Post by Jeff ZeitlinExcept for Adults, it appears that Speedo-style swimsuits and briefs as
underwear are not available choices for male Sims, only the loose,
baggy, boxer-style swimsuits and boxers as underwear. I find this
especially odd with respect to male children, as when I go shopping for
clothes, I find that boxer-style underwear for children is vanishingly
rare.
Is there somewhere that I can download brief-style underwear and
Speedo/racing-style swimsuits for male Sims for child and up? Barring
that, is there any documentation anywhere that would allow me to use
BodyShop and/or SimPE to generate same from the existing Adult briefs
and Speedos?
There are a number of places that offer this type of thing and I think
someone else has posted some links. There's also a tutorial on Mod the Sims
2 about changing meshes for different age groups BUT (read below) ....
Post by Jeff ZeitlinSecondary question: If I generate or download an outfit - for any
purpose/age - that I feel would be appropriate for both male and female
sims, is there a way to make the outfit available to both, or do I have
to fiddle around with copies of the nearest thing shape-wise for the
"wrong" sex and copy in the texture and alpha graphics (and hope that it
doesn't distort the look TOO badly)?
Not really - I mean, yes, you can sort of. The best way to do it would be
to convert a texture from one sex to another but it would probably take
quite a lot of fiddling to get it to look right.
When you make clothes for sims there are two components to the clothes: the
mesh and the texture. The texture is the bit that is the appearance
(picture) of the clothes, the mesh is the 3D model around which the texture
wraps and which gives the clothes their shape. The texture is actually made
of two or three components: the alpha channel and the (clothes) texture
proper and sometimes a map texture (which gives the clothes shading) - if
you don't know what these are, then you need a good skinning tutorial and
not me. The meshes (3D model) are not just models of the clothes, as many
people seem to think, but the whole body of the sim except the head and
hands. You need both a mesh and an associated texture in order for the
clothes to show.
Let's say you make a set of clothes for a male sim that you'd like to have
on a female sim. To convert a texture, what you need to do is find a female
mesh that has a similar appearance to the male mesh you are converting from.
What you would do would be to export (in Bodyshop) your male skin texture
and then a texture from the female skin you found. You then do one of two
things. You either transfer copies of the male texture and overwrite the
female texture. This is not just a case of transferring the files, you need
to alter the file coding and overwrite the files in the female texture.
This is quite simple but again if you don't know what the coding is, you
need a good skinning tutorial and not me. You'll need to have a look at the
result in Bodyshop. What you are doing is projecting a texture made for a
male-shaped body onto a female-shaped body and inevitably you will need to
adjust the texture to get it to fit the body properly. As you will need to
adjust the alpha channel (and possibly the map texture - though most people
seem to ignore this) as well as the clothes texture (picture of the
clothes), this can be quite a fiddle to get right. You need to remember
that the three files of the texture need to map onto one another directly.
Alternatively, you can do a cut and paste job using materials from parts of
the original male texture files and pasting them into the female texture
files. The best thing for this, either way, is a good paint programme with
a layering facility. Remember to save the new female files in EXACTLY the
same format (same size, same colour density) as the originals.
You imply in your question whether it would be possible to simply recode
clothes for female sims from male sim clothes (or vice-versa). This is also
possible I think (though you need to be even more confident with package
files and I don't know how to do it). At least, if you want to change the
age-group of clothes, you alter the coding in SimPE and I imagine you can do
the same with gender. However, from our example above of converting male
clothes to female: You could either try just to change the coding of a
texture so that it attaches to a female mesh (which is basically what you
would do if you did what I outlined above only another way round) and you
would run into the same problems making the clothes fit the new mesh. Or
you could try converting the mesh as well as the texture, which would avoid
the mapping problems but would mean that your female sim would have a
male-shaped body. You also might run into the additional problem of the
male-shaped body not lining up with the skeleton of the female bodyplan
(this is usually more to do with height and as both male and female sims are
the same height, I don't think it's necessarily a problem). However, I'm
guessing this is not what you want.
Ugh - from re-reading that, I'm pretty sure trying to recode using SimPE
would be a nightmare. To be honest, I think your only viable option is to
fiddle about with the textures.
Best wishes
maxon