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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 2nd Jul 2014 at 12:11 AM
My CC accessory isn't showing up in game. Any artists or developers want this project?
I hope I'm posting this in the right place. I've created my first mesh (today is day 4 of working on it); a set of horns. I will list my process the best I can:


1.) I created the mesh horns in Sculptris Alpha 6, exported them to Milkshape.

2.) In Milkshape I resized and positioned them, exported them to Blender.

3.) In Blender I baked them, exported them back to Milkshape.

4.) Using Gimp, I created both my multiplier (from Blender), and specular. I saved them as No Compression, RGBA8, Generate Mipmaps, as was instructed in TSR Gimp tutorial.

5.) In Blender, I imported my finished horns again, reduced their pixels (triangles) by half, and created my Medium LOD mesh. I then reduced the medium LOD mesh by half again, and created my Low LOD mesh.

6.) In TSR Workshop, I started a new project (numerous times, but we won't get into that), first checked teen through elder, male and female, human. I chose accessories under type, and kept clothing type as earrings (that was the original game mesh I was working with). I selected all categories for the game, and changed my file name in 'extras'. In another attempt, I just checked adult and male.

7.) I added all my meshes for High LOD, Medium LOD, and Low LOD. In textures I added my multiplier and specular, and I used the EA default red for my Mask. I don't need an Overlay. I then added my multiplier and specular to each mesh (High, Medium, and Low). I also changed the pattern and color in the texture tab for all three examples. I then saved my file to TSR Workshop, and exported out my game file.


My custom content downloads and installs to the game perfectly, however it doesn't actually show up in game. I'm at the point now where I'm pretty much done with it, but I hate to see this last four days of hell go to waste, not to mention the horns are beautiful and I think they have a lot of potential. If anyone can see what my problem is off the bat, awesome. If not, I'd like to give it to someone else to salvage. It's on the verge of being game-ready, I'm just not equipped with the knowledge at this point to fix it. I don't know where to begin researching my problem anymore. I've read every tutorial that pertains to my problem, and even a few that don't. I've watched a couple hours of videos on Youtube, but I can't see where I'm doing something wrong. As far as I can tell, I've done everything exactly the way the tutorials and videos instructed.
Screenshots
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Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#2 Old 2nd Jul 2014 at 1:49 PM
You didn't mention assigning bones or doing a UV map. I assume you did the UV map since the texture shows up. If you didn't assign bones the mesh will be invisible in-game.

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
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Test Subject
Original Poster
#3 Old 2nd Jul 2014 at 4:03 PM
Quote: Originally posted by CmarNYC
You didn't mention assigning bones or doing a UV map. I assume you did the UV map since the texture shows up. If you didn't assign bones the mesh will be invisible in-game.


Ah, assigning bones. Nope, I don't believe I've done that. The UV map, yes. So by not assigning bones, that would prevent it from showing up in game all together? Or will I still find the item in game, but the horns will be invisible? I mean, I'm going to read/watch the tutorials for assigning bones and fix them anyway, but I'm just curious because I'm not finding the item in game what-so-ever, invisible horns or not.

I'll work on assigning bones today, and then I'll post an update as to whether or not it worked. Thank you for the suggestion! This is more than what I've received at TSR, and they're the ones who made Workshop in the first place.
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#4 Old 2nd Jul 2014 at 4:28 PM Last edited by CmarNYC : 2nd Jul 2014 at 4:39 PM.
If no bones is the only problem, you should still see the item listed in CAS - but no bones can have weird effects including crashing the game so I guess it's possible CAS wouldn't recognize it to screen out problem meshes.

You can assign the entire mesh to the head - not sure exactly what the best bone choice is called. You can look at an earring mesh to see what it uses. You can do it in Milkshape - select the entire mesh, in the Joints tab select the head bone, and assign it 100%. There's also a way to do bones in TSRW but I've never tried it. If that doesn't fix it, could you upload the package or wrk file so I can take a look?

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 2nd Jul 2014 at 7:23 PM Last edited by Ellva : 2nd Jul 2014 at 8:03 PM.
Quote: Originally posted by CmarNYC
If no bones is the only problem, you should still see the item listed in CAS - but no bones can have weird effects including crashing the game so I guess it's possible CAS wouldn't recognize it to screen out problem meshes.

You can assign the entire mesh to the head - not sure exactly what the best bone choice is called. You can look at an earring mesh to see what it uses. You can do it in Milkshape - select the entire mesh, in the Joints tab select the head bone, and assign it 100%. There's also a way to do bones in TSRW but I've never tried it. If that doesn't fix it, could you upload the package or wrk file so I can take a look?


Hmm, quick update I guess. I'm just reading what you posted, and I will get into Milkshape now and try doing what you said, but in the meantime, I should still give what information I have. I'm enclosing two screenshots. First, it appears my horns have no bones at all, and if I understand the tutorial I just read, you have to have a bone listed in order to assign it to something. Another thing that concerns me (and it has everything to do with this) is when I go to Edit > Project Contents, I see a huge list of stuff (including bones). I remember reading in another tutorial that we're to remove all the items that aren't needed, but I've never known which items I need, and which I don't, and none of the other tutorials ever mentioned Project Contents.

Would I be able to clear everything when first starting a project (original mesh, textures, etc.) then clear everything in the Project Contents list, and then start? And if I did it this way, after adding my new mesh, textures, etc., would the Project Contents list have only the items I need listed? I hope that all makes sense.

As for the earring mesh, when I loaded in Milkshape, it was literally just the earrings, no head or anything. I found some default Sim meshes here at MTS, and I'm gonna try using them, but I'm still a bit confused as to how that works out in TSR Workshop. Let me see if I understand this: I upload a head mesh to Milkshape, then upload MY mesh. I then follow the directions as you said to connect my horn mesh to the Sim head mesh. Once I transfer my horns back into TSRW, Workshop will know that the horns are assigned to the head of a Sim?
Screenshots
Test Subject
Original Poster
#6 Old 2nd Jul 2014 at 7:42 PM
Quote: Originally posted by CmarNYC
If no bones is the only problem, you should still see the item listed in CAS - but no bones can have weird effects including crashing the game so I guess it's possible CAS wouldn't recognize it to screen out problem meshes.

You can assign the entire mesh to the head - not sure exactly what the best bone choice is called. You can look at an earring mesh to see what it uses. You can do it in Milkshape - select the entire mesh, in the Joints tab select the head bone, and assign it 100%. There's also a way to do bones in TSRW but I've never tried it. If that doesn't fix it, could you upload the package or wrk file so I can take a look?


Oh, and here's my last attempt. I meant to upload this already.
Attached files:
File Type: rar  male Horns Attempt 5.rar (766.0 KB, 3 downloads) - View custom content
Test Subject
Original Poster
#7 Old 2nd Jul 2014 at 11:41 PM
Oh my gosh, okay... I swear I'm in hell right now. This is my hell. NOTHING works the way the tutorials say it should. Like absolutely nothing. I notice the tutorials are extremely basic. They make specific things in the tutorials, like a table, and the way the tutorials are set up, it literally ONLY TEACHES YOU TO MAKE A TABLE. I mean, half of these tutorials will even say, "you won't need to pay attention to such & such function because it doesn't apply to this table we're making," so you're still not learning what you need to know to make the items you want to. I can make tables and chairs all day long from the tutorials I've been reading, but I can't do a damn thing with these horns.

So since my last post, I've reduce the poly count of all three of my meshes (High LOD, Medium LOD, and Low LOD), they were too high. I'm sure, of course, that this means I need to do a new UV map. However, for the last, oh, hour & a half or so I've been trying create joints in Milkshape so I can assign them somehow, but I can't make a joint if my life depended on it. I'm enclosing a picture of what the tutorial says to do (it's the only specific tutorial I can find). I don't know if I have a different version of Milkshape than what's in the example (mine is 1.8.5), but mine sure as hell doesn't do what the one in the example does.

In the tutorial, it says to just click on "joint", and in the front wire mesh, pick a spot. First of all, I click on joint and the pivots (or whatever you call them) don't turn blue like the example. It doesn't matter if I select the mesh or not. So when I mark my joint, it's just sort of floating in mid-air, it doesn't connect to the mesh at all. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to get my joint to connect, or even touch the mesh.

Tomorrow's my birthday. At this point, this is literally all I want; just to figure this out. I promise I'm never going to try creating custom content again. EVER.

I'm pretty much at the point that I just want to enclose everything I have, and hope that someone will come along and do something with it. I'm so tired.
Screenshots
Attached files:
File Type: rar  Horn_Mesh_High_LOD.rar (311.9 KB, 6 downloads) - View custom content
File Type: rar  Horn_Mesh_Medium_LOD.rar (279.0 KB, 4 downloads) - View custom content
File Type: rar  Horn_Mesh_Low_LOD.rar (249.6 KB, 4 downloads) - View custom content
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#8 Old 3rd Jul 2014 at 8:56 AM Last edited by CmarNYC : 3rd Jul 2014 at 10:19 AM.
Happy birthday!

95% of your problems are because you're new to this and don't know the basics. How well I remember that feeling of %}{{%€ damn this crap NOTHING WORKS!!!

You mentioned tables but hopefully you're not doing tutorials for objects, because they work completely differently from CAS parts. I'm not familiar with the tutorial you posted a screenshot from, but it looks like a general meshing tutorial, not a Sims-specific one. It's good to know the general principles, which are the same, but there are also specific things that are done differently for Sims.

You don't have to (and shouldn't) create joints for your mesh. ('Joints' and 'bones' are used pretty much interchangeably.) In Sims, all the bones are predefined. When you import a mesh into Milkshape, that information - both the list of bones with their relationships to each other and the assignments of each mesh vertex to from one to four bones - is imported along with it. Then, in the Joints tab, there should already be a list of bones you can pick from.

Let's run through it with TSRW. I'll start a new project and pick the adult female hoop earrings. Then I export the earring mesh as a .wso file. (Since you uploaded .wso files I'm assuming you've already done this.)

I'm also assuming you've installed the TSRW plugins for Milkshape since you're working with .wso meshes. If not, go to C:\Program Files\The Sims Resource\TSR Workshop\Extras\Milkshape plugins\ , copy msTSRWorkshopExport.dll and msTSRWorkshopImport.dll, and paste them into C:\Program Files\Milkshape 1.8.5. (On a 64-bit system it will be Program Files (X86).)

Now start Milkshape, click the File menu, and click Import. If the plugins are correctly installed you should have an option called "TSRW Object" near the end of the list. (You may have to scroll down.) Click that, and select the .wso mesh you just exported from TSRW. (Sorry if I'm repeating stuff you already know.)

You now have a mesh of just the earrings. You don't need the head mesh; the bones/joints are all defined. Go to the Joints tab and you should see a list of joints in the top right.



Now select the entire earrings mesh in either the Model or Groups tabs (or select one vertex, it doesn't really matter in this case) and back in the Joints tab click the Show button in the lower right.



Under the checkbox for "Draw vertices with bone colors" There's a set of four dropdowns with numbers under them. These are the bone assignments. You can see the first one is now set to "b__HeadNew__" and the number is 100. This means the selected vertex (or the first vertex if you selected the whole mesh) is assigned 100% to the bone b__HeadNew__. This is the same assignment you need for your horns. (Don't ask what the rainbowy thing means - I haven't a clue.)

Now I'll start over in Milkshape and import your horns mesh. I see it has NO bones at all, not even the predefined bones list. Did you import from .obj and is that what happens? Or did you import obj into Milkshape and export it as wso? That's not a good idea.

Anywho, easy enough to fix - import the earrings mesh first, delete the earrings group in the Groups tab, then import the horns mesh. Your list of bones should remain in the Joints tab. Select the entire mesh, go to the Joints tab, select b__HeadNew__ in the dropdown for the first bone assignment, fill in 100 under it, and click the Assign button on the lower right.



Now export the horns mesh as wso and import it into TSRW. You'll have to reposition the horns now that they're correctly animating to move with the head. You could export a hair mesh to help with positioning in Milkshape.

Quote: Originally posted by Ellva
Another thing that concerns me (and it has everything to do with this) is when I go to Edit > Project Contents, I see a huge list of stuff (including bones). I remember reading in another tutorial that we're to remove all the items that aren't needed, but I've never known which items I need, and which I don't, and none of the other tutorials ever mentioned Project Contents.

Would I be able to clear everything when first starting a project (original mesh, textures, etc.) then clear everything in the Project Contents list, and then start? And if I did it this way, after adding my new mesh, textures, etc., would the Project Contents list have only the items I need listed?


My advice is NOT to mess with the project contents unless/until you really know what you're doing. The 'bones' you see in the contents are bone adjustments - small changes in the mesh skeleton. TSRW works in mysterious ways and I really don't know why all that stuff is in there, but it's risky to just start deleting things since if there's a link to it and it's not there, it could do Very Bad Things.

I did a very quick test using the high detail mesh with correct bones, and except for the positioning and still having the earring texture, it looks pretty good!

Screenshots

Please do not PM me with mod, tutorial, or general modding questions or problems; post them in the thread for the mod or tutorial or post them in the appropriate forum.

Visit my blogs for other Sims content:
Online Sims - general mods for Sims 3
Offline Sims - adult mods for Sims 3 and Sims 4
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