hello and happy new year! ceci, do you happen to have or could you please make a tutorial on creating teeth if it's not a big hassle? i wanted to make a very particulat teeth shape for my sim, but apparently i do something wrong because the result morphs the whole face in a weird way
gurl the "happy new year" is beating my ass rn, not this exposing the state of my inbox...... 😭😭😭
but ok more seriously, I'll get on with the tutorial 😳
Step 1
first, we're going to use s4studio to create our package. we're going to clone the EA teeth to use as our base.
open s4studio and select "create 3D mesh" under "CAS"
click the blue "CAS" button
Step 2
select "Face" from the Part Type dropdown menu. this will make only the teeth files show up.
we're interested in both "yuTeeth" and "yuTeeth_Snaggle", but select yuTeeth first! (you can hover over each picture to see the names too)
click next, and save your package file as whatever you want.
Step 3
zoom in close to the model with mouse wheel until you can see the teeth, to make sure everything is correct, then go to the "meshes" tab on the right side
export your mesh and save it where you can find it.
note: if you've never used s4s or blender before, make sure your blender location is set up correctly in the s4s settings. otherwise, the sims4studio tools won't show up in blender & we won't be able to edit our cut numbers later.
Step 4
now that we have our mesh, we need to edit it in blender. I'm currently using version 4.2. the controls are different in different versions, so feel free to ask me about it if you're using another version and something isn't working right.
open your mesh in blender. press the N key to get rid of the side panel and Numpad 5 to make the view better/less disorienting. you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, and move around by holding the mouse wheel and moving the mouse.
look to the right panel where "rig" is listed. click the arrow to expand the list so you can see all parts of the rig.
click the eye symbols next to "head" and "head_2" to make them invisible so you can easily see the teeth!
Step 5
there are many ways of editing teeth, of course, but what i'm going to show you is basically how to frankenmesh them. this is a good way of creating subtle variety in MM style, without it being overly difficult! we're going to combine the regular and snaggle teeth as an example.
go from object mode to edit mode by clicking the menu at the bottom and selecting "edit mode"
afterwards, click the symbol on the bottom right to toggle "x-ray" so you can see all your vertices when editing.
Step 6
left click in the gray space to deselect all. there will be no orange left anywhere on the mesh.
then, hover over the top teeth and press the "L" key over a vertice (the small black dots) to start selecting the top half only. you should only have to select a couple vertices until everything on the top half is highlighted orange. you can change your view by holding down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse.
Step 7
now, press "X" key to bring up the delete menu.
click "vertices" to delete the parts of the mesh we've highlighted. only the bottom half of the teeth will be left behind. if there's any floating parts left over, highlight those with L and delete them the same way.
Now, repeat Steps 1-3 with "yuTeeth_Snaggle". when you have that mesh exported and saved where you can find it, continue to the next step.
Step 8
go back into object mode. you must be in object mode to append meshes.
go to file -> append to bring up another window
double click your snaggle mesh you just exported
double click "object"
double click "s4studio_mesh_1"
click "append" (if the window didn't close already) and the snaggle mesh will be added to your current mesh!
Step 9
you will see several new mesh parts in the list on the right. right click over "bone_bone_shape.001" and click delete to remove it, since it's just a duplicate.
do the same thing with "rig.001" to delete it as well
select the mesh part you just appended- which is "s4studio_mesh_1.001" to select it and go back to object mode (you can also rename it now by double clicking it if you want)
Step 10
repeat what we did in Steps 6-7 to remove the bottom teeth of the snaggle mesh. you may need to be more careful since these teeth are less straight & overlap more. take your time, and if you make a mistake, you can press CTRL+ Z to undo. you can also click the eye icon next to our first mesh part to hide it so you can see better.
when you're done deleting, unhide the first mesh part to see how it looks together. you now have the top teeth from yuTeethSnaggle and the bottom teeth from yuTeeth on the same mesh! you can mix and match many teeth parts this way.
I decided to rename my mesh parts to top & bottom to keep them organized. you can click the eye symbols to hide either one and see how each part looks. when you're ready, select the top teeth mesh part and return to edit mode.
Step 11
some of EA's meshes have very few polys, so they can be hard to edit, especially if you want to move individual teeth. but, teeth are so small that they don't need/shouldn't have too high of a poly count. having every single tooth be super detailed is overkill, so it's a good idea to only increase polys in the specific areas you want to edit. for this example, i'm going to mainly focus on the front teeth.
select the front teeth by right clicking + dragging over the area you want to select, and it will highlight orange.
go to "edge -> subdivide" to increase the polys in the selected area only, which will give you more to work with. DO NOT SUBDIVIDE TOO MUCH! once should be plenty for this.
Step 12
now for the fun part- actually editing the teeth to be unique! you don't have to do this if you only want to mix & match EA parts, but it's neat to toy around with, even if you just do tiny edits. there's a variety of ways to do this, and I like to do a mixture, but for this example I'm going to use proportional editing.
click the circle button to turn on proportional editing
left click any vertice you'd like to edit
press the G key (move tool) and scroll the mouse wheel forward until the gray circle appears on your screen. this circle represents the influence of editing- the bigger the circle, the wider range of vertices will be moved around that point. the smaller the circle, the smaller/more detailed the change.
move the vertices around by moving your mouse. you'll see right away how it moves. play around with it by using a combination of scrolling the wheel back and forth and moving the mouse.
left click to confirm/stop moving the vertices. you can undo using CTRL + Z if you need to. keep repeating this step by selecting vertices, pressing G, and moving them around how you want. you can also use proportional editing with the S key (scale tool) to make areas bigger or smaller. in blender 4.2, you can also click the tools on the top left side of the window if you want to mostly use your mouse, but I usually use the keyboard.
when you're done editing your mesh and you're ready to test it out, save your file before moving to the next step. keep a copy to the side so you have something to come back to later if you want to change anything!
Step 13
now we're going to prepare our mesh to be game-ready. some of the most important aspects of that is ensuring a) the mesh part is correctly named and b) the "cut" number is correct. if these things are off, the game won't know how to read it, and we'll get odd bugs like missing heads or our mesh just not showing up at all. we currently have two mesh parts and teeth only need one, so we'll fix that first.
first, go to object mode and select both mesh parts by holding shift and clicking each one.
press CTRL + J to join them together into one part.
Step 14
another thing we need to do is remove doubles so our mesh doesn't look weird or have any odd shadows in-game. in blender 4, it's "merge by distance", but in earlier versions it's just "remove doubles". you should do this when you're done editing, because it'll be difficult to edit after this step. I always do it after I merge all my mesh parts & am about to import for testing. I also double check the cut numbers after this to be sure they're right.
rename your combined mesh part to "s4studio_mesh_1" and ensure the cut number is 0.
go to edit mode and select all by pressing the A key
go to mesh -> clean up -> merge by distance
unhide the "head" and "head_2" parts of the rig you hid in Step 4
save your mesh as a new file name so you don't overwrite your working mesh, in case you want to go back and change something
Step 15
go back into your package in s4studio and import your new mesh
if you like how it looks & are done editing, select LODs 1, 2, and 3 in the dropdown menu and import your mesh there too. these are normally different meshes, but since EA based teeth are so insanely low poly, there isn't much point making individual LODs for them. but it's not that difficult to make them if you want to- if anyone wants a quick tutorial for that, let me know!
Step 16
you can stop here if you want- the teeth will take on the texture of your defaults if you used the yuTeeth package as a base. however, since we've used the Snaggle teeth on top, I think an adjusted texture might look better. I always use the textures by @ice-creamforbreakfast for my teeth, so head over there and grab their defaults if you haven't already! then grab the "uneven teeth" package file and open it in s4s.
export the texture from the uneven teeth package file as dds
go back to your package file and import it! (and don't forget to credit ice-cream if you post your teeth publicly ;3)
Step 17
lastly, go to categories tab and scroll to the bottom. if you want your teeth to be enabled for random sims, check the box
if you want the teeth to be considered a certain type (like buck teeth), change the miscellaneous to that type. if it doesn't matter or you're not sure, just keep it as TeethStraight.
Finally, save your package and you're done! :)