How to know if your item needs to be split into meshgroups:- while in CAS, put a choker, a necklace, an armband, bracelets, tall boots ( if making the bottoms/full-body outfit). All of these items must be from maxis, no custom ones. If any of these accessories clip into your garment, said accessory needs to be hidden.
- let's say, you want to hide the shadow the necklaces cast on the body. Clone yfTop_VestLeatherStudsTank, export the blend;
- you will see two meshgroups: in the chest area ( tuned to hide the shadow ) and the rest of the top. If there were many of them, id suggest you to rename them to r(eference)+(the last digit of the cut number), so r_0, r_2, r_3, etc. This is the only thing that matters so that you don't mix up the cut numbers. But in this case you can simply delete the meshgroup that is the rest of the top and leave only the chest one;
- File - Append, choose the blend with the garment that you made, then Object, then the meshgroup with the garment. Append from Library. Delete bone_bone_shape.001 and rig.001;
- select the appended garment, optionally switch how it is shaded or the shading of the whole scene, in edit mode select the area that matches the chest meshgroup. You can switch the shading back. P - Selection to separate;
- select the separated meshgroup and give it a cut number that corresponds to the original chest meshgroup. In this case, it is 0000, so the other meshgroup should have 0001.
- download this
addon ( enter 0 and click on purchase, in Blender go to File - user preference, switch to addons, choose install from file, choose this file), remove unused vertex groups from all meshgroups;
- delete the reference, save, import the blend in the yfTop_VestLeatherStudsTank.
- check how the mesh works in CAS;
- now you can go back to the pre-split blend file and bake textures;
- make lods, check how the mesh behaves on the lowest settings in live mode;
- upload thumbnails if needed.
