Thanks a bunch!
I'll try it as soon as I'm brave enough
But howdoes the preview work for hair, how are you meant to identify the hair you're editing? Or do you rely on the .package name (Or hair texture)?
Thanks again.

*screams like a rabid fangirl*

Thank you so much!!!! This will cut so much time away from fixing all the hairs... now I can also bin my old hair in no-time!

:lovestruc

*edit to ask*
When you bin the hair in the right colors, will it also edit it to the right brow color? So that blonde hair will also have blonde brows showing up, etc.?

And it's working! Yay! Thank you!

THANK YOU for this!! Oh, how desperately I've wanted a tool that could familyfy and make the hairs in the same family use just one grey - up until now, I've done it manually (for binning, I've used Theo's SimPE tool), which has made me want to pull my own hair out on more than one occasion. So thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!

*runs off to use program on her entire Hair folder*


Edit: All right, so I just tried it out and I've found a little annoyance. It won't run if I don't select four files - which means that if I have a set of hairs with only three colours, I can't use it if I want it familyfied and to use just one grey (which I do).

Edit II: I just saw that binning less than four files is a future feature. Great! Any way to make it so that it works with less than four files all around?

Otherwise, I love it! :lovestruc

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, I have such messy beard and eyebrow sections. I just love organization!

I am SOOO grateful to you for doing this. I have just given up trying to get rid of extra elder hairs. I've spent hours in SimPE trying every way imaginable, deleting this and that, to get the extra elder hairs removed. Nothing I tried worked, and I resigned myself to bloated haircolor files and elderbin glut. This is such a wonderful tool, and I'm going to try it out as soon as I get a chance. This is a godsend to those, like me, who venture into SimPE only to get bit for the effort. THANKS!!!!!
ETA: Yay Yay Yay for the future option of deleting unwanted ages. This is so incredibly awesome!

This is awesome! My cluttered & disoranized brow bins thank you.

I've tried it and it works just like you said. I was wondering though, Theo's tool gives me the option to remove the files that aren't altered (like, when a hair is from teen to elder only - I can delete the toddler and child files then because I don't want to be stuck with 15 exactly the same kid hairs from Maxis). Could you make that possible with your tool as well?

ETA: Sorry. Just saw that it's already an option for the future. Yay!

Oh...my...Go-sh!!! How did you know what I was tackling next? This is TERRIFFIC!!!

This looks amazing. I'm going to try it. I'm usually very conservative when it comes to changing from one tool to other, but this looks awesome

Thanks so much, Cat.

Thanks, everyone for comments and especially suggestions and bug reports (thanks Gwenke). Much appreciated! :D

Here's what's planned for the next version(s).

- bin less than 4 files at a time (if familify is off, and you want color binning only)
- when familifying, have option of putting all 4 colors in one file
- remove unwanted ages, and add YA if adult exists
- hair clothing categories, ie maternity, outerwear (thanks mangaroo)
- allow file overwrite

I may put some of these features in an Advanced section that is hidden until you press the Advanced button. I'm trying to keep this tool as simple and quick and easy to use as possible. While I understand creators can certainly use these new features, I don't want to confuse non-creators who just want to clean up their hair catalog and may not be as familiar with hair as creators.

There were other suggestions too, like having 5 or 6 colors in a family (extra blonds and brows and such). I have concerns about that one. What happens if you have two blondes, and you switch from blond to red and back to blond? How do you know which blond you'll get? Probably the first one the machine finds, and not necessarily the one you started with? I'll have to look into this, but right now, I probably won't add this unless there's lots of creator demand for it.

However, for those of you who really, really want this, you CAN do it now. Say you have two browns. Just bin your black, brown #1, blond, and red. Then bin your black again, your brown #2, blond again, red again. Everything will get the same family as the black. As I said, I have my concerns about families with more than one of each color, and I wouldn't do it, but the capability to do it is there now for those of you who wish to do it.

--------------------------

Nouk Yes, eyebrows will match binned hair. That is, when you create the sim in CAS, and you switch hair color, eyebrow color will switch too. Of course, that only works with eyebrows that are correctly binned themselves. So if you have binned hair, and unbinned eyebrows, the eyebrows won't switch like they should. When playing the game, out of CAS, changing hair color in a mirror just "dyes" the hair, doesn't change genetics, and if I recall, the eyebrows do not change, unless you "dye" them too. Someone correct me if that's not so.

TrivialSim The preview image(s) can be seen when you select a file. Look at the second picture in my thread. See the eyebrow image? That's how you know what color it is (if the file wasn't already labeled).

melanie68 I can remove ages easily (in the next version), but cannot add child hair to adult hair. That would require making a new mesh for the child. You need a mesh editor and SimPE for that.

inapickleyum I use HystericalParoxysm's Idolatry of Flesh default replacement skins with my age transition faces, here.

Thanks so much for the bug report and suggestions, Gwenke, I'll take a look.

As for sorting by index, that would be awesome. Auto sort by mesh would be a good start. That is project for another day, no idea when I'll get to it, but it is on my longterm list (unless someone else does it first).

----------------------------------

Catherine Great! Glad I could save you some work! Or did you mean you were going to write a tool like this? Did you already start? Would you want to look at the source for this?

Yes, this is how it works. When your sim ages or you switch between colours in bodyshop/cas, you don't know which shade of hair the sim will get but they'll keep the same style and get the right colour bin. Personally this is how I bin my hairs. I'd rather get the wrong shade than lose the style entirely. Plus this way people can just install the shade they prefer and the family-linking will still work. So I would love an option to add extra shades while binning the standard 4 colours! Thanks for the workaround tip in the meantime - that will come in handy.

Also, is there a reason you made it so you MUST have 4 colours in order to family-link? Sure that's gonna be the most common usage, but is there some reason to strictly forbid family-linking fewer than 4 colours?

Also also... this might be beyond the scope of this tool, but I thought of something that would be super handy. An option that will delete the custom textures and link to Maxis textures instead. This would be great for age conversions of Maxis hair and slight edits of Maxis meshes.

Hiding some of these things behind an "advanced" tab sounds like a smart idea, btw.

Absolutely wonderful - thank you!

In my experience, if you have, let's say, two binned reds in the same family, Bodyshop will always use one of them when switching from any other colour to red. But he important thing is that you don't lose the style when you switch from the 'secondary' red to another colour.

Also, I'm not totally familiar with hairs - but it would seem to be useful to have a button that says 'remove all unused textures', that would remove all textures not referenced in any of the TXTMs. Would there be a downside to this? Would there be a case when they are needed even if they are not referenced?

To clarify about the sort index - I meant the sort index that decides the order in which stuffs show up in the catalogue. For hair, it could help arrange similar styles together, like long, short updo etc. But it would be a god-send for managing custom bodyshape clothing.

I may put some of these features in an Advanced section that is hidden until you press the Advanced button. I'm trying to keep this tool as simple and quick and easy to use as possible.

*standing ovation* I think it's great that you're entertaining suggestions, but I'm glad that you're keeping your vision of a quick-and-easy binning tool. Its ability to clean up my elderbin is worth its (virtual) weight in gold. Thank you for sharing your work.

I currently enforce 4 colors for familifying because that is the "correctest" way to do it, it gives expected game behavior. However, since creators do have a use for 5+ size families, and think the pros of that outweigh the drawbacks, I can certainly change the tool to allow 5+. Let me think about how to do that without overcomplicating it or cluttering the UI. Could have an option like "allow 5+ colors in family" or something. Probably something to stick in the Advanced section.

Could also have an option to allow <4 colors, again, in Advanced, since a family with less than 4 does not behave completely correctly when you select the missing color. I understand sometimes people only download 2 or 3 colors from a set if they don't like all the colors, and they may want to familify what they do have.


Sort indices, massively useful for hair, clothing, accessories, and anything else with a catalog sort index. Will keep this in mind for a *possible* future sort index project. I can't just stick it into the hair binner, unfortunately. I wouldn't want to change hair sort indices for 4 hairs without first checking that this won't clobber sort indices of existing stuff in Downloads. Scanning all of Downloads would be quite lengthy in terms of time, even if you just do it once. That, and the applicability to clothing and accessories, makes me want that in a separate tool.

To group all "short" styles and all "long" styles, you would have to manually tell a tool which ones are short, which are long, and that gets more complicated than just grouping recolors by which mesh they use. I like the idea, but would take me some time to implement. On longterm list. After finishing up the tooltip adder and extra texture remover.

nuking unreferenced textures
Yes. YES! Why did I not think of this? It is theoretically possible that a TXTR that is unreferenced in the package it lives in, does get referenced in some other package. However, I have never run across that with hair. Has anyone else? I think it would be safe and very useful to nuke any unreferenced textures, not just the TXTR for removed elder greys.

I for one would be very happy to have this option! Like I said above, I'd like to be able to familify hairs even when I don't have all four colours, and also (if possible) have them use just one grey.

As I've been binning, I've realised that MANY of my hairs have more than one blonde and/or brown colour, so I'll add my vote to the ones who'd like to be able to have five or more colours in the same family as well.

Melaniem68:
"How about a tool to tell what kind of outfits the hair goes with (e.g., PJs, Everyday, Formal, etc)."

The Wardrobe Wrangler does that already, very easily.

Critical Update - Version 1.02, Feb 19 2011
- critical bug fix: If using "1 Grey" on hair where elders had the same color hair as adults, the files would break. (It worked correctly on hair where elders were grey.) This has been fixed.
- bug fix: Sometimes unnecessary grey textures remained behind in files, although the catalog entries were correct. This has been fixed.

PLEASE REDOWNLOAD

===================================================

Gwenke33

I figured out why the extra grey textures stayed behind in DLM hair files. I was removing extra grey TXTR from eyebrows correctly, but not from hair, due to overlooking the difference in naming between TXMT and XTOL resources. Thank you for testing and reporting this bug! Now fixed.

You will notice that there is still a texture that looks grey that's sitting in all the files. However, this is a bump map, not a color/alpha texture. It looks like grey hair, but it is really a bump map. There are four identical such bump maps, one in each color. So I plan to add duplicate bump map removal. Keep one bump map, maybe in the black hair color. Then, of course, users would have to know NOT to remove the black. Or stick the shared bump map in the mesh file. Then users can remove whatever color they want, without losing the bump. Nuke duplicate bump maps now on my list...

Wow, this is really fantastic and even more so if you might make a Mac version. Please make a Mac version? please?

Awesome! Thank you.

Cat, it looks like you have an instant hit on your hands. I'd like to point out an oddity I had while using it though; sometimes when opening a folder or a file the file list went completely blank and I had to back up a step in the file list to find it again. I think it came about because I was double clicking on stuff when I should have been pressing the 'Open' button and vice versa. Can you look into that?

Also, I want to show my support for adding in a few features; of the hairs I download and need to 'fix' most often for my game, the problems they have are 1)Not being binned or familifed 2)4 elder greys 3)Extra unchanged ages 4)Crappy tooltips. This great new tool of yours fixes the first two, it looks like you have plans for the third, and I know you have that spiffy tooltip editor program, but maybe you could add that to this so I don't have to run two programs on one troublesome set of hairs?

My other suggestions would be to have the eyebrow binning stuff not be shown when you are dealing with hair, it was a tad confusing, and to not have the default radial button set to Townify. Binned hair is already accessible to townies so decustomizing it only removes the star. I prefer to only decustomize Maxis aged up/down hair so I can tell what is really custom and what isn't. Also, having so many icon buttons was confusing and the picture arrows and the go back up through files arrow seemed reversed in where they were placed. Ah look at me, actually using stuff I've learned in college about Human Factors and User Interface, gah. Tell my teacher he was right.

Anyways, GREAT TOOL. This thing breezed right through all the hairs on my 'fix' list that I just hadn't been getting around to. Love it.

I'm certainly impressed! Although I was grateful for Theo's tool compared to relying upon the Sims PE option, binning remained a pain in the arse and made me reluctant to start on my hair projects. Thank you sincerely!

Phaenoh Thanks for all the suggestions.

Color binned hair is accessible to townies, even with the custom star? Almighty Hat told me this too. This behavior is different from custom and decustomized clothing then? I'm a clothing maker, not a hair maker, so thanks for letting me know. I'll fix the UI labels in the next version to just say "decustomize".

File list blanking, thanks for reporting that. Sounds similar to the "filelist tooltips / redrawing" issue I'm aware of. I think I know where the problem is, and I think I can fix it, but it may take me a few days or more. If anyone reading this happens to be an expert in updating the FLU library, and has already done this, PM me.

Tooltip adding could easily be added to this tool, so you don't have to run the tooltip program. Another thing to put in Advanced, I think. I'm currently designing the UI for the version with several new features in it. Trying to keep it uncluttered. If you have human factors education, mind if I run it by you? I took some UI design, but it's not my area of expertise.

Eyebrow gender can definitely be hidden, and I can differentiate between hair and eyebrow files, so I can probably enable/disable it when the user selects their first file. What do you think? Not a coding problem, more of a "How do I do this without confusing the user" thing. I agree it shouldn't show up if you're doing hair / beards.

"All the buttons were confusing" - Which buttons? The ones in Choose File, or the ones the main hair binner window? If you mean buttons in Choose File, I intend to rewrite that thing later, with less bells and whistles. I added package file image preview capability and two arrow buttons to it, all the other buttons are what it came with (it's FLU library code). It was made to be very general purpose, needs some streamlining. If you mean my main hair binner window, I can try to streamline that too. I want this to be easy to use for non-creators as well as creators.

The "image preview" arrows are backwards from the "file" arrows? Hadn't noticed, thanks for letting me know. That's a 5 second fix, and I'll definitely put it in the next version.

I happen to hate the arrow placement in the Choose File dialog box. I would prefer the "image" arrows under the image. However, that dialog is mostly library code, with my "image preview" arrows tacked on in the one place I could get them to show. They wouldn't show at all when I put them in the logical place. Luckily I have the library code for that dialog, and could rewrite and put arrows and buttons in better places, it's just going to take me several days, at least.

=================================

REDOWNLOAD

If you have version 1 or 1.01, you need to REDOWNLOAD and get version 1.02, see main thread
.