I think I'm going through withdrawal.

[hat_plays_sims]

How did I get addicted to Garden of Shadows so fast? I've only been a member for... six or seven months, and now that things are all down and limnal, I keep finding myself intending to go post a confession or a quick question or actually get that 'here are elventeen mesh issues that seem small to my untrained eye. Would anyone like to take a bash at one or two of them?' post I've been working on up in the Wishing Tree. My first instinct, in trying to find out whether or not the secrets were up this week, was to check GoS instead of LJ.

This is highly frustrating.

Comments

[hat_plays_sims]

I'll give it a bash or two again once I've slept something. Enjoy your vacation! I am in the western US and bits are very, very pretty. We're having an El Nino year, so everything's still green in my neck of the woods.

The original original shrine, or the shrine via CEP? Cos vanilla, it is not recolorable; CEP makes it so.

[aquilegia]

I'm actually from that area originally (Oregon! And going back for a baby sister's HS graduation), but living in Finland for years has made it seem a very strange place to me. The last time I went back I felt very much the foreigner, and I'm sure it'll only be worse this time.

(My odd turns of phrase and such are the result of a magpie mind like mine soaking in non-American dialects and non-English languages for five years. Give me another five and my accent will be noticiably strange, too. *g*)

Aside aside, original + CEP. :) Even if I can't seem to remember to uncheck unneeded EPs in the file table, I usually remember to keep CEP in...

[hat_plays_sims]

I'm a Bay Area girl, born and raised. I wouldn't know what to do with Real Weather (but that's okay, if the Zombie Apocalypse comes, I live somewhere it's really hard to freeze to death). So yeah, hey, welcome home-sorta! I've heard Oregon is beautiful-- very green. I like green. It's green here now. Usually by this time of year it's brown.

I shall beat on the thing a bit in SimPE today and hope I learn something that'll make my coin heaps work, too. Fingers crossed!

[eefje00704]

Hi there, can I join the GoS party? ;p

You could have a look at Hugelunatic's tutorial for your non-recolourable object. I think you mentioned that you already checked the MMAT Guid, so skip to the 'missing tsdesignmode enabled' part. http://sites.google.com/site/hugelunatic/making-objects-recolorable Sorry if this is of no use, or if you already knew about this.

And the David statue. Well, I was sort of the person who requested him. The original free mesh looked very much like the real statue, but Suza (from simplystyling) then tried to reduce the poly count as much as possible. And well, you can see the result. I'm still grateful to her for trying to make me Venus and David statues though.

[hat_plays_sims]

Always room for one more at the GoS party, no matter where it happens!

Thank you for the link, I'll have a look at that! I'm really, really new to object... stuff, in general.

Now I feel a little sheepish about ragging on the David. *facepalm* I think it must be the original free mesh that has issues once it's in game, because Sgooby's look about the same (worse, actually, they have this weird shimmer like they're placed over another object) and I don't think he reduces poly count at all (statues with teeth and gums and eyelashes and individually-meshed braids and beads, et cetera). It could be a texture thing, too-- David always seems to be a solid-colored texture, but Venus has some shading and detailing, and she's the best of the three at Suza's. (Although I do like the Madonna and child-- somehow the rough-cut look suits them.)

[eefje00704]

I think you know more about object stuff than I do. I only know how to do recolours and how to fix unrecolourable objects to make them recolourable.

The free mesh that Stephanie (Suza) based him on is this one: http://artist-3d.com/free_3d_models/dnm/model_disp.php?uid=577&ad=02anatomy_design.php&count=count
But of course the polycount was through the roof, so she had to reduce it by a lot. She couldn't choose specifically what parts to reduce or something, which is why his chest and face lost so much detail. She tried to repair most of the holes caused by lowering the poly count, but couldn't get it to look just right. At first I'd only requested him in the small size, and it looks quite acceptable, I think, but then I asked for him in a larger size too, and then you could really see the difference. The venus is another matter. The bottom part is from a free mesh and the upper part is mostly from a maxis statue, Stephanie then added the shading because it really didn't look good without. She really put a lot of work into those statues, it's not like she just threw the original mesh right into the game.

[hat_plays_sims]

You're a step ahead of me, then-- I know how to make SOME unrecolorable objects recolorable, but other than that I just have a loose idea of how things are put together. It's like understanding that most bridges are built to withstand high winds and earthquakes, but not being able to reproduce the same effect just by reading about bridges.

That's... really odd that she couldn't choose where to reduce the poly count. I wonder why that is-- I can certainly see how being stuck with reduced polys in places you didn't want them could make for a problematic mesh! I've heard there are poly-reducing programs out there... I wonder if she ran the original mesh through one and it removed more polys from planes like his chest and face than from areas it may have seen as more detailed and thus probably more important, like his feet and pubic hair.

[eefje00704]

I don't know how to fix them all either. If they don't have an MMAT, I have no idea how to fix them.

Steph used Milkshape to reduce the polycount, I think. The original had about 30.000 faces I think. After reducing them by a lot she said "this David would have still much polys what could be reduced, but not with Milkshape. The direct x mesh tool begin to reduce from the inside, but I can´t tell this tool which parts it should reduce...there are also a lot of polys in the hair what will not be needed, but it don´t work this way. Whenever I try it again, the face is lost complete : (....and if I splitt David and try to reduce I have again much holes" I don't know anything about meshing, so I can only go by what she said.

[aquilegia]

Oregon's greenness is somewhat overstated. *g* The Willamette valley is very green--it's actually called temperate rainforest--as are the surrounding mountains and the coastline, but as far as I know all of central and eastern oregon is high desert, lots of sagebrush and scrub and brown. However, the civilization there is all farms and rural towns, so the metropolitan green part of the state tends to forget about it (I say with an eyeroll, as my hometown is IN Eastern Oregon).

The hills and plains in E. Oregon look about like the Bay Area does, most of the year (except it's bone dry, not humid in the least), but with more pine trees when you get to the mountainous bits (like the Blue Mountains in Northeastern Oregon). It's like that right up into Washington, and possibly even up into Canada, although I'm not sure. I DO know that the swathe of temperate rainforest goes right up through Canada.

/geography geek. :D

[hat_plays_sims]

Yeah, folk tend to forget just how much of California is farmland, too-- almost anywhere you get something described as a valley, we gots farms.

I've been up through the Sierras a couple of times-- my sister had her wedding in Lake Tahoe, once or twice I've gone to Reno with Mom-- and it's always fun to watch the trees change from scrub oak to pine as you leave the foothills and enter the mountains proper.