Converting Fem-Frame Mesh to Masc-Frame
This tutorial assumes you have basic knowledge on blender and sims4studio, so i won’t go over basic things. As always, you’ll need to export the mesh you wish to convert first. Next, open it in blender and switch into edit mode.
Hit ‘UV sync selection’ to make the work easier.
Now, with the ‘L’ key, select only the body parts and separate with the ‘P’ key. Your mesh should look like this:
Then, hide the body (hit ‘H’ key or hit the eye icon in the outliner tab) and import the needed male body mesh. If your object is only a top or only a bottom you may not need the whole male mesh, but just to be safe, I prefer importing both regardless for a better view of how the weights look later.
Before editing the mesh, make sure to merge by distance so nothing breaks or gets crunchy in the sculpting step.
aka sculpting the mesh to the male body. Go into sculpt mode and select ‘elastic deform tool’, either through the button itself or the keys ‘shift+space 8’. Then make sure to select ‘mirror: x’ in the symmetry tab so that everything you do on one side occurs on the other to keep it all even.
If all's well, when you move around the mesh, your cursor should look like this:
You may need to switch between ‘material view’ and ‘solid’ with x-ray on as shown in my recording to get a good look and keep everything proportional.
Before moving onto weights, I usually look back at the original female body to see what parts were deleted as an outline for how I will now delete parts from the male body. Visually, the easiest way for me to do this is I select both bodies, with the female pre-highlighted and the male unselected, and then select parts while holding the shift key.
Separate and hide the other meshes, leaving you with something like this:
If you don't see any holes anywhere, we can now move onto weight painting.
The first thing you want to do is to look for the cas-breast weights and delete them. Theyre not needed and will only fuck up things later LOL.
Now, go to the ‘spine_1’ weight, it’ll probably look like that, which we dont want. So hit the button ‘weights’ and select ‘normalize all’ as such :
Spine1 should now look like this
After this point, weight painting is very dependent on the mesh itself, so, the most I can say is to un-hide the rig and rotate various bones to ensure the clothes move properly and/or don’t clip anywhere. If it does, those are the weights you'll need to fix.
When youre done, merge both meshes together and import it. Once it's imported, youll wanna export it again to fix the uv_1.
Why?
Because we merged vertices earlier and that impacts the way the uv_1 turns out. Seeing lines go across every side of the mesh negatively impacts the way itll morph on the body in-game. Everything has to fit correctly. Example of a not well uv_1:
Once the mesh is re-imported, separate the body from the dress/clothes so the uv_1 editing happens /only/ to the clothes. Add a complete male mesh again, select your outfit and go to modifier properties and select ‘data transfer’. Make yours look like this:
After applying it, it should look something like this:
And now you're free to combine the two meshes and to merge by distance again!!
Finally, import and check how it looks in game. It's usually never perfect the first time…
How did this dress turn out?
Well, like I said, its imperfect still but looks like this in-game atm:
