Just found your tutorial on making clothes using Blender and Milkshape. OMG, thank you! I have a question, however. I made a dress but now TSRW won't import the fat morph because it says the vertex count is wrong. I merged some vertices in Blender & exported the mesh as an .obj file but in Milkshape it still displays the original vertex count. It's like the .obj isn't retaining the information. What gives? Any ideas?
hi @lolabellesims , I’m glad you found my tutorial useful! :) I hope you don’t mind my public answer, I think my ramblings might be good info for others who have similar problems. ;)It is weird that Milkshape does not display the correct vertex count. I would try to export the file again using a different name, maybe it was just a glitch when saving? I am a little bit rusty when it comes to meshing, but maybe we can still get to the bottom of your problem.Morphs are kinda special in that they do not like it at all when either a vertex is added or deleted. It is very important to update the morphs after you edited the base mesh, specifically, after deleting/merging or adding vertices. Morphs need to have exactly the same vertices as the original, and I never had success in trying to manually match a morph to an edited base mesh.Once you add/remove anything, you need to do exactly the same edits to all morphs or create new morphs. CmarNYC’s Mesh Toolkit has an option to edit the morphs to match a base mesh (mesh toolkit: TSRW tools -> match morphs), you can try using that to see if that works. You might have to revert back to the original morphs though, in case you already made edits to a morph mesh.The morphs need to be untouched, only the base mesh should be changed, and then mesh toolkit will do the rest. As far as I remember, match morphs works pretty well if you only deleted stuff from the base mesh, you might need to create entirely new morphs with mesh toolkit if you add anything new to the base mesh though (mesh toolkit: auto tools for WSO -> auto-create morphs.) Sometimes, the message about a wrong vertex count can also appear with high-poly clothing. I suspect it has something to do with the vertex ID’s overlapping. In sims 3, there are specific vertex ID number ranges assigned to specific items, here are their starting values:Tops: 5000Bottoms: 15000Full body: 5000 Hair: 20000Shoes: 30000Accessories: 40000This means that tops can have a maximum of 10,000 vertices, from number 5000 up to number 15,000. A dress would be a fullbody outfit and could have a theoretical maximum of 15,000 vertices, fullbody outfits cover the top plus the bottoms vertex range since either a top and bottom or a fullbody outfit is used on a sim. If a top has more than 10,000 vertices, they would clip into the range of the vertices reserved for bottoms. This plays an important role in animation and morphing. Vertex ID ranges are also used by animations and sliders. For example, if a slider targets the vertex ID range of bottoms, but the top clips into the range of those ID’s for bottoms, the top will be deformed as if it were a bottom by those sliders. This means you will probably see weird animations and exploding meshes. This is why it is important to always stay in those ranges. The vertex ID’s might also be messed up and wrongly assigned, and there are tools to fix that (usually, when you use cmarNYC’s Mesh toolkit to make the morphs and bone assignments, the mesh gets correctly renumbered in the process). Usually, the vertex ID’s are nothing to worry about if you stay in the usual polygon range. To be on the safe side, as a rule of thumb, only use 2/3 of the available vertices. This also minimizes morphing and bone/animation issues.I hope any of this will be helpful to you! Let me know how it goes :)
