#meshing tips

[bellakenobi]

hi!! would you consider sharing or doing a mini-tutorial on how you made manual morphs? i would LOVE to just make the morphs myself

Hi!

Well, actually I'm only doing morphs by hand when it's necklaces (and that last madlen boots I converted) because it was possible to fiddle with it without messing things up since no EA body seams are involved.

For clothing, my process is quite chaotic. (it's what I ended up doing on my madlen numia conversion)

I use Mesh Toolkit to convert from .obj to .wso and assign bones and make morphs.

Then I convert the morphed .wso to .obj again so I can adjust the fat morph on blender (because it's always the fat morph that gets distorted af).

Then I re-convert the resulting .obj and use it as reference to re-morph it with Mesh Toolkit (because I then can fix the EA seams in the raw mesh before making the morphs with the Toolkit).

Oh, and I use the Sculpt mode on Blender for that! In my opinion, is more intuitive to fiddle with that, than with proportional editing.

As and example, here I'm fiddling with a choker. Note that in this case I have to better adjust the spikes, but you can see how easy it is to adjust the whole thing to the neck.

The tools I use the most are Grab and Elastic Deform.

(i'm also planning on doing a tutorial of converting necklaces without using milkshape, but then I'll have to overcome my shyness about not only speaking in a video, but maybe speaking in another language? oh well)

[simlicious]

Meshing Tutorial: How to create a UVmap in Blender that looks good with patterns

UV-maps - there is no easy formula for them, because every shape has different needs. Rectangular mesh shapes are pretty easy, but organic shapes and bended shapes can cause headaches. Automatic mapping methods often do not produce satisfying results. Don't be afraid to go in and pull those UV's into shape yourself! Here's a bit of guidance to do this. I used my cute Owl Earrings as an example project to show you what I mean :) I highly recommend to work with different UV background textures. the built-in UV Grid texture of Blender is a good start. To help you understand how pieces need to be mapped in order for the pattern to follow the shape, I created an arrow texture. You can simply imitate this and make a texture with arrows in your favorite image editing program ( the arrows should all point in one direction, straight down from top to bottom). It should tile seamlessly. Try 1024x1024px as a size for your texture  (that's the size of clothing textures in Sims 3) but it can also be smaller or bigger, as it is just a guide for you.

Step-by-Step explanations along with the pictures

Image 1: The first picture shows how the finished earring looks in Blender. You can see the mapping and a preview texture so you'll have an idea of how it will look in-game. Image 2: To check your mapping, use the built-in UV-grid texture that Blender offers.

Image 3: If the grid texture looks rectangular/elongated or squished on your mesh, then the uv-mapping is not ideal, but stretched.

Image 4: Look at the vertex rows and faces of the mesh. How are they structured? What are their dimensions, their ? Try to keep the shape/ geometry of thems on the uv-map.

Image 5: Use the arrow texture you hopefully created by now as a guide to see the pattern flow (how the patterns will be tiling and showing up) on your mesh. You can load it in the uv-map window. Click on Image -> open image and load your arrow texture.

Image 6: Let's show you how to modify a uv-piece that you created automatically. Here, I automatically remapped the metal earpiece of the earring to be able to show you the process of manual adjustment.

Image 7: As you can see, the automatically mapped piece does not offer a natural pattern flow. Image 8: By grabbing, rotating ad moving areas on the uvmap, you can put them into a shape that fits the pattern flow. I hope you are now motivated to try it out yourself on your own meshes. It is not that hard! :) If you screw up completely, you can always remap the piece and start again.