Creating hair is pretty much the same as creating clothing, only you are often working with a more complicated mesh, with multiple layers, and each hair file contains multiple ages.

Open up Body Shop, select "Create Parts" and then "Create Genetics".


First, click on the hair icon. Second, select your color. For recoloring a Maxis hairstyle, I will usually start with blonde, because it desaturates, leaving the strand details, better than the other colors, IMO. You can start with other colors if your end result will be closer to one of those colors. You can also recolor custom hair.

Select your hair, then click on the button to import the texture (3).


When you open the package in PhotoShop, you can see the number of texture files you're going to need to modify! (I didn't select the toddler ones here. You can modify them, but their meshes are not the same, so the alphas and textures will be different as well, and need to be done separately)

The nice thing is that in the simpler styles, the texture is the same for all the ages, so once you get to a new texture you like, all you have to do is "Save As". . .each one of these files.

Note also that the image size is 512x512 pixels, a quarter the size of a clothing texture file.


Just to show you why there are so many different texture files, I took the three we have for this 'do and colored them vibrantly. Sometimes these textures are just the top and underside of each piece of the hair mesh, sometimes they're different pieces. However, they're all needed if you want the entire hairdo to appear.


This looks pretty strange, but you should get the idea.


Let's start with something simple (I went back to the original color for this step, BTW. )

Just as with clothing recolors, the Image>Hue/Saturation, with the "colorize" box checked, will give you a pretty wide range to choose from. You may want to write down the color settings you choose. In addition, since this changes the color of the entire image, you might lose some contrast, so select Image>Brightness/Contrast and use the sliders until you like the look. "Save As" all the lookalike texture files.


Refresh in Body Shop to see how it looks on your mannequin.


Now, let's play some more. Using the polygonal lasso, I selected one of the forelock pieces. You might be able to get a result you like just by using the Hue/Saturation sliders, or you might want to desaturate that piece and start from scratch with a different color. Feel free to play - the only part that's going to change is the part you've selected.




Again, though, changing the hue sometimes muddies the details, but the Brightness/Contrast can bring them back out again.


"Save As" all the lookalike texture files and refresh in Body Shop. Nice. I could do the same thing on the left, but we're just going to move along here.



Maybe we want to make the hair a little wavy - your filter menu is filled with all kinds of fun things, but here we're going to use Liquify. You'll see in the box that you have a lot of variables you can adjust. What I did here was make the brush a little more subtle than the default, and dragged it across the hair parallel to the part line.

Be careful when you do something like this to keep the hair tips sticking in the right direction. Few things look worse in a hair recolor than strands going in a different direction than they should, crossing the hair tips instead of running down them.


As with changing the Hue/Saturation, some of the detail might be lost. In this case, another filter will do the trick. Select "Sharpen" to make the strands look more distinct. You can do this more than once, and if it's too much one way and too little the other, you can pick "Fade Sharpen" from the edit menu and use the slider to tone it down.

"Save As" all the lookalike files.
Go to Body Shop and refresh.



OK, so now our mannequin has a blonde streak AND wavy hair. If we like it, then it's time to modify all the other age groups. It's the same as "Save As" within the one age group. Remember those highlighted file names a few pages back? They're all identical, even the smaller child and teen, so you can overwrite them with your modified texture without any problems.



The one age group we might want to change is Elder. Yeah, he could color his hair in a foolish attempt to disguise his age, but really, we know he's gray underneath it all.


Especially since we've altered the shape of the texture, we want to use the file we made for the elder, just Desaturate and change the Brightness/Contrast. My feeling is that not all hair colors turn gray the same, so I don't like my elders to all have the same color gray. Starting from your base color gives you a bit more variety. (And in this case, our elder gets to hang onto one last vestige of youth, the bleached forelock!)


After we've used "Save As" to save the gray texture to all the elder texture files, we have our new hair, modified for all ages, ready to name in the "Enter Tool Tip Here" box, then export to our game and start playing.

Have fun!


When you're done, check out
Theo's SimPE Coloring Binning Plugin or
HystericalParoxysm's SimPE or
Callum91's DatGen hair binning tutorials.

thx for sharing!!

thanks I'll try to remember all that

I just love your tutorials....Thank you again.

Ive been just tinkering around with this aspect of the game and found the hair to be the most difficult to modify because I din't understand the way the file structure worked for them. After veiwing your tutorial and giving it a go... i came out with a superb looking hair style... Great tut thanks for your Lessons.

Wow! This is the first tutoral I finally understand! Thank you VERY much! :D

Wow! I have never actually understood a tutorial before but I understood this one completely. Thanks!

i never thought i could have fun learning ...i could try finding the fun in school, but i dout i can highly ...thx now my friends sims cant out do mine ur da bomb, pez out :D

Nice Just one question... how do I acess the custom hair colors that come with the game? Aka, not mods;... the blonde/purple floppy hair, for instance. Or the mohawks. The ones that you can only use ingame via using a mirror, not in sim creation. I've looked in body shop time and time again, but I can't find them in there...! Any ideas?

Also... How do you put them in specific bins? Ie, you see some mods with a set of regular hair colors (brown/blonde/red/black), and they show up in the correct bins ingame. Any idea?

Thanks!

When you open Body Shop, you'll see the four colors and then an asterisk. All custom colors will be found when you click on the asterisk.

And in the body of this tutorial, I provided links to binning tutorials by Callum91 and HystericalParoxysm that use DatGen and SimPE, respectively.

If you delete a custom hair for an elder/adult/young adult or teen, will it delete for children or toddlers? The reason I ask, is that I don't want all the adult hair styles in the custom bin, when they were altered to fit for toddlers... and kids... they were put in the right bin. But, if I manage to get them in the custom bin, then the hair is going to be in the right color bin AND the custom bin, and I don't want repeats. Thanks

Rayne... Hair recolours contain all of the textures for all of the different ages... Toddler, Child, Adult, Teen, and Elder. Selecting and deleting one age group will delete the whole recolour file - including the other ages linked to it.

If you want to remove extraneous ages, that's something one does from within the actual .package file - by deleting all the resources for that age group (I believe the age group is listed in the name of the Property Set in SimPE - all of the other associated files except for the material definition will have the same instance, so all of those can be deleted, and then the material definitions should also include the age group as well, and can also be deleted). Then the hair recolour won't show up at all for those other ages, but will show up for the ones it's supposed to. It doesn't end up working right for breeding purposes, or if you age a certain sim up or down...

But as for -repeats- you won't get those unless you have a duplicate of the same hair recolour. If it's in the custom bin, it's only in the custom bin. If it's in the natural hair colours bins, it'll only be there. Properly bin them and remove the extra ages that don't use the custom mesh if you want things to be as neat as possible.

I'm working on properly binning them... I think... using BodyShop... the thing is, they are still showing up in the right color bin, and the custom bin... and I have no idea how to use SimPE to remove the extra ages. And I am not worried about them keeping a hair style when they age... I always change that anyway, different style for a different age... usually whatever looks good on that sims face.

I closed BodyShop after properly binning the hair, then restarted it. The hair is still in the normal hair color bin, and the custom content bin. ( How do I fix this?

*sigh* You do it by reading the tutorials on categorizing (binning) that were linked in the tutorial. You remove unwanted age groups by reading Simply Stella's tutorial right here in this very forum on removing unwanted age groups. You can't bin using Body Shop, unless you take all that time and recolor each individual hair starting with an existing binned color.

I would like to thank the people who gives effort in making these tutorials just for the sake that we noobs would have the chance to make our own meshes clothes hair etc keep up the good work and hope you guys wouldn't get tired of guiding us noobs

I don't mean custom content hair styles.. I mean the ones that come with the game, but can't be accessed in Create a Sim- only by a mirror after a sim has been created. Ie, the colored mohawks, the floppy purple/yellow hair, etc..

Sae sae, those are "styles" hairs - not normally accessible by any usual method for some stupid Maxoid reason. You could find the recolours for them to use them for other stuff by this method:

1. Make a new project. For it, select another recolour of the hair that's on the same MESH as the "styles" hair you want to modify. Import to Game.
2. Close Body Shop.
3. Open that new recolour .package from your SavedSims file in SimPE. Look in the Property Set under Plugin View - find the one for adult (should be obvious from the name - af or am). Find the line that starts with "name" and select it. Over on the right side you'll see the value for that line is selectable/editable - select the text before the underscore (i.e. if it says afhairmohawk_blonde only select the afhairmohawk part). Copy that text. That's the name of the mesh that's used for that recolour.
4. Bring up SimPE's Resource Finder. Paste the text you copied from the property set into the resource finder and then search. It may take several minutes to finish and won't respond while it's searching. This will find every piece related to the mesh with that name, including all its Maxis recolours, including the "styles" ones.
5. In the results, you should have a list of quite a few things. Scroll down till you start seeing lines that start with "Large Image File" (not Texture Image - those are much smaller images and not what you want) - read the text after the underscore. That should give you a good idea of which each one is (blonde, brown, pink, grey, etc.). There will be two of each kind - make sure you get the one with the 0 in it, not the 1 (the 0's are the right size, the 1's are smaller files). When you find one that sounds like the one you want, double-click it.
6. SimPE will chew on it for a while, opening up a biiiiig file that holds a lot of images, so be patient. But it'll jump to the one you selected. Take a look at the recolour in plugin view, make sure it's the right one, and then right-click it and export it as a .png. If it wasn't the right one, go back to the resource finder and keep looking till you find the right one.
7. Now you can edit that .png file in most any graphics editor however you want, save the result as a .bmp, and then use it as the texture in a new project on the same mesh.

Complicated? Yes. Why did Maxis make it so stupid-hard? I don't know. Questions? Go ahead. Good luck.

WOOHOO! thanks a fruity bunch, Faylen! i just did my first ever recolour alongside reading your tutorial. yey me *silently applauds herself* always wanted to know how to do this since coming across this site, thanks for helping us newbie-recolourers out! gonna turn into a recolouring nutcase now <-- i look like this now...

Would you be able to answer this please?

I have 2 computers, 1 with win98SE and photoshop that I don't use very often
The other computer has WinXP, the game and photoshop.

When I open clothes with photoshop in WinXP everything works out fine but when I open hair in Windows Explorer or Photoshop they will crash.

When I open clothes with photoshop in Win98 everything works out fine and nothing crashes.

Can you tell me how to adjust my settings in XP so Photoshop as well as Windows Explorer will not crash in XP when opening hair projects?

-Thanks

There could actually be a number of different issues as to why this is happening. I doubt I could tell you myself, but if you are more specific, I might be able to pick the right brains. How much free memory do you have, what kind of video card do you have, what driver version do you have, and which eps do you have - all of these could be contributing factors. Also, if you're getting an error message, telling what that error message is, specifically, would be helpful.

The older computer with Win98SE has the least amount of memory and the worst graphics card.

The newer computer with XP has a decent graphics card and plenty of memory.

Opening hair projects in XP crashes Photoshop if opened there, but other projects don't crash when opening thier folders. It also crashes windows explorer in Xp as well when I use it to open the hair folder.

The old computer works fine opening the hair folder, no problems.

It gets annoying that I have to transfer things on floppy to the old computer just to modify hair color or shape.

That can happen if, for some reason, the files within the folder have invalid filenames. I've had Windows Explorer and Photoshop crash when opening certain directories containing files with long, odd filenames (created from exporting a .png image from SimPE, but I suppose it could happen coming out of Body Shop too).

What hair are you recolouring that's doing this? If it's a custom hair that's a recolour of a recolour of a recolour (i.e. a project made from a project made from a project - gone in and out of Body Shop several times) that may be causing the long invalid filename problem.

how do you get photoshop??? I have Windows Explorer Xp.

PhotoShop is a program you buy. There are links to that and to other less expensive or free programs in the Skinning FAQs thread in the Skinning Forum.

You have to buy it?