular textures to the uvs that were generated in the square uv space, they stretch. Right now all of them are stretched. So you need to either create uvs with the rectangular texture assigned in the background or shrink them vertically with S Y 0,5 before rotating or changing position;
- the garment needs the inner side only in places where it is visible. In your case, it's only on chains and buckles;
- when making a chain or anything made of identical shapes, you need to unwrap it before duplicating. Right now the chain's uvs differ, so you cannot manually reduce the polycount through uvs to make sure it all looks good. It would be faster to re-do the chain and the thing in the chest area;
- with buckles, though, you can just delete unnecessary edge loops. Just delete one buckle first, reduce the polycount on another, then duplicate and mirror;

the template is for uv_0 only, it does not correspond with how things are unwrapped in uv_1

About the chain, you can try selecting an edge in uv editor on all Uv islands (lasso select it), then select - edge loops, it should select the same edge loop on all of them, then you can dissolve it

Well, decimate will do the job but the mesh may end up with ripped uvs and display textures the wrong way. Ideally you’d want to delete unnecessary edge loops yourself but it may not be easy with the topology zbrush gives you.
Either way, make sure to replace the body with that of corresponding lods instead of decimating it

Fwecka (Lolabellesims) sometimes it may select (or, well, leave selected) things you do not want to be deleted(borders of uv islands, borders of 3d models, edge loops that go in a different direction, etc), so it’s best to be careful with checker deselect

You will have to re-adapt every mesh again.

the guidelines for the polycount are the following:
lod0 - as low as you can get while preserving details that cannot be preserved through textures;
lod1 - remove all fine details that were preserved in lod0, delete all inner side, reduce the polycount as much as you can while preserving overall shape
lod2-3 - go as low as you can. By the times the game will switch to them, you’ll be barely  seeing anything.

speaking of, you can straight up export any maxis item, write big LOD0 in from of it, assign it to the root bone, vertex paint with black, do the same for each lod with corresponding numbers, then re-import back in the package. Set the game to the lowest graphic settings, re-start it. Put the item on the sim and zoom out. Optionally, you can take screenshots of when lod0 changes to lod1 and the rest to get an idea of how much you can see and how low you can go

also,if you plan on doing more content for ts4, the biggest advice I, as ex-Maya and Zbrush user, can give you is to ditch both of these software and learn blender through courses (not ts4 specific), there are many free ones on youtube, which is another great thing about blender. These software have their own pluses but in Blender everything is just so much more simple, straightforward and convenient. As you will go further, you’ll see that things don’t always turn out right the first time even if you know what you’re doing and you have to re-do or fix certain things a number of times.  Not knowing how to do it in blender and having to go back to Maya or zbrush will be a headache, so it’s best to save yourself some time by familiarizing yourself with blender now instead of having to jump between the software and re-do the whole adaptation process… learnt this truth the hard way. Speaking of Zbrush, you will also see that the topology it gives is not always good, whereas manually retopologizing in blender or md is very easy and foolproof

also, Remove doubles is the analogue of Merge vertices in Maya. All vertices that are in the specified range from each other will be merged into one.

checker deselect is the analogue of selecting every second edge but with more options


aaaand one last thing, also do not advice you to do alpha hair. The game is not programmed to sort transparency as it should, so you will have to jump through millions of hoops to make it render alpha hair right. And if you plan on monetizing your work or just want it to reach wider audience, alpha hair is not the best choice for this. These days everything maxis-match is more popular, you can see the huge difference in notes and downloads between maxis match hair creators and alpha, so that path would not only be easier but more reasonable in that sense.