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Quick(?) and very dirty tutorial: mixing meshes
This is a “simple” tutorial for transferring the neck and cuffs from Sexy Rabbit to a garment made by EA. I wont explain everything (like making a mask) so you’ll have to google/bing/startpage/duckduckgo/qwant/searx/swisscows the rest (plus using modthesims, simswiki, thesimsresource and tumblr).
What you’ll need:
1) Making a .wso on s3pe (because TSRW can’t open my damn package…)
Open Meshtoolkit and go to the ‘Package Tools’ tab and then to ‘Name Those Files’, on the box select Sexy Rabbit SIMPLER and press ‘add names’. A second window will appear already with a name on it: “afTopJacket34Sleeve”, you can leave it or put any other name (don’t go overboard). You can overwrite the package or create a new one (I suggest to overwrite it).
Open that package in s3pe and go to the lowest part to turn off the ‘preview’ (it will make selecting things quicker), then select the ‘_LOD1 GEOM’ and ‘_fat’, ‘_fit’, ‘_thin’ and ‘_special’ BGEOs. Export them to file, each one will have a looooong name with the description almost at the end, you can rename them as you wish as long as you don’t replace the extension.
Open Meshtoolkit, go to the ‘Conversion Tools’ tab and then to ‘Geom to TSRW WSO’, on the boxes select the lod1 and the fat, thin, fit and special morphs we just extracted. When you press ‘Convert to WSO’ a second window will appear that ask us to ‘Select the base mesh LOD’ in this case select ‘1’ and then press ‘Continue’ to save it, name it ‘rabbit_reference.wso’.
Still in Meshtoolkit and the ‘Conversion’ tab. Go to ‘WSO to OBJ’, select ‘rabbit_reference.wso’ and name it anything you want. Couldn’t we just skipped the conversion to WSO and go from geom to obj directly? Nope. The wso has information about the bone painting plus morphs, we will need it later.
If TSRW didn’t had problems opening my garment (happens rarely) it could have generated the WSO and OBJ in two steps instead of all this but is good to know alternatives.
2) Editing the OBJ
Open Blender and import the OBJ, on the right section of the file picker, almost at the middle, you will see the letters ‘Geometry’, click on that and two boxes will appear, deselect ‘Split by Object’ and instead select ‘Split by Group’.
If you did it right this is how it should look:
On the ‘Scene Collection’ section delete each group by using the right mouse button and selecting ‘delete’, all except ‘group_base’. Click on the mesh, then press the key ‘Tab’ to enter ‘edit mode’ then press the number ‘3’ above your keyboard to go to ‘faces’ mode.
Quick double-press the letter ‘A’ to be sure everything is deselected, then move the cursor over the stomach and press the letter ‘L’, all the faces connected to the mesh should be automatically selected, move the cursor over each arm and do the same, then do it again for the tail:
Press ‘X’ and then choose ‘Faces’ everything but the neck and cuffs should be deleted. Now I’m noticing 4 faces pertaining to the boobs that are still there, to select them press ‘B’ to draw a box around them, press ‘X’ and then ‘Faces’ again.
Now we’re going to export it back as OBJ (File>Export>OBJ). In the file picker, right section, deselect ‘Objects as OBJ Objects’ and instead select ‘Objects as OBJ Groups’, then go to the ‘geometry’ section and deselect ‘Write Materials’.
3) Back to WSO
Meshtoolkit>Conversion Tools>OBJ to WSO. On the first box select the OBJ we just made on Blender and on the second ‘rabbit_reference.wso’, press ‘Convert to WSO’.
Meshtoolkit will automatically add the bone painting using the reference, but we still need the morphs. Go to the ‘Auto tools for WSO’ tab and then to ‘ Auto-create Morphs’. On the first box select the WSO we just made, then ‘rabbit_reference.wso’, then down below click on ‘Restrict Interpolation to nearest face’ and finally click on ‘Create Morph Meshgroups’.
The mesh is ready to be mixed, we only need to modify the textures.
4) Extracting textures
Let’s go back to opening the original package in s3pe, we’ll need to export all the textures: mask, overlay, multiplier, clothing specular and normalmap. You can turn on the preview to visualize them. Right-click on each one and select ‘Save as DDS’ which will allow you to rename them, or select all of them and “export them as file” which will allow you to save them in bulk but with the elongated name. I prefer the first method.
Now open TSRW and lets clone a very simple garment, what do I mean with that? Body and clothes share the same texture, in cases where the clothes need a little more space (to include belts, ruffled decorations, etc) you have two specific areas at both sides (for upper and lower garments respectively).
We want a dress or top that has the ‘extra area for tops’ unused because that’s where I originally located the textures for the cuffs, neck, bowtie and the tail. So I selected the ‘afTopDressTightHalter’ from the base game because it has that area cleared and because neck and wrists are also unobstructed.
Don’t forget once you select the dress you’ll have to enter a ‘unique name’ under the ‘Project Details’ window, this is very important to avoid conflicts with other creators and your future mods.
Ok, so let’s export the textures from the halter, go to the ‘Texture’ tab on TSRW and press ‘Edit’ for overlay, mask, multiplier and clothing specular, on the new window that will appear press ‘Export’. Rename it accordingly to differentiate them from the rabbit textures. To export the normalmap go to the ‘Mesh’ tab and on the box choose ‘High level of detail’ then on either ‘Group 0’ or ‘Group 1’ click on ‘Materials’ and then on the button with the three dots (…) The ‘Material Editor’ will appear and now you can select the ‘Normal map’ and export it.
Still on the ‘Mesh’ tab, lets export the meshes, on the right of the box where we selected the high detail mesh there’s an icon of a box with a red arrow. Click on it and a warning about “multiple groups…” will appear, press OK and then the export window will appear which allow us to name and save each group by separate. Rename ‘Group 0’ as ‘Halter_0.wso’ and the other as ‘Halter_1.wso’.
Why two groups? There’s a limit on the number of bones a garment can include (60), in a full body outfit is easy to go above it so it must be separated in two, as you can see Group 0 has 60 while Group 1 has only 8.
5) Mixing textures
On Paint.net open the multiplier for the halter, then go to ‘Layers’ and then to ‘Select from file’ and select the multiplier from the rabbit suit. It will be imported on a new layer on top, ready to be edited.
In this case we only need to delete the texture on the right which corresponds to the corset on the full version (yes I was too lazy to make different textures, sue me). Once deleted save it as DDS, on the save window select BC3 (Linear, DXT5), then check on ‘Perceptual’ for the ‘Error Metric’ and finally make sure the ‘Generate Mip Maps’ check box is activated.
DTX5 is generally used for multipliers, normal maps, overlays and 4 color masks. BC1 (Linear, DXT1) is used in clothing speculars and 3 color masks.
You’ll have to repeat this for the rest of the textures and probably will have to check other tutorials about textures, masks aren’t that hard to make but depending on what you want to do it will require some texture editing skills. You can use the textures I will include in the final package at the end to speed things up.
6) Joining everything together
We need to join the cuffs/neck that we separated with the rest of the mesh made by EA, to do that lets go once more to Meshtoolkit>TSWR tools>FrankenMesh. On the first box select the WSO where we added the morpsh back on part number 3, on the second box we will use the second group, the one we named ‘Halter_1’. Why that one? Because it only contains 8 bones, the other is exactly on the limit, one more and it will cause the whole mesh to deform irremediably.
Now press ‘Update Morphs, Combine and Save’ and ignore the warning about “Mesh does not have a valid ID…”, save the file with a new name just in case and it’s time to compile everything into TSRW.
Go to ‘Mesh’ tab. Next to the icon of a box with a red arrow there’s an icon with a green one, press it and a window will appear where we’ll select ‘halter_0.wso’ and the new one we just frankenmeshed. After pressing ‘OK’ accept every message TSRW makes about optimizing vertex data (twice in this case) and optimizing the bounding box, never dare to say “no” to both.
Let’s do the same with the textures, fist for the ‘Texture’ tab and then on the ‘Material Editor’. When importing the normalmap you’ll notice the images on the other boxes: alpha map, diffuse map, and specular map look exactly like the originals, that’s because TSRW didn’t changed them we have to do it manually.
Alpha and diffuse map use the multiplier and we only need to ‘Browse’ for it. Browse? Didn’t I meant ‘Import’?. Nope. You see if you first changed the files on the ‘Texture’ tab you already included them inside the final package, there’s no need to import them again, unless you want to make the file larger for no reason at all. So press ‘Browse’ and a window will appear with the textures we already saved, so for the alpha map we select the multiplier and the diffuse will automatically update with the same texture. Now we go the specular map and it normally uses the clothing specular but for this particular dress it again uses the multiplier, so we browse for it.
This has to be done for Group 1 (including the normal map) and also for each LOD: ‘Medium level of detail’ and ‘Low level of detail’ which also “need” their own meshes. For this particular example you can get away with using the LODs already included, just change the textures on the Material Editor.
Go to the ‘Textures’ tab and, at the top there’s a box that says ‘afBodyDressTigh_halter’ that’s the “variations” selector/creator, variations contain different colors / patterns but also could link to different textures. We’ll just delete them because variations are not in the scope of this tutorial, just don’t delete the variation we just modified or you’ll have to browse for all the textures again.
Still on the ‘Texture’ tab, almost at the end where it says ‘PartHighlighting’ click on it and you can see the area to include a CAS thumbnail (256x256 png) otherwise the game will do it for you.
In the ‘Project’ tab change some of the ‘categories’ because this dress only appears for Formalwear (don’t enable validformaternity because the original dress doesn’t include a pregnant belly, also don’t change the age category to teen or elder) and we’re done. This is how the mixed garment should look on TSRW:
And like this in the game:
afBody_DressHalter_RabbitMix.zip7) Final words
So again, I didn’t covered all the aspects but this should be enough to start learning how to mod this game, yes is that messy. Don’t force yourself to understand everything in one seat, take your time but more importantly be prepared to fail, write notes and take screenshots, take a rest and then try again.
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If you want to recreate your ME1 character from scratch in ME2 by converting slider values into a ME2 face code, here's how to do it. It's very simple, but you need to know what the slider values were for your ME1 character.
CONVERSION TABLE:
SpoilerSlider Value: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34
Face Code Value: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Y ZExample:
Spoiler
Below are the slider values and the corresponding face code values according to the conversion table given above. Note that * is the value for the scar slider which isn't supported in ME2.
Spoiler7 5 3 11 || 31 12 16 16 1 12 12 || 1 10 15 16 16 1 1 || 20 1 1 10 || 10 1 1 16 16 || 6 5 11 || 4 9 16 4 || 6 1 6
7 5 3 * || W C G G 1 C C || 1 A F G G 1 1 || K 1 1 A || A 1 1 G G || 6 5 B || 4 9 G 4 || 6 1 6
Now let's put all these values into groups of three and add a dot between each group in order to form the face code, ignoring the value for the scar slider (*)...
ME2 Face Code: 753.WCG.G1C.C1A.FGG.11K.11A.A11.GG6.5B4.9G4.616
Here's how it looks like in ME2:
Spoiler
PS. If you want to get ME1 slider values from a ME2 face code (i.e. the opposite of the method described here) you can use this tool here.
Spoiler
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Vault Bimbos in Peril, Issue #2!
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In any case here's a sneak peek at page one before inserting dialogue and other graphics.
Enjoy!
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