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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#26 Old 8th Jan 2014 at 3:02 PM
3 days later and more failed attempts than I care to admit, the UV map is done. Lining things up with the existing body UV got things into the ball park, but when I got into the areas where I'd added a lot of detail I wasn't making any progress. One of the biggest problems turned out to be the size of the grid I was using to align verts. With all the added verts there were groups of faces with no line running through them to use as an alignment reference. I couldn't get the line edges to smooth out because all the faces inside the solid areas were out of whack. Once I made a smaller grid for fine tuning, things started to fall in place.
Screenshots
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Sockpuppet
#27 Old 9th Jan 2014 at 1:15 PM
i hope you get the normals right, been always a pain for me.
The dividing actual works pretty ez, select the whole mesh and subdivide in 4, fix the borders.
But then you have to reposition each vert so that the normals look decent, something i never could do correct.
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#28 Old 9th Jan 2014 at 9:03 PM
I finally got the hang of doing normals. By rotating the camera around the selection center you can get right down on the surface of the mesh, and see every little bump and ridge. By nudging the verts with the scale tool it isn't difficult to make the surface as smooth as a baby's bottom, just time consuming. In the pic you can see I was even able to change the shading between the breasts and around the nipple. The slight shading thats visible on the surface is caused by the edges of the triangles. I has to stop subdividing at some point! After spending a few hours tweaking the morphs I went ahead and looked at the mesh in-game. WOW was I disappointed. The overall shape looks good at normal size, but the smooth curve I made under the breast looks out of place, and it only gets worse as the slider is moved. Even though I started with a nice concentric layout of the verts, by the time I finished subdividing and moving stuff to make everything smooth, it looked pretty random. All those weird triangle shapes were magnified even more with the sliders, so I've decided to put this project away for a while. It was close, and I'm definitely learning a TON by attempting these complex projects, but this one is still beyond my abilities. I'll try again after I've made a few more less challenging meshes. I reworked the area under the breasts because of the normals, but I really think I could get them right if I put the original shape back. When I redo it at a future date I'll stay on top of the UV as I go so the mess I just dealt with won't be repeated. That was AWFUL! I've been on this long enough though and really need to do something else for while. I'm still re-learning the basics. I made a very short skirt, but mapped the UV where the top was supposed to go. I had the part mask handy when I mapped it, but I had it marked to put the tops where the bottoms should be and vice-versa.
On to a meshed, mostly transparent, pareo as an accessory. I don't think anyone has made one of those yet --
Screenshots
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#29 Old 11th Jan 2014 at 12:09 AM
Sciguy: another meshing software I've dabbled with is Sculptris, and IMO it could be useful for this kind of project involving subtle modeling and smooth surfaces. One of its nice features is that it automatically subdivides faces as required. You'd have to import/export .obj with it and then convert and do bone assignments. Like everything else it's not nearly as easy as they claim but it's free and maybe worth a try.

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
Field Researcher
Original Poster
#30 Old 11th Jan 2014 at 6:14 AM
Thanks for the heads up about Sculptris! I downloaded it a few minutes ago and watched a couple of the videos. I don't expect it to be an easy thing to learn, but it has GOT to be more user-friendly than Blender. It took me 2 days just to figure out how to get Blender's interface to show up well enough to work with. This looks pretty awesome. Now I have to find the time to practice with it.
Ms. Byte (Deceased)
#31 Old 11th Jan 2014 at 7:25 AM
I'm fairly good with this stuff but Blender makes my head explode. :D

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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