More Awesome Than You!

I am just about to embark on sorting hair using data gen when I realise that the latest version of datagen doesnt have the hair toner. Dark Matter and the rest suggested skin mgr is a better plugin to sort hair and promise a tutorial which will prob never come now since they have stopped developing this tool.

So my question is : what do you guys who use data gen to sort hair use? Skin Mgr or Hair Toner?
They mention problems with hair toner to sort hair thus they exclued that plug in?
If you are using skin mgr, can give me some help or point me to some guide for help? Thanks :)

There is a tutorial further down the tutorial page.  Direct link: http://www.datgen.info/tutorials/sm_hairtone.aspx

Make sure you have the latest debug version; the 0.7.13 version had plenty of bugs.

Thanks. But Darkmatter and his team said that hair toner was scrapped because its buggy and replaced that with skin mgr. Now I am all confused over which version.

Perhaps it would be better to just bite the bullet and sort it with SimPE?  It's really not hard, just tedious.  But copy/pasting is your friend, and it works really well.

I was thinking of either that or should I just use a quick band aid (Stella's tutorial on deleting excess hairs over at MTS2).
I don't really care if the sims inherit hairstyles not colors. but I am bothered over seeing so many repeat hairstyles of maxis defaults for tots, kids and elders :(

And Stella's tutorial means I can sort them out in hours not days. I only have around 400 hairs.

Blue, do you use SIMPE or DATA GEN? If its latter, which version? I read that hairtone is buggy so if you guys sort using datagen hairtone plug in any problems?

No, I used SimPE to sort the hairs.  The first thing I did was sort it all into correct bins, and next I will go through and delete the excess hairs in the wrong bins.  I rarely change stuff for the kids and toddlers anyway, I just play on mach3 during those times anyway, so whatever they get is usually fine with me.

I have about 150 hairs (after deleting a lot I didn't use) and it took me about 2 hours to sort the hairs out with SimPE.

So that means after sorting the silly hairs into the silly bins, I must still go and apply Stella's tutorial to get rid of the excess hairs for the wrong age groups?

I started deleting hair already using Stella's instructions because I figured that might make things faster for me? Am I right in thinking that? Thanks so much .

2 hours is pretty fast. You are awesome! :D

Well, it took about 35 seconds to do each hair (or so), and then after each hair colour folder was done, I loaded BodyShop to check the custom hairs to see if I had missed any in that colour.  Right now I have a red one I don't know, and two hairstyles from cc Sims (I can delete those though, since I gave the MATY Sims genetically proper hair. 

I don't know if that will make it faster or not, since I haven't done that part yet.

So that means you have not delete the excess hairs for the tots and kids yet?You still have them hanging around in ur folder?
That means another 1-2 hours to do those.

Ok, I am going to do the opposite way and see what
1. Stella tutorial first.
2. SimPE way.

Thks for anwering my many questions ! :)

There is a QUICK and LAZY way of getting rid of unwanted age groups. Using this, it should take no longer than a few minutes to do all your hair, assuming that you know which age groups you want to delete from which hair.

Here it is. Just be careful when you reach the parts in bold, because that is where a bad screw up can happen and ruin your files (make sure you backup any files you are working with!).

First, sort your hair into folders. For example, if you downloaded a hair that should only be available to Teens, Adults/YA, and Elders, you will want to put it in a folder called Teen_PLUS so you know you have to get rid of toddler and child hair. When you finish, you might end up with several folders like Child_ONLY, Child_PLUS, and Adult_ONLY and so on. By the way, you can use subfolders inside these folders.

Next, place just ONE folder into your Downloads directory and make sure nothing else is in there. Your Downloads folder should be empty except for the folder you will be working with. This is important because I'm not going to explain how to force SimPE to only look inside that one folder instead of everywhere.

Run SimPE. From the Tools menu choose Scan Folders. Point it to your hair folder. Run the scan, Wait until the scan finishes.

You should now have a list of files, hopefully with textures visible.

Sort by Type. This should sort out recolors from meshes. Meshes will probably be listed as "unknown" and have no texture.

I assume you know how to select more than one item from the list (hold down the Shift key). Select all the hair recolors. Do not select the meshes. We are ignoring the meshes. In fact, you could have removed them all from the folder before you started this. We are only interested in the recolors.

On the bottom-left of the screen are three tabs called: "Scanner Settings," "Operations," and "Cache." Open the Operations tab.

Scroll down a little bit until you see a bunch of checkboxes with age groups next to them. It's under the silly title of Clothing Scanner. Here's a picture:

(http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c129/saramkirk/sims/Shot_001.jpg)

Uncheck the age groups you want to get rid of.

Click the blue "set" link ONE TIME ONLY ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! When you click it, the checkmarks will appear in the boxes again. DO NOT CLICK AGAIN ! Clicking "set" again will DESTROY your files. Seriously. I'm not joking. You will have to start all over.

I'll even say it again: NEVER click "set" more than once! Not even if you changed something after clicking it the first time. In cases like that, you will have to start over. I hope you made a backup.

That's all. Run Bodyshop to confirm that the unwanted age groups are gone.

Note that is truly a LAZY way of doing this, because ideally you should delete textures to reduce file size, and all that other stuff. This method is for those who just want to do it quickly and don't care about doing it correctly.

Final note: It appears you can't add age groups this way. I haven't even been able to add YA to a hairstyle that's adult only.

For some reason copy and paste dosn't work at all in simpe. It is VERY tedious typing each number. Have any ideas?

You have to use the keyboard keys because right-clicking with the mouse does not work.

Copy: CTRL-C
Paste: CTRL-V
Select All: CTRL-A

Yes, copy and paste works fine if you use Ctrl+C to copy, and Ctrl+V to paste.

Edit:  Sara, you beat me to it!

By 12 seconds. ;)

I forget to ask just now if I delte those unwanted age groups, will the tots be born or worse without a scalp if they inherit the parents' custom hairstyles?

And thanks for the tutorial SaraMK. I appreciate it :D

Good question. I have no idea. All my hair is also sorted into color bins, so my sims always inherit a color, not just a hairstyle. I don't think I've ever had two sims who were made with a custom unsorted hair and allowed to breed.

I'm going to guess that yes, if the baby inherits just a hairstyle and no color, it would wind up with a bald head because the game would treat it exactly the same as a case of a mising file. The game won't be able to come up with a replacement because there is no way to tell what color the hair was supposed to be.

If you're using the toddler mirror, JM's clothing tool, or the Insim, you can fix the toddlers right away if that happens. I don't think anything worse than being bald will happen to them.

ok let find the answer to that then I am in the midst of clearing out those excess hairs.
oh oh, with OFB, we might not even need the tot mirror anymore..

What is the procedure for doing this with SimPE?

I used this tutorial by Dewshine (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2119.msg59038#msg59038) to do it.

thanks