|
Post by s3nova on Nov 23, 2017 0:30:20 GMT -5
Sounds like a vertex weight problem. You did a weight transfer?? Sharing pictures, .blends and .packages will help other readers to analyze your problem, can you share?
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Nov 22, 2017 17:11:42 GMT -5
Hi! Not easy to say but your mesh got really complicated. And with over 36.000 faces it is huge as well. Lets split the bigger problem into smaller ones. 1. Making a proper mesh A proper mesh consist of only quads. The game uses tris for technical reasons, but when editing your mesh you should strive to only use quads. This helps with selecting and it is very helpful in UV-mapping as well. A proper mesh also contains just enough faces, remember this is all about simulation. The bigger the more it will slow your game and computer down, so a very good reason to reduce. Your mesh contains quite some repeating elements which are key to a solution. Keep in mind that once UV-mapped and textured you can duplicate separate elements without much need to adjust the UV-map. You can bend and scale them later, just keep an eye on the scale of the texture. From what I see I suggest you create 3 single elements: the medium length peaks at front and ear-area, short sized on top, long sized at the back. In cross section you should have around 4 to 6 edges, which you have in your current mesh. The most important thing is that you recreate these elements with quads. Only at the tips you will have to use tris, but that'll be just 4 to 6 then. Try to use elongated quads, elements that will be bend only slightly do not need much quads, lets say 5 or 6 for the longest element. If you know in advance where a lot of bending will occur, you can create an area with more edges which will create a smooth bend. This is the case at the front elements. Make the elements straight and symmetrical, all bending etc. will be done later. Tip 1 (see video below): make use of curves for editing. Just spend some time to learn with the videos supplied. This will make things easier for you. Tip 2: First make only the left or the right half of the hair. Convert all curves to meshes but do not join them yet. Select all and then Shift + D to duplicate, <Enter> to confirm. Move the duplicates a bit and add Mirror modifier in Object mode, apply. You can add both halves together now. Use proportional editing on the mirrored side to reduce the visible symmetry. Since you are no longer working with curves you gave up some ease of use. That is why you shouldn't join the meshes, because now you can still use proportional editing on the separate meshes which together form the mirrored half. When you're ready editing use Ctrl + J to join all meshes together and your mesh is ready. Now first do the other steps of UV-mapping and texturing. Only after that start duplicating your elements and position them in the final composition. Each element will be a clone of a base element, as such it will have the same UV-map and texture. There will be some repetition of elements visible, but remember you can rotate elements before bending and positioning. This way you can create the illusion of many different elements while actually using only 3. 2. UV-mapping UV-mapping should not be a problem on the relatively simple separate parts. Select all faces, U to unwrap, fist to Lightpack and then the second time to Follow active quads. 3. Texturing I assume you want to try to project a texture on your mesh. But with Blender versions above 2.7 you can make good use of Blender Cycles renderer. This allows you to create materials like hair and light them properly, with lamps or a HDRI image in the background. If everything looks fine, you can use the Bake Texture option of the Cycles renderer, which will actually create the texture for you following your UV-map. You can save the texture as a .png and import it into S4S. So in the end still a lot of work to be done, but I hope you understand my explanation and that you will succeed. Cycles renderer might require you to follow some video tutorial, but you can easily find them on Youtube. Be aware that Blender also as a particle effect to create realistic hair, please stay away from that as it causes ridiculous amounts of vertices. Its just about creating the material, so only focus on creating hair material with Cycles, in which you can simulate hair material or derive it from a picture. Once you master Cycles, quite a world will open up for you as from then on you can tell Blender to create textures for you. Added some video tutorials for you: using curves for easy editing of hair like here and here.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Nov 22, 2017 16:28:30 GMT -5
Hi! Your mesh has a problem, see here. There is an inner skirt part, which is OK. But there is also an outer skirt part, of which the normals are facing inward. This causes the black lines I think. Select a vertex in the outer skirt part, use L to select all linked vertices and delete them. For both left and right sides. This should help, although a clearly visible seam shows up. Just edit the mesh a bit to solve this and you should be fine.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Nov 22, 2017 16:10:14 GMT -5
It looks like the speculars are no issue, they're good (no specular at all). The problem is that your lipstick contains some transparency, which allows the highlights of the skintone to shine through. Try switching skintones to be sure. The solution might be removal of transparency in your lipstick diffuse. You can also clone the original one you found on the internet. Put the package in the Documents\Sims 4 Studio\Mods folder and you can clone it with S4S. Avoid introducing any transparency when editing the diffuse.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Nov 12, 2017 3:33:00 GMT -5
Hi! I'm sorry to say, but in the posted files there is no information present to make any sparkling neckline seam.
Attention: for the rest of this post I assume that you work with images containing an alpha layer and know how to work with a photo editor.
What you could do is edit your texture by adding white pixels which will form light dots in the black of the neckline (or a line, whatever you like). To make these white dots shiny you'll have to make a copy of your edited texture. Then delete everything out of your texture exept for the white dots on the neckline. This will lead to a completely black texture with only white dots. Save this file as '<your filename> specular mask.png', do not close your photo editor!
Next recolor those dots with RGBA (255,192,0,25), a yellowish/orange color. Then use the Magic Wand selection tool to select only the colored dots. After that invert the selection and hit <Delete>, which will lead to a transparent image only containing the colored dots. Save this file as '<your filename> specular.png' (without mask). Open Windows Explorer and change <your filename> specular mask.png into <your filename> specular.mask.png by adding a dot between specular and mask.
It is important to keep these pictures aligned with each otherm that is why you will have to copy one file as the base for the next file.
You now have two files that work together. By using these names S4S knows how to import them together. The colored dots in the specular file will tell the game to add shine and the black file with the white dots will prevent anything else than the dots of becoming shiny. This is also a warning: anything in the specular.mask file that is not completely black (RGB(0,0,0)) will let shine anything thru from the specular.png file. Even if your specular.png does not contain information, other speculars from other objects might contain some color on the same spot, which might lead to unwanted shine on other parts of body or clothing.
Hope this will work for you, if not let me know. Success!!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Nov 12, 2017 3:11:53 GMT -5
Hello! First check if your textures do not go outside the allowed borders using this for reference. Second check if any shadowmap is present (in S4S under Texture tab, Texture section, choose Shadow directly under Diffuse). Open it in a photoeditor to get a good view, as any shadow will be a light shade of grey. Unwanted shadows can be removed by painting them white and re-importing the resulting image back into S4S. Hope this works otherwise let us know. Success!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Nov 12, 2017 3:01:32 GMT -5
Much respect and a very BIG THANK YOU also from the Netherlands!! You're doing a very great job in helping so many people! Keep up the good work, you're great!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Oct 13, 2017 18:54:41 GMT -5
No, just select Edges not faces. You can also use Menu Select / Select Edge loops (often useful). Then you can mark them as sharp (will turn lightblue) or seam (will turn red). Both have effect on the smoothing, but seam is more useful when UV-mapping and sharp is more useful for smoothing. A seam helps you to unwrap (peel off) the 3D mesh to create a flat 2D UV-map, as the UV's follow the seams. The UV map is effectively split over the seams. Edges marked sharp are not split when UV-mapping, but the smoothing changes. They help to create different areas of smoothing on your mesh. Autosmooth is very useful, you use it in combination with an angle. That angle means the angle between two adjacent faces, connected by an edge. If the angle between those two faces is (for example) 30 degrees, then Autosmooth with lets say 10 degrees will not smooth both faces but it will treat them separately with a visible edge between them. If you set Autosmooth above 30 degrees, then there will be no visible edge between the faces anymore. A good setting is often 180 degrees, as this will smooth anything below 180 degrees. If you want more control over this process, then mark the relevant Edges as sharp and you can create areas of different smoothing. See this video.Video about sharp/seam is here and about smooting (using Autosmooth) is here.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Oct 11, 2017 15:46:30 GMT -5
Hello Ilona, it seems to me that your Safari browser is using plugins (e.g. symantec webkitutils) that actually cause the crash. Is this problem new or has S4S been running good until the crash? Or did you install it and got the crash immediately after installing and running for the first time?
May be you should close Safari completely before trying to run S4S.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Oct 10, 2017 13:42:14 GMT -5
Your graphics card seems fine, but what DirectX version are you using?
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Oct 10, 2017 13:35:36 GMT -5
A more general tip for UV mapping is to mark sharp edges as 'sharp' (or even as 'seam', see what works for you). Then select a face let's say on the small curved side of your mesh. UV mapping two times does the trick. Use U to unwrap (in Edit mode) and first choose 'Lightmap pack'. Ignore the result, which is most of the times not useful. Do not make any changes, but unwrap a second time. This time you choose 'Follow active quads'. This usually generates a straight set of squares which you can easily handle (Scale and Grab). It tends to be big, so scale it down in your UV map. The edges marked as 'sharp' (or seam) are very helpful to select linked faces (shortcut L) and they function as seams for the UV mapping. Altogether this saves a lot of time and creates very useful and straight UV maps.
When you get the error 'no active face selected' then shift+click a face in the area of interest. This deselects the face. Shift+click again will again select the face, but this time the face is sort of promoted to the active quad. The second Unwrap needs an active quad and you can give the unwrapper what it needs by using this.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Oct 3, 2017 13:25:37 GMT -5
Hi! Use this template for UV-mapping. The one you are using is good for CAS items but it shows not enough detail for what you want.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Oct 3, 2017 13:22:16 GMT -5
Hello! Seems you need to check the position and /or perform a Weight Transfer in Blender for the left hand dagger.
|
|
|
Metal
Sept 28, 2017 18:05:18 GMT -5
Post by s3nova on Sept 28, 2017 18:05:18 GMT -5
You're welcome! Feel free to ask if things aren't clear or you simply got stuck ;-)
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 28, 2017 6:16:27 GMT -5
Hi! Check if the UV map of the ring uses the right designated space on the texture template. If it is outside its designated area the texture will show up on other parts of the Sim. Use Sims4Studio to export the texture and use this to check the areas.
|
|