[SOLVED] Clothes creating issues in Blender 3.6.7 + S4S Star

Sharp edges conclusion: select boundary loop => mark sharp to achieve better in-game shadows.

Why is it necessary to unwrap the bottom of the dress if it is down below there and not that important? Is it possible to leave it as is?


29. Shift + left click on the vertices of the collar and sleeves seams.
30. UV => Mark seam (why do we need to mark that as seam?)
31. UV => Unwrap
32. Sticky selection mode => Shared location
33. Place seam vertices on the mesh, so the one seam vertex will be in the same position as the dress vertex, and the other seam vertex will be a little further (Do we merge the mesh on steps 32-33?)

35. Alt + H to unhide
36. Select dress mesh
37. UV - Export UV Layout for body and dress => 1024x2048 (is it acceptable to export in 2048x4096 for HQ textures?)
38. Scene - Cut "0000" (what does the cut value mean?)
39. Add modifier - Edge split - uncheck edge angle - apply (why do we need it?)
40. Save mesh and import into S4S
41. Add - mesh - plane (note: for better shadows)
42. Delete materials
43. Enter shader editor
44. New => Add => Image texture => 1024x2048, alpha 0 (again, is it acceptable to use 2048x4096 for HQ?)
45. Select dress mesh and choose image on the UV images
46. Render engine => cycles => GPU (why cycles?)
47. Samples => 500 (why 500?)
50. Bake => Bake type => Ambient Occlusion
51. Margin => 6 (why 6? I saw 3 and 4 in other tutorials, can you explain how it affect on the texture? The lower value the higher quality?)
51. Make sure that image texture is selected on the shader editor
52. Bake the diffuse
1. When I tried to bake diffuse for the first time, the texture was noisy or whatever is the proper name for this, and your texture seems smoother. When I re-tried the tutorial, my texture was smooth too. Can you explain what might cause that noise?
2. What if the dress too close to the body? May I at first move/resize it and then hide gaps and everything else? Are there any golden rules about outfit mesh/size distance?

Cuts:
If you were to switch to the warehouse and embed all resources, you'd see Geometry resources ( also called meshgroups, cuts, subparts, 3d models, etc. Basically, parts of your mesh).

Simple items like a lingerie set have 1 geometry per lod, so 4 in total. More complex items can have more and their number per lod may differ.
Each of these geometries has different identifiers, which are tied to different tuning. What you import in the package will inherit these things, so it must correspond with what you're replacing.
But if the mesh is made of multiple parts, how does s4s know which one is meant to replace what? Cut numbers.

There is always a reason why maxis meshes are split into multiple meshgroups and you must never disregard or delete them. Remember that each of these meshgroups is tied to something in the package, so disregarding why or straight up removing it can cause problems.
There are three known to me reasons as to why CAS items are split into multiple parts:
- to assign a different shader to a specific part of the mesh. For example, lenses of glasses need transparency, so they are separated and have a different shader assigned to them;
- interaction with other CAS items. For example, the bottom of pants interacts with tall boots: loose pants hide boots, tight pants tuck into them. Sleeves hide bracelets, collars hide necklaces, etc. All of this is done to prevent these items from clipping into each other;
- bone limit. A meshgroup can be affected by no more than 60 bones. If this numbers is exceeded, some area of the mesh is separated into another meshgroup. This is why some meshes are split in finger, skirt or foot areas.
Presumably, Dresspanels is split in LOD1 due to this bone limit. Does it differ between LODs? Who knows. Should you import a decimated mesh from LOD0 into LOD2-3? Probably not, but lets hope enough vertices was removed for the bone limit to not be exceeded. Just check the mesh in live mod on the lowest graphics settings. If it does not distort, it's fine. If it does, then do lod2 the same way you did lod1 without splitting

Baking:
Why cycles? Starting from 2.8, blender render has no ability to bake textures. This is a good thing because blender render is not realistic, so the results you get from it are worse.

First, you need to understand what ambient occlusion is.
Imagine that your object is lit from all direction equally ( let's say, your dress is inside a glowing sphere ). This type of light is called ambient. Would your dress be flat white? Not fully, because it still casts shadows on itself. If you were to introduce more obstacles between the source of light and your object, there would be more shadows, which is why you need the body and the floor in the scene. But if those obstacles actually clip into your dress, the shadows they created look sharp and are pitch black. This is why you disable rendering only for objects that may clip into your garment, not everything else in the scene.
There are two reasons why the texture may look noisy: overlapping uvs and low samples.
- The outer and inner sides of the dress are lit and occluded differently, so their baked textures would look different. But if uvs of the outer and inner side overlap, how is blender supposed to know what shading to bake? So it bakes both and it looks noisy (like, big noise, triangular shaped). If you added the inner side to  your dress without moving uvs as some tutorials suggest, this is why;
- in simplest terms, sampling is the amount of attention the rendering engine gives to every pixel, lol. Im not going to go into how it works, you dont really need to understand it, but the lower the number, the worse the quality. I think 500 is pretty good for ambient occlusion, but if you had different sources of light, you'd need to increase it. In my case, it takes 17 seconds to bake this image with 500 samples, so I can increase it to 2000 and get a completely noiseless texture, but on weaker computers it can take more than an hour, so dont go overboard with this if you have one. First, theres a limit to how good it can get ( remember, small uvs = less pixels to preserve shading while baking, so 1000000 samples wont help ), second, it increases rendering time dramatically.
Light paths is not related to this noise at all. The only difference on our examples ( baking clothing) between 1 and the default 12 is rendering time. It is noticeable with caustics and the likes, which is something you'll never use for this

Blender image export settings:
You can read what all of this means here. In short, it makes no difference in our case. Less compression and 16-bit would preserve the image quality better ... if there was much to preserve in the first place. I compared the image exported with default settings to the one with no compression and 16 bit and there was no difference at all, so dont sweat it.

Margins and resolution:
On maxis textures they range from 6 to 8 pixels. If youre going to make a hq texture, you need to use 12-16 instead. If you'll make them too big, the texture may get on the body's uvs. If its too small, you'll get this along the borders of uv islands

Again, not something you need to understand, but in short: one pixel can display only one color. When mipmaps are created, the image shrinks and there becomes less pixels to preserve these colors. As a result, the image worsens in quality and the area between the texture and the transparency background blurs. So when you zoom out in-game, you start to see the transparent area of the texture.
Authors of tutorials tell to set it to a smaller number because they did not study gaming assets before teaching others how to make them.

About normal map, it’s actually super easy and requires no sculpting or additional programs

I assume you’re using MD? So it goes like this:
- once you’re done making your mesh, subdivide the avatar and increase particle distance on the garment. You may want to increase offset from the avatar on tight clothing ;
- simulate until the mesh looks very good;
- export the garment as weld and thin, naming it High poly;
- then reduce the polycount WITHOUT simulating again (or, if you retopologized, apply the topology now, not before). If it clips into the body or looks ripped along the seams, don’t worry, the seams will be welded and the body deleted;
- export the mesh as Low poly;
- so once you’re done adapting the low poly version in blender and it works in-game, you just bring in your HP version and bake diffuse and normal map from it to low poly. You can add seams in you want by bevelling and extruding seams. Just don’t waste your time on stitches, those things are too small to be preserved

You can just look up tutorial on « baking normal map from high poly blender », there are many of them, don’t need to be TS4 or clothing specific.

When you click on the avatar, there are different options in Properties. Both subdivision and offset are there.
Fabric thickness will change how the mesh simulates, so unless you’re making « knitted » tights, this is not the way to go.
Great thing about tight clothing is that you don’t need to adapt it at all:
- say, you created tights in MD, exported;
- clone socks, export the blend, open;
- import your tights, bake diffuse and normal maps;
- save, modify textures, import just these textures in the package. That’s it, nothing else.
Bras, underwear, swimsuits, turtlenecks, tights shirts, leggings, socks, gloves, etc, all can be created this way.
You can also create simple clothing this way, except for instead of baking MD mesh to some nude body part, you baked it to an exist maxis mesh that is shaped similarly to yours.
You could also import maxis meshes in MD as garments and get perfectly fitted clothing instead of making it completely from scratch


Particle distance: it depends on your mesh. You want a LP mesh to have the same overall shape as a HP mesh, minus all small details that can be preserved through textures instead.

Retopology is something you should save for later. Yes, « miscellaneous => remesh (beta) » is technically retopology, but you should never use it. It fails to do everything retopology should, only makes it worse, so don’t bother. As a beginner, model in quads. Once you master everything else, you can try manually retopologizing. It’s not difficult to do, but it’s kind of difficult to learn, since the answer to « how » is always « depends ». But here’s a simple example sims4studio.com/post/194158/thread


The mesh will change the shape and the result of baking from one mesh to another will not be right. You can just undo this, lol

For the future, MD’s buttons are very high poly, it’s best to use custom ones made of cylinders. Also, try to never put buttons in the chest area on feminine frame

Socks or anything like this are just textures projected on the default body. There is a mesh (just a face hidden inside a leg), but you do not need to modify or replace it at all. You just bake diffuse and normal maps, combine them, import instead of the diffuse inside the package, and it’s done
( bear in mind that a normal map is tied to geometry, so if there’s no geometry, a normal map won’t work )