Viewing Hair/Clothing Without In Game BootUP

[killerpoet]

I want to know from all you smart people that seem to everything about how the game works if there is a way to view hair (or clothing) without actually having to put it into your game and wait for your game to boot up or bodyshop to boot up. Basically I have a lot of hair/clothing over the years and I know that when you actually download it from a website that the creator will make it look super, but when you put it on your own sims with your own skin there are huge seethr gaps in them at the back of the hair or the mesh of the hair isn't made quite right and there's a huge mismatch in skintone gap between your skin and where the hair actually starts... and with clothing some clothing meshes make it so that when the sim moves slightly the clothing goes right through their arm.
So is there a way to do it without having to boot up the game or bodyshop, or maybe even a program that allows you to view before putting it in game.
(I have all EPs & SPs except for the Holiday Stuff)
Thank you in advance for any answers... I'm not even sure if anyone reads these anymore but I'll give it a try (I think I just saw tumbleweed go by).

[Tarlia]

You can view both meshes and textures with various programs, but I'm not sure it'll do you much good. It won't show the sim the way you see them ingame.

Start by not downloading anything by Peggy, though.

(Tumbleweed? MATY is very active. Even if there aren't many new TS2 threads, they usually get an answer if anyone has one.)

[killerpoet]

Thankyou for your quick response... "?" Peggy. Do you mean PeggyZone? Why are they infected or very,very large?
Also if I google for one of the programs that you mentioned what kinds of keywords should I search for to find them?

[rufio]

Peggy hair is notorious for having giant gaping holes in it.

[killerpoet]

Oh... I didn't realize. Most of my downloads are from MTS and some use Peggy meshes, perhaps some of the creators there may have found a way to fill the gaps. Thank you for the info. Is there any other problems with Peggy that I should be aware of?

[jezzer]

Is there any other problems with Peggy that I should be aware of?

How much time do you have?

[Tarlia]

On second thought, you could probably find the some of problems in the meshes (textures would have nothing to do with this), but I have no experience whatsoever creating or editing meshes. There are tutorials on how to do so, though, and they should also tell you what programs you can use. I expect that gap problems and similar you might find, but clipping through sim's bodies and such I don't think you will see without testing them in the game, since that's an issue of the mesh combined with the animations.

[killerpoet]

I have no idea how they are made I couldn't edit a mesh with a gun to my head... clueless with that stuff.
I tried googling for a program to view without loading with many different word combinations but still have come up with nothing even remotely resembling a program that can do this. Do you perhaps know the name or creators name of one of these? Or even maybe a word combination suggestion that I could try that would get a hit. At least if I could view a file before it's in game if it looks okay on the view that would be a lot less in game testing of the animations to go through. A lot of the hairs and clothing that I have the creator only used a series of numbers for and so they are completely unidentifiable as an actual hair name, and some I've found if I delete from the CAS window or even BodyShop it completely borks some of the Maxis hairs... I don't get that... but not a skinner maybe they know why that happens but I've lost entire neighborhoods deleting some of the hairs before. I have so many hairstyles that I would love to purge my game and get rid of a bunch of the colors to cut down on the weight of my downloads folder (ya know only keep like a few colors of the good ones and scrap the others).
So should I google for other search words like mesh viewing or editing or something like that... I'm really at a loss for google combinations now, I've litterally tried about a hundred different combinations or more to find some sort of program to do this.... and I know the SIMpe popped up for one of those. but my computer hates the SIMpe and every time I've ever tried to install it... when I click to boot it my system crashes even though I installed all the other Microsoft needed stuff before it... so the SIMpe is out. I really would love if you may possibly remember the name of one of these types of viewing programs... or even a creator name... then maybe Google will hit something relevant... I don't even mind if I have to search 100 different creations to find something. Thankyou for your answers.
 

[Mootilda]

There are a few programs which will allow you to preview CC, but the preview that you see may not help you.  The pictures will not look anything like a sim, instead they are flat rectangles with bits of the clothing, hair, etc, in various places on the rectangle.  The game takes those rectangles and wraps them around the shape of the sim (mesh).  Some of these programs are:

Clean Installer:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=409950

Multi-Installer:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=37577

SimPE:
http://sims.ambertation.de/

I'm not familiar with this program, but the Wardrobe Wrangler may help you:
http://forum.jfade.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=457

If you try any of these programs, you will quickly see what I mean about the pictures.  You may be able to recognize the stuff that you want to delete.

[killerpoet]

Thanks for the info Mootilda.. although none of these do what I need them to do. The clean installer is only for Sims2Pkg Files. The multiInstaller is only for walls/floors.
The SimPE crashes my computer. The WardrobeWrangler is for binning hair.

I need a program that can read the files (not Sims2 pkg) and view what they look like in general to see if I should even bother to do a game install of them looking for flaws later. The problem is, over the years I have a lot of hair and clothing files and some of them I know are garbage but I have no idea what the name of the file is. Others are ones that I have no idea what they look like at all and I want to see them (on a sim) doesn't even have to be a real sim (can be just like a manniquin) to see in general if the hair or clothing is even worth putting into the game/bodyshop and Really looking careful for flaws. Without something like that I am constantly putting a file into my downloads/booting up the game/going to create a sim and viewing it/if it sucks shutting down the game/removing the files from the downloads/banging my head on the wall and repeating the process hundreds of times.

Any info anyone can give me is apprecciated regarding either a program that can view files/ or even a search word to find a program like this/ or even if something like this even exists or not. I've tried googling various combinations of viewing Sims 2 files without bodyshop (literally hundreds of combinations now) and no joy.

[Tarlia]

I'm glad to see you decided to ignore what I said earlier.

On second thought, you could probably find the some of problems in the meshes (textures would have nothing to do with this), but I have no experience whatsoever creating or editing meshes. There are tutorials on how to do so, though, and they should also tell you what programs you can use.

All of the programs Mootilda list only show you the textures, and the textures won't show you any problems with the meshes.

I googled 'sims 2 how to make meshes' for you and this was the first search result, although there were many more you might want to check out. This one suggests using Milkshape for mesh-creation (and therefore, you can assume you can also view them with it).

That said, it's entirely possible that even viewing the meshes won't help you see any problems with them, especially since you have no experience making them, and you'll just have to live with sorting through your CC ingame/ in Body Shop like the rest of us. The thing that you want - a convenient all-purpose CC preview program - does not exist. That's what Body Shop is for.

You might want to make things easier for yourself by sorting through your CC properly and NOT have a whole bunch of poorly named files. Clean installer helps you with this, if you use a lot of Sims2Packs. If you turn on debug mode ingame, you can also see the tags of the files in CAS, making it easier to delete the right ones. But all of this does require effort, and yes, it is slow and tedious, but that's how it is with this game. Sorry.

[killerpoet]

Most of the files are Not Sims2 packages... They are just files sorted into Folders, and deleting some from CAS/BodyShop bork the Maxis files... that's why I thought I'd ask about a preview. But since nothing like that exists. Thank you everyone for your answers, I will continue to do it the tedious way and let everyone get back to their gaming.

[jezzer]

It's been a while since I've played Sims 2, but isn't there an option to delete custom content in-game?

[HomeschooledByTards]

It's been a while since I've played Sims 2, but isn't there an option to delete custom content in-game?

Yes, but when it comes to hair and clothes is it UNBELIEVABLY tedious. Every time you delete something it resets back at the beginning of the clothing section you were in or back into the beginning of the black hair (no matter what color hair you were deleting). So annoying.

[Tarlia]

It's also really slow. The best method is to either know or find out which files are which CC, view them ingame/in BS, write down or otherwise keep track of which you don't want, and delete the files after you've shut down the program.

[Mootilda]

The clean installer is only for Sims2Pkg Files.

Not true.  If you run the Clean Installer and point it at a directory, it will show you all of the packages in that directory, along with any pictures that it can find for each package.

[rosess]

It seems as though most of the negatives of using BodyShop for this purpose are easily resolved by loading the program with only the new stuff in the Downloads folder.  Loading time will be reduced, there won't be as much to sort through, and there is no chance of deleting something already in use in a neighborhood.