I don`t believe that we will be able to make seperate jewelry :disappointed: I wanted to have a dress without straps but there was a problem and I don`t know how to explain this in English. Ok, I will try it: I deleted the straps in the alpha picture (I made these parts black) first and reimported the dress into BodyShop. When I now choose this dress, the Sim looks funny. At the place of the straps the skin of the Sim is raised (embossed ?). That`s why I made a necklace from the straps. If you want (or if you don`t understand what I`m saying) I can make a screenshot of the dress without straps, tomorrow. Then you`ll see the problem. Sorry, my English is not so good Tahera
Tahera, Your English is very good. I think there are 3 different bitmap files for each clothing skin. eg:- top~stdMatBaseTextureName.bmp ------- (actual image of the 'skin') top~stdMatBaseTextureName_alpha.bmp - (the alpha component) top~stdMatNormalMapTextureName.bmp - (if you look closely at these blueish images you'll see they contain the texture of the clothing *eg, belts, belt loops, straps etc. I have attached a part of one of these images as a jpg - the rest of the file name has been left unchanged. I think that I won't be an easy task to make images like these ... or maybe I mean that it isn't difficult to make them ... but making them look good isn't easy. Hope this puts a smile back on your face ...
Well, I finally finished my first paint program project. I decided to do my screen name's namesake: Anubis. I just wish that the Showcase didn't darken them up so much. Anyway, Anubis is a tuxedo. So I used AltF8's tuxedo from TS2R, made a "facepaint" mask which had his colorings and made some blue-green cateyes. This is what he came out looking like: http://thesims2.ea.com/sim_detail.php?asset_id=6900&lastURL=/showcase.php
I think I kind of understand what you're saying happened with the raised skin without the straps Tahera. I just don't know if that's something that could be fixed by changing the Texture file or if that's part of the Mesh... Has anyone else figured this out yet? And KatAnubis, I love the eyebrow whiskers on your namesake sim!!
Thanks, FaeLuna. I have a pressure sensitive graphics tablet and was using a "thick-thin pen tip". He actually has many more whiskers on each cheek and on his eyebrows and they are white-white. I just used a few since things don't look quite right if you try to get them all in. Of course, the little stinker is sleeping on the chair next to me today. Why couldn't he have done that yesterday when I needed him to model? I kept having to chase him down to look at his little face. Today I can just glance over. (Murphy's law, probably.) If only we could put tails on our Sims. :winks:
Typical Cute Blonde A cute Blonde girl. I tried to make her look like Buffy but she doesn't quite pull off the look, although her clothes are something Buffy would wear and the hair is the same.
@Mirelli I don`t have these blue pictures! When you look close to the texture file, there are different grey shades in that area. I`ll change these parts and I hope that somethings changes. I`ll report about that, later. It`s "later" now That doesn`t help. I attached a picture of the embossed skin. I wonder why I can delete parts of the dress without having the same problems.
No, ManagerJosh, I din´t use bump maps. In the alpha channel, I filled the areas with black and the result is the embossed skin where the straps have been before :devious:. This mistake does not appear when I change the décolleté. On my PC, this dress has no blueish bitmap (Mirelly was talking about that). I wonder why the original bitmap of the skin (the colored one) has so many different grey shades in the "background" around the dress. I thought that, if I change the grey tones, the Sim will look better, but nothing happened. Tahera
Yesterday on the Sims2BBS someone was talking about that problem (only they were talking about shoes at the time). Evidently the reason why we are seeing embossed "straps" is that they are part of the mesh. That's why we've been having problems getting rid of them. I'm hoping that if that is true that Maxis will make their meshes simpler so that we can just use the alpha channels and bmps to change the look of the clothes. (At least until we have a way of changing the meshes themselves. I'm studying Maya, how about you?)
Thanks CatAnubis! I`ve got a demo version of Maya at the Cebit (German Computer Fair). I installed it yesterday but I don`t know what to do. I think that it is hard to learn. Now I`m looking for tutorials for beginners. At this time, I`m learning Carrara. This 3D prog is very easy but I can make simple 3D objects only. I`ve to learn a lot! Tahera
Alias has a pretty good tutorial book called "Introducing May 5: 3D for Beginners." I've been working through it slowly. (*Very* slowly at this point because I'm also working my way through learning my paint programs and learning HTML!) If you can't order it through your bookstore (which is how I got mine), you can order it from Alias directly: http://store.alias.com/dr/v2/ec_MAI...id=41107&CID=0&DSP=&CUR=840&PGRP=0&CACHE_ID=0 That takes you to the bundled one (which is $69US) but if you just get the Introducing Maya book, it's much less. It comes with the Maya5PLE. (I had the 4.5 version already, but 5 is closer to what they are using for Sims2.)
You can download maya ple for free as long as you're not using it for commercial purposes. Maya is pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. I was making custom stuff for UT2004 pretty easy.
You can't use MayaPLE for commercial use according to Alias (the Maya people). They have made it so that the files don't work with any of the commercial products and it has an animated watermark to show that it's not supposed to be used for commercial purposes. How did you use it to make custom stuff for UT2004? Did they provide a custom interface so that they could use it in the game? That's what Maxis is hoping to be able to do for Sims2.
Tahera, Josh was teasing you, asking about "bump" maps ... it was quite funny and (of course) it was very clever (cos Josh is a very smart guy!) :lick: I am so sorry that I did not check my information more carefully. Yes. The dress that you are using doesn't come with one of the blue texture maps. I think that what is happening is this. Body Shop has been supplied with a few meshes to get us started ... Now I know only a little about meshes but one thing I do know is that when sims change their clothes they often have to change bodies (meshes) at the same time .... Given the size of the skin files (pretty big!) Maxis obviously had to be a bit economical with how mcuh they gave us to play with. There is a long strapless dress that I'm gone have a play with now and see what can be done with that ... OK I've had a play ... What I did was this. I made new project of the adult bra and the teen forma strapless dress. :confusion: I used the alpha file from the the bra texture map from the strapless dress from the teen formal collection. Then making lots of use of PSP layers to control what what happening the first job is marry up the upper center of the bra's alpha shape to the top of the dress' front alpha view to get the neckline right (tahera's already been doing this and is probably much better at it than me :tired: ....) After that I painted in a new top to the neckline ... got a bit bored with the straps cos I new they were gonna look terrible whatever I did! :disappointed: I really hope that meshing isn't gonna be difficult ... I mean it would be really cool if say it turns out to be possible to take an existing and to just tweak it a bit ... eg adding/removing a belt, moving straps, make small changes to hemlines, cuffs etcs ... or does anyone. Josh, maybe??? have any better theories (informed "guesses") ... LOL Oh and BTW --- 118 days until 9/17 ...
Yes, that`s right. Each 3D programm (or landscaping programm, e. g. Terragen) is using bump maps . The only thing I didn`t understand was how to use a bump map in BodyShop :surprised: . But as I don`t know everything it could be possible, who knows??? These blue pictures might be used as bumpmaps; I don`t know it. Where did you get the strapless dress from? I`ve two long dresses only, both with straps. All the files are really big (the amount of data). Do you think that Maxi don`t want to have so much fansites for The Sims 2? Who can afford a site producing so much traffic? First, I had a small fansite (The Sims 1) on a server I was paying for. The bandwidth was exceeded within two days (more than 1 GB). Because I don`t wanted to pay so much money to get more bandwidth, I hosted my page on a free server (Lycos). Now, I`m closing it. I want to make a site for for The Sims 2 but I don`t know a hoster who will allow to put large files on their servers :disappointed: . Tahera
