More Awesome Than You!

Is there going to be a private secret board for this somewhere? Someplace where we can do it without people getting their panties in a bunch?

Well, nectere has said we could use her forum for this.

Other than that, there's a few secret boards out there for file sharing.  ;)

I thought someone had said that but I couldn't remember who. I guess you should delete the link or she should require membership approval or something though because otherwise it won't be secret now. ;)

I have a lot of binned custom hair.

From most I have removed excess ages (sometimes maybe removing an age that was changed...) and I have also mostly removed the grey hair from all colours except the black, except when that hair was changed in some way. If I had hair that didn't fit into families I just marked the grey not to show so the sims would keep the hairstyle when they aged.

I wouldn't mind sharing if anyone would want any of the hairs I have (all are free) but since I have quite many I really don't know which ones would be of interest.

Really? Where?

I have maybe a hundred+ binned and sorted custom hairs, with all colors adjusted to realistic hues - i.e. no purplish-red for redheads. I'd be happy to swap for something. Or even just share.

I don't think she was keeping it a secret, she did post it in that hair thread before about it.  And the site is in her profile.

As for the secret board, well....if I told you, it wouldn't be a secret, now would it?  ;) 

Awwwn. Meanie.  :P

*cough*

*peeks up BlueSoup's sleeve*  You have something hidden, m'lady?

Fine! Be that way!  :P

Seriously, there is a few of them out there, I think.  But none of them belong to me, so it wouldn't right to share it.

Cool idea.

I hope I am not out of line when I ask this.  Would it be possible to have one of you fine people who is more experienced at taking these custom hairs and fixing them (to appear in the proper bin as well as making them use Maxis original colors) to perhaps give us a tutorial to go by as I would definitely be interested in learning to do it myself.

As I said I really don't know what is involved but I would certainly be grateful as I can't stand how messy my custom hair section is and I like things to be organized.   8)

There is a tutorial found here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2119.0).  Do a search as well, there's a ton of threads that talk about how to do it and various things about it.

Question for all:

I've binned a lot of custom hair (Mostly Neptune Suzy's, Lyran and Janna), but I don't put them into the correct family.  Up until now I hadn't been taking out extra ages.  Should I fix them further, or are y'all okay as they are?  I'm willing to do the extra work - I'd just have to mess around in SimPE this weekend.

For me personally, I'd rather have hair that was properly categorized with no extra ages, etc.  I've not done that myself, which is why I haven't shared any yet.

Katty: Taking out the extra ages, particularly the textures, drastically reduces the file size and over the course of a lot of files this can lead to faster loading times. The game has to take time load everything in every package file in downloads. So if you have a bazillion hairs that all have duplicates of the same Maxis toddler, child, teen, elder etc hairs, it has to load those too and it extends your loading time when starting up the game.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, that tutorial as well as SimplyStella's "Hairs - How to Remove Unwanted Ages [Quick Tutorial] " at MTS2 was very useful.   ;D

I'm in the process of recategorizing most of my downloaded hair. I am not taking out the extra ages though, because I do a lot of recolours and it messes things up. Still, when I'm done would you guys be interested in properly binned hair from certain *ahem* "donation" sites?

Oh, and a quick question. Is there any way in Simpe to figure out the name of the custom mesh a texture is attached to?

Do you have a link to that tutorial? I'm so sick of shuffling through six hundred shag do's in my children's hairstyles!


*Edited for spelling.

Here is the link:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=89652

I think the answer to that would be yes.   ;)

Well, my answer at least.   :P

Almost all of the hair I've downloaded I've binned, but I haven't put most of it in matching families yet. I did all of the hair I had by Seomi and then started to feel a little stir-crazy.  :-\ I'll probably get all of it done in the next week. I'm happy to share if any of it'd be useful.


Why yes, yes I would.

When I edited one of my hairs with Simply Stella's method, the hair dissappeared from my bodyshop. I'm sure I deleted the right things, and besides - every single edited hair went poof. I restored the originals and the hair popped back in. Does this happen for anyone else?

I'll have to look at her tutorial again, I only skimmed it. I know there's some stuff you don't want to yank, but the textures and such can go.

I think that was the tutorial I followed and none of my hair dissapeared (I think, with the amount I had I probably wouldn't have noticed if some went poof  :))
Does that mean I have too much custom hair?

I was a little weirded out at how the tutorial shows how to yank the 3d referencing files even though yanking the property set is more than enough to keep extraneous hairs from showing up - maybe with some hairs, due to how their mesh was made or something, yanking a 3d referencing file buggers it all up. Not sure, it's a wild guess.  :-\

I've done it by deleting unneeded textures (when I could guess which ones were the unneeded ones) and property sets, and that's worked fine so far.

That's all I do, too. I hadn't read that particular tutorial until long after I started binning hair, and it caused me to groan, like "Have I done a billion hair files wrong?" But all of mine seem to work just fine, so I don't plan on going back and changing anything unless someone explains exactly what benefits there are.

As far as I can tell, leaving the 3D ID references in won't hurt anything. Even if they are unnecessary, the amount they add to the file is negligible. 95% of the size of hair packages is the textures, if you can get rid of the unnecessary and duplicate textures and keep weird textureless hairs from showing up in the bodyshop and CAS, then you're good as far as I am concerned.

Of course Pinhead would really be the person to ask about this since he first discovered how to do this and is the hair binning expert. ;)

My problem is that I don't recognize the hair in thumbnail/SimPe form. I tried it once, and just succeeded in deleting too much, including some meshes. I'll check the tutorial out as soon as I have some time. I too have those 'gazillions' of toddler/child/teen duplicates, and would love to get rid of them.

@Liegenschönheit: why, thank you for asking; hair (for sims) is my weak spot :D

I have no issues following her tutorial but I have other 'hairy' issues.  You can read about them here.


http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=3636.msg106470#msg106470

post 134

Just wanted to add that I had some issues with Stella tutorial and things disappearing..especially the toddler hair melodie at MTS2 created.  I'm not sure I want to mess with things in SimPE again considering I'm pretty illiterate at programs like that but I could be persuaded to share as well as partake of any binned hair, pay or otherwise.

I had troubles with it too.  I redownloaded the hairs and this time didn't delete the 3D ID referencing files or binary indexes.  They worked fine.

Just delete the property set and extra texture, like the others have done.  It works for me too.  :)

Here are the binned hair that people said they were interested in. They are sorted into bins and grouped into families. The february hair has been modified by myself because I didn't like the ugly straggly bits that were on the back. It isn't anything pretty, I literally had my domain transfered to a new host earlier today.

*link removed due to "issues"*

Ooh, thanks for getting rid of the hair at the back of the neck on the Feb. gift.   :)

I think it just looked bad. Also, on most sims it sunk awkwardly into the head. It pretty much ruined a nice hairstyle, so I took it off :)

If need be, I can whiff up a small forum, hwere we can do the sharing. I have a small domain where i could also host the attached files.

If that is, anyone is interrested.

I have a lot of space left on my site. Email me the files and I can host them.

Interestingly a lot of people have peggy feb special but I cannot find the Jan special...

I also have ton of space/bandwidth available on my host that could be used if necessary. I HATE my hair folder. I'm at the point of throwing it all away because it isn't sorted well and its all over. So I'd love to be able to have properly binned hair.

Well, *someone* let us know when things are ready...  Some simmers are too nervous to PM people and be obnoxious abut asking...  (I'm not averse to sharing what I have, just unwilling to stuff my dl folder with more junk.)

Send the files to matyuploads@mac.com when you are ready.  :)

hi people!

i received a pm from Motoki asking to explain some things about 3IDR files and removing unwanted ages from hairs..
I'm not an expert, but i learned a lot when i was trying to figure out how the maxis download hair was working.

sincerally, if was so easy as deleting the ages that is clogging the bins with the same mesh that maxis, for sure maxis couldn't include options to create recolors to other ages since when creating a recolor you will select a age first, then the color and mesh.. So, will create problems with the fuctionally if references are been deleted.

the thing that i research (a lot) and learn about hairs is: when a hair is created, the family string stored at property sets will be used to change ages and colors of that hair style (the mesh). So a hair with full functionally will use this string and keep the same hairstyle and color from when the sim is growing. If you delete a property set, the game will try replace with other family and this family will be other hairstyle (mesh).

Since the discussion involves placing a custom mesh in the right bins, if you delete property sets from toddlers, childrens and teens, for sure you will never got a sim borning with this hairstyle. If you keep the toddlers and delete the childrens, when changing ages the game will replace with another hairstyle, losing the last hairstyle when growing from children to teen.

about deleting 3IDR (since i never did that) i can only think that will be a mess since the first 3IDR is stored the Hair XML (that has properties from color of browns, family string, ages, etc..) and the game will not find those informations. and if you leave there, it will not find the property set stored in the others 3IDR files... conclusion, a mess. lol
of course that i'm talking about custom hairs not converted to use maxis genetics that use other color number string different from maxis ones.

well, looks like maxis made a good work with the fallbacks, since people are deleting everything and is not appearing a sim without scalp... I particularly will never delete anything from a package without correctly reference to another file.
so, if you think it's safe, go ahead. :)

And is so simple to just hide an age from the bin and not get a random hairstyle each time that your sim grows... anyway i noticed that OFB is showing hairs with hidden flags when you are setting a business job outfit in a business lot.. damn.

I am in the process of rebinning the hair and that is going well.  However my next plan is to try to delete some of the extra textures and knowing that will change my hairstyle at age transitions, I still like to try a couple of them as they are basically using the same toddler and child Maxis textures anyway.

So I am in SimPE and and I see each Property Set for the PUhair and the cfHair and I go by the tutorial that says select the property set and shift del, it put the line thru it  but when I exit it just goes back to the way it ways.  I didn't see a commit button up top or on the bottom after I delete it because the commit button disappears when you put the line thru the property set.  I hope I am making some sense here.  Does that delete the texture completely or do I have to open the texture you see the raw image of the hair, do you have to delete those too?

Any help would be great.

Did you save after deleting?

 :-[  duh "smacks forward", oops, forgot about the save feature, so used to commit, commit, commit.  So I don't need to delete any of the three or four actual texture image files if the property set is deleted?

Thanks idtaminger   :)

You don't need to but you really should. It wastes space and slows down the loading time. Textures are by far the largest part of most package files. If you can cut down or even eliminate them then you will save a lot of file space and make the files smaller, cleaner, more compact and efficient.

Alright, I'm new to this hair binning thing but I've got a couple questions

1) I want to catagorize everything but I don't want 3 million grey colors for the same mesh.  I don't know if I missed that in the tutorials I've found.  I also don't want it to show up for toddlers if it's not a new mesh for the hair.

2) I have a tutorial by someone from here who's name I can't remember and who's name isn't on the tutorial.  I have to change something in the "family (dstring)" in the Property set however he just said to copy some numbers and paste it for every color...problem is, I don't know which numbers he's talking about.  Anyone know of additional tutorials for the simple brained regarding hair binning?

I prefer using Datgen to do this. If you can get it to work, it's much easier and has a nicer GUI. That being said, I have put in a request for Quaxi to add a plugin to SimPE to easily categorize hair and delete unnecessary ages so every go here (http://ambertation.de/simpeforum/viewtopic.php?t=2875) and reply and bug him to do this. The more people the better lol.

When using Datgen, download the debug version from http://www.datgen.info as it is the latest. Also I would separate out the hair you want to work on and just have it scan the directory with that hair in it.

As for the Elder hairs, you can delete them and just leave one color in, generally the one connected to black is what I leave in. If you set the families up properly, all the colors should find the right hair when transitioning to elder. You can also delete the textures and property sets for toddler, child etc hairs if the hair is not using them and they are basically just Maxis dups.

Rome Raven

The guy you are talkiing about is dewshine.
He has a tutorial here. I believe there is a link in this thread or the other hair related thread leading to his tutorial.

Datagen is not supported anymore by Dark Matter. So I didn't use it. Besides, he said the hair toner is bugged. So I was afraid to use it and instead opt for the simpe way.

Hmmm...Motoki, I am going to bug Quaxi too.  ;D Did you start a thread to bug him or did you PM?
Gimme the thread so I can go and bug/beg him too.

And Motoki, I am following Dewshine's tutoral exactly but when I delete the grey textures, the hair couldn't bin! :(
I have no idea why. The families are sorted too. Because of that, I left the greys in.

I did start a thread http://ambertation.de/simpeforum/viewtopic.php?t=2875

And Dewshine is a girl, not a guy. :)

Opps, gender mistake again lol :D

Ok, I shall go and bug him when I finally register.

ETA: Motoki, I presume you are female, right?  :D

Jysudo - Motoki is a male.  ;)

lol Yup I am male last time I checked.

OMG!!! Motoki is male!  :o
Jeez! I am sooo baad at guessing genders!

Yah, happens to the best of us!
Oh, and Brynne is a GIRL!  ;D

since i don't have good arguments to convice you guys that is not good deleting things in a package  ::) ,
i think that i can give a little tip about deleting textures without remove the functionally of the hair:

when you open the hair package, using SimPE go to "Material Definition" resource list, and go selecting the ages that
you like to change the texture to point into a maxis texture. When you select a txmt resource, go to
filelist tab and there will be stored a name of the base maxis texture that was used to create the recolor. Copy
this name (ctrl+c or select the name and right click/copy). Now in Properties Tab, find this line: "stdMatBaseTextureName" and
paste the name that you copy in "filelist" tab into the "VALUE" field of this line(replacing the name of the texture used in this package) and now the hair will use
the maxis texture for this age. Repeat this to all ages that you like to change.

Important:

*some creators use a same exported hair to change colors and if you notice that the name in filelist is using "-black"
and you know that the hair that you are editing is from other color, just change the color name to the one that you are editing.(maxis use
these names to color textures: -black / -brown/ -blond / -red / -gray. This way you will not get wrong colors in the textures.

*is good to take a note of the textures names listed at "stdMatBaseTextureName" that you are editing. Is important to know what texture was used and you will be able
to delete from the package. But you need to look in other ages that you didn't changed to see if this texture isn't used anymore by other txmt, to delete the texture safety.
 
*make sure to make a backup of the original file first, of course. If you make a mistake you will not lose the file.

*is important keep the 3IDR files and Property Sets. If you delete them, this little tip is useless. :)

after i saw so many hairs out there with the functionaly broken, i stopped downloading hairs since months now. too much work to correct them. :(

Pinhead, I really appreciate that infomation about textures and deleting.  Wow that sure is a tedious task !!!  I thought just binning the hair in the appropriate colors was bad.   Okay so I downloaded a custom hair set in four colors, not maxis colors of course, and although the style is only changed for female adults and the rest just use the original maxis style and the creator has the whole six property sets included in the package and I want to delete any of the rest of the property sets, that could break the funtionality of the hair?


I looked at this particular hair in SimPE and the line at "stdMatBaseTextureName" for all textures in the Material Definition resource list goes like this:  pu = [##0x5f9ffd6c!0xe3f45a02]  cf = [##0x5f9ffd6c!0xb829564a],  tf = [##0x5f9ffd6c!0x50ee3d3f],  af = [##0x5f9ffd6c!0x50ee3d3f]  ef = [##0x5f9ffd6c!0xf69aa5b]  and:  yf = [##0x5f9ffd6c!0x50ee3d3f] . . .

So going by your quote there, the texture** can't be deleted for the yf and tf because it is the same as the af in regard to the Base Texture Name. But I can safely delete the pu, cf and ef because they have different Base Texture Names. Am I understanding that correctly?

**PS   And by texture do you mean just changing the BaseTextureName or deleting the PropertySets?


Thank you  :)

I dunno. I've been deleting textures for a while and none of my hairs have acted up so far. I just never delete unless I'm 100% sure that the texture is not needed. Afterwards I generally just hide the age in the property sets, as opposed to outright deleting them. No issues that I know of have resulted from this.

There have been certain hairs where it's been hard to figure out which textures are which, though. The Material Def. info should be very helpful in this.

Deleting the textures does seem to work okay for me as long as I delete the property set along with it. Deleting 3D ID References and Binary Indexes seems to cause things to act up though.

Getting hairs to use Maxis textures can be done, but it's really tedious and a pain in the ass to be honest. Though in cases where a creator changed a mesh without changing the texture at all it really should be done as it's much more efficient. For extra ages like toddler etc though, it's easier IMO just to delete the textures.

I'd hope to understand what these resources are really for, but their logic still eludes me. :P

Just one more pointer on the 3D ID Reference quirkiness, this one witnessed by myself:
http://ambertation.de/simpeforum/viewtopic.php?t=2883 (http://ambertation.de/simpeforum/viewtopic.php?t=2883)

if you delete property sets, will broke the functionality.


yes. Those ##groupID!hash  is the name of a TXTR (texture Image) that is inside your package. If you change like i said to use the name stored at Material Definition's Filelist tab, you can
delete those for pu (toddler unisex), cf (child female) and ef (elder female) TXTRs (Texture Images) stored at this package.


that is the TXTR (Texture Image). isn't the property set. Like i said, you must need to keep the property sets in the package.
If you like to hide the age that you changed pointing to a maxis texture, in the property set
look at "flags (dtUInteger)" and change there to 0x00000009. This way will not show in the bin, the thumbnail will be hidden.


thank you! i'm glad that someone is interested.

Like i said, after people starting to delete property sets and 3IDR, is not possible anymore to just hide the ages in the property set. The last ones that i got
came with just 3 PSETs (adult, ya and elder). Sincerally, i can't enjoy something made incorrectly just to make the package small.

anyway, since you said that you are not getting weird things deleting the texture, maybe that filelist name in Material Definition is something like a Fallback. If
the texture setted at "StdMatBaseTextureName" field is not found, then the game will use that filelist to call a texture.. but i'm not sure about this.

the instance ID is the key that link property set to the specific 3IDR and BINX.

to be more especific:

property set has information and limitation to ages, skins, genders,... but also has information about the mesh
and the groups that is been used in the mesh. Also, with those informations, is stored the position of the
line that the Material Definition will be found in the linked 3IDR (by Instance ID).

BINX looks like a resource that inform how to render and store the thumbnail in the catalog. i'm not 100% sure.
anyway, there will be stored the lines of the mesh resource found in the 3IDR. I don't know exactly the functions
of each property of BINX but i know some and how to make it work correctly if i add a group to a mesh. what i
can say is:
sortindex = is the position of the thumbnail in the catalog.
stringindex = is the line of the TEXT resource that will be show when you mouse over a thumbnail.
iconidx = i'm not sure but i think that is the number of lines that the mesh resource will be rendered in the thumbnail. (a mesh
with just one Material Definition has a value 3 in this field (line one CRES, line 2 SHP and line 3 TXMT).
stringsetidx = not sure, but is the next line of 3IDR after all mesh resources are setted in iconidx (UIDATA?)
binidx = not sure also, but is the next line of 3IDR after stringsetidx (TxtList?)
objectidx = not sure again, but is the next line of 3IDR after binidx (Collection?)

those are the only thing that i know about those resources.

Does it really matter if you delete a child property set for an adult hair though? No sim will age back to a child unless you use a cheat. And if the hair is set up with the proper Maxis genetic colors then no baby sims will be born with the hair because they will get the girl 'Meg' hair or the boy short afro hair. Basically, you will only get the hair by using the mirror on an adult and then the adult can age to elder and that's it.

hmm.. well i got a sim with custom hair (binned to use maxis genetics) when changed to toddler. but in the last times that i played i didn't had new childrens
in my neighborhood. So, i don't know how is now.

anyway, you made me think... to a hair that isn't binned with maxis colors, for sure you will get something strange in the game, since the hair is
custom and is stored at the sim DNA (custom and unique "hairtone" number).

But a sim will get a maxis hairtone that will be random from that
hairtone ( a lot of different meshes) if the hair is binned. So, will be random at the family string to that hairtone and only to the toddler ages that are found..
and no problems (i think). just never a sim will born with this hair style.

but now i'm curious if my suspicious about the not binned hair and deleting resources with a sim that is using the custom hairtone in his DNA... not sure what will cause..
maybe a fallback to push to a maxis hairtone? anyway, how the game knows what color was used? it's a unique hairtone... maybe a wrong fallback with a mother with black hair, the father with red hair and their kid with brown or blond hair... lol

You had a kid born with custom hair that was put in the proper Maxis bins? That's odd. All I ever get with a sim with binned hair Maxis or otherwise is the Meg hair for girls and short afro for boys. Always have. Now un-binned custom hair when they have kids the kids seem to get the custom hair and I agree deleting the property sets could cause problems there. Or maybe Maxis built in a fall back? Like a lot of custom hairs don't have a male version but if a boy child gets that hair from the mother it falls back to a Maxis hair.

yeah. i think that you are right. maybe will call the DNA from the other parent
hmm.. well, when i had a custom hair binned to a child was when i
played university (before NL came out) and was studing the categorizing thing..

and looks like that maxis changed something with DNA in OFB ( i think that was OFB that they changed, since the last time that i tried edit DNA was before NL came out also). If you change any properties in the dna will reflect directly when you enter
the lot with that sim. Never happened this to me before  after tried to edit the DNA fields. This is new to me.
Even the portrait will be refreshed!! that's good to change skintones :D

I think they may have changed this in NL, because I still haven't installed OFB yet, but I had to go through and correct all my sims recessive genetics because of what happened as discussed in the thread about sims being reset to CAS default DNA.  I had set one of my sims with a custom medium-dark skin to the second lightest tone by mistake.  When playing the game and my sim called him to visit, I did not recognize him!  He had the S2 skintone!  I didn't know it would automatically change their appearance.  I thought it would just alter the genetics that they passed on when reproducing.  Since then I have tried this with other sims, changing their eye and skin color by editing their DNA, and the results were immediately reflected in their appearance when loading the game.  This was a very interesting discovery for me.

I am finding this discussion of editing custom hair in SimPE very interesting but a little confusing.  Like some others here, I followed the tutorial on MTS2 for getting rid of unwanted ages in custom hair packages.  I also edited the hairtone so it would show up in the correct hair color bins.  I did this for several hairstyles, deleting the 3D thingie, Binary, Property, and Texture Image.  Like Motoki said, deleting the unwanted texture files greatly reduces the size of the file.  I am just very picky about having things neat and tidy (although you wouldn't know it to see my room ::)), and I wanted the extra unwanted stuff gone.  When I loaded up Body Shop, everything looked fine, and it looks fine in the game as well.  So I am still a bit confused about what problems could be caused by deleting unused property sets.  I don't really care about what style sims transition with, because I always use JM's clothing tool to change them on age transition anyway.  My male toddlers always get that kinky curly hair, and my female toddlers always get the short straight hair.  I use Melodie9's toddler hair, so I always change it to something different, and they grow up with that.  Before I started using her hairs, though, my toddlers always grew up to that horrible Meg hair, or the boys grew up wtih the same kinky curly hair.  I am so glad to have some variety in toddler hair now, but that's a different rant.  Basically, I am just wondering why some people have trouble after deleting property sets and others do not.

I also had sims whose names I changed revert back to their original names after installing OFB. Kenny became Komei again etc. I don't even understand how it happened. :P I can't remember if I changed their names with the Insimenator in game or in SimPE but somehow the game must have retained their original names.

Could someone please fix these hair styles?

Old textures for the pixie hair that female children grow into.
http://www.filegone.com/v5sn

Old textures for Ajay Loner's hair.
http://www.filegone.com/dl1s

Motoki: sounds like an issue I ran into with NL.

I play in the en_uk locale but for some reason the game decided that as of NL I'd be Yankified (en_us). This means that name strings were altered.

Easily registry fixed, but evidently a bug in the TS2 installer(s).

I hope u don't mind but I have another question, I was reading buffysmg81 from N99 who posted a tutorial from leave_me_anonymous at MTS2 with pictures to help with custom binning hair.  Now in that tutorial they also said this:


So is number value for the Family value line a common number for every hair as this seems to say and is it necessary to change this too?  aaaahhhh!

Yes, you got it. Every colour/age of your binned hair has to have the same family value if you want them associated with one another. What this means is when you click from black to brown with that hairstyle selected, the style will stay the same but change to the brown colour. Make sense? It isn't precisely a necessary step to take if you don't want to, but it is if you want to remove duplicate grays or whatever.

What I usually do is load up the black colour and copy the family value, then paste it into every other colour. The whole process is faster and easier if you use cut and paste.

. . . . .Cut and Paste is my friend  ;D . . . . .

Do you have a link to the tutorial?

Ok, I have an odd way of learning. As I'm learning I write the information as if I'm teaching. So, do I have this right?
And yeah, I do care if the toddlers are deleted correctly, since I know there's a difference, I want to do it right.

Anyone who belongs to a certain yahoo group should check for a new post there.  8)

*Simsbaby hates how little he knows*
 :(

It's a secret society. You have to make the right friends and then wait to be kidnapped.  ;D

*cough*Yay!*cough*

So you got it Blue?

Let's just say very soon creators will have no valid excuse not to bin their damned hair or use the Maxis textures from the game files instead of duplicating them and wasting space.

   Ditto

 :'(

Indeed. It is a thing so shiny it is glittery!

Yes and people better start using it. Creators I mean. We really are going to need to get on them and insist they use it. Custom hairs are an absolute mess, this should fix the situation but only if the creators use it. We shouldn't have be cleaning up their messy half-assed files and then starting secret groups to share their cleaned up files in private because we don't want to offend them. They need to do it right in the first place and they need to update the old hairs too.

Neat. Does it put the recolours into families and all that jazz too? I didn't see any mention of it.

And also, I hereby solemnly swear that any hair recolours I do in the future will be properly binned :P

I can't promise I'll take out the duplicate parts though, because when you go to recolour it causes problems.

Damn straight, especially people who are charging for their custom hair. It's really pathetic that out of all of the hair I have, everything that came from a paysite was NOT binned by the creator and I had to do it myself. Everything I have that came binned by the creator was free. :P

Yeah, I got it, but I have to wait until I get home to check it out.

And, I personally don't care about offending creators, but I also have no wish to bring down the wrath of everyone who doesn't think sharing is good.  So, the secret groups remain, I guess.

Renatus: I think I know what paysite that is. And what's worse is, Pinhead actually went to the trouble of binning a couple of hairs recently posted on said pay site AND having them use the Maxis texture so as to save lots of space and not duplicate textures we already have. He sent the file to that site owner and offered to let her host it on her site and she ignored him and instead the half-assed bloated one she made is the one being distributed, being recolored off of, having a female version made of the male hair etc.  >:(

Lein: Yes it should do families. I've been told it will also do eyebrows and facial hair. :)

Motoki, it's actually paysites, plural, but the one you brought up is definitely one of the offenders. Their continued asshattery regarding binning amazes me, but I won't go into it lest this turn into a very long vitrolic rant.

Onto happier things - The shiny will do EYEBROWS? I'm going to faint from sheer glee. I went to geneticize some eyebrows a few days ago and stopped dead when I saw there were 12 XML files to edit in each file. *glee!*

What? A binning tool? May I have a link, please? Pretty please? :o

Oh yes, that would be the one that says "Oh but then people won't be able to find the hair!"

Because, you know, SO many people have had SO much trouble finding the Jeanette Biedermann hair, and Seomi's hairs, and my female afro.  ::)

If I was a paying subscriber to any paysite, I would demand that they properly binned the hair (so I guess paysites are lucky that I'm not).  Most know how to do it but they just don't bother. 

I just finished properly binning all my hair and am now moving on to eyebrows and facial hair, which must be done manually so any tool that could ease this process is worth a cookie, possibly even two!  ;D

So would I, Nikita, so would I!  ;D As the situation is, I snark at them from afar.

How does one join a secret group.....

is there a special handshake involed, or a naked rain dance, or perhaps the pledging of a first born child. or do i just have to pay off the right people  ;D

I *need* binned hair dammit lol (and am admittedly way too unawsome to do it myself  :-\ )

Inquiring minds wants to know!!!

I don't know why y'all keep talking about a secret group. There's no secret group.  :P

Really, the first rule about any secret club (which I'm not saying exists), is DON'T TALK ABOUT IT!  ;)

Look, if you all want binned hair, tell the creators to do it. It's really up to them. We shouldn't have to do it. If we keep doing it ourselves, they won't.

I'm so glad to have this tool.  There shouldn't be any reason why creators can't properly bin hair (because obviously not everyone knows how to do it), and will have even less of an excuse after it'll be properly released.

Oh and yeah, there is no sercret group.  ;)  Don't be silly.

I tried taking out the duplicate parts I didn't want in a hairstyle with the tool, then loaded it up in bodyshop. I then exported it to recolour, and it works fine. It just substitutes a default hairstyle in the apropriate colour for the missing parts, and pulls the correct gray style. So it seems that what I've been told about removing extraneous parts from hair packages messing up recolouring is false.

The only small problem I see so far is that only one package can be added to each colour, so if you have a light brown and a dark brown, you will have to do one of them by hand.

Has that actually worked for anyone here because they are not listening to me  ;) i tried to do it myself and just ended up with a migraine and a lot of useless files  ::)

When you don't know the file name of each recolor, the tool doesn't help much, as you can only see the textures after you add it to a color bin!

If it comes out as the wrong color, you can only remove it and try to load another one >:(

Oh, and when I used the option to disable the original packages, an error dialog appeared saying that the file was being used by another process. Did anyone seen the same?

All the hair binning info here is really helpful. It will prob helps me to improve my hair binning techniques if I ever want to do it again.
But hey, in case we are all trapped in our little worlds here, I just want to highlight that most folks still don't care about hair binning or even know what hair binning is.
I had to explain that to a friend who had hundreds of thousands of cc and yet had no idea what hair binning is.

It seems only Mts2 and Matyians are very concerned about hair binning so far.

And since the majority of downloaders are ignorant/ doesn't care, why should paid sites creators care?  :-\

I think the only thing we can do is to inform people about it and to keep bugging the creators to do it. I think more and more people will catch on. And once Theo's tool gets released, creators will have less of an excuse for not doing it.

I just posted a huge rant about it, heheh

http://www.theliteratesim.com

It's not until I recently started binning my hair, that I'm truly realizing the value of it.  I've only binned one creator so far and have quite a few more, but I think I have enough variety of hair to stop downloading hair until other creators start binning their own creations., as would make logical sense so people can stop complaining that they got black hair with blond eyebrows and can only change that in game.  Not binning them can screw up the genetics [which I'm sure many of you have seen when a child grows up with the electrocuted hair...makes me nuts >:(]

Okay..point said.  Have to continue binning my ahir

Motoki, its very well written!
I wish lots of creators will read it.

 :)

Where does one go to ask if they can be kidnapped and taken off to, erm, nowhere?

Can I ask, if I wanted to re-place my hairs in the custom bin, is it absolutely necessary to have a unique hairtone number per package, or could I use a hairtone number for multiple files? If so, would copying the family over to the hairtone be okay to do, or a bad idea? Or perhaps there's a generator of some sort?

Why I ask is b/c I have elder stages that I want in the custom bin, but I don't want to have to rebin everything just for one stage.

Could you just export the elder stage in Body Shop?

Exporting in bodyshop is rather unfeasible for the amount of files I have.

When you bin your hair, every stage has a seperate property list with the bin number on it. So if you wanted your elder hair to show up in the custom bin, then re-bin every other stage, but leave elder alone and it will still go to custom. To make sure it ages up correctly, remember to keep the family value consistant.

The thing is, the files are already binned, and so I don't have the hairtone numbers anymore. So what I was wondering was - is it okay to copy the family line over to the hairtone line and make it custom that way? Or, perhaps, copy a hairtone line over from a separate package and use that same number for multiple files. I'm not sure about the logistics of this, and so I really don't know if I should try this.  :-\

Theo's new binning tool for SimPE allows you to move hairs between bins, at least the latest update posted today does. Can't you just check the greys and uncheck the rest and move them to the custom bin?

Really? I hadn't gotten around to testing it out yet. I've been recolouring like mad this morning. I'll def. try that out. Thnx. :)

Ok I followed the steps using the male Jeanette hair (hey! Where can I find the female? The link I found (http://www.jeanette-meets-diesims2.de/) seems gone.) The name in the file to point to using my step 4 of removing seemed to work to redirect to a maxis texture, since I deleted the texture but a texture showed on the mesh for those age groups. In other words, I did delete the texture, but it didn't hide the ages I deleted, so I had unwanted toddler and children's hairstyles in my bins. How do I hide the ages I deleted? I tried deleting the property groups, but that ment that if I selected the adult age and then made it a child, then back to an adult, the mesh changed to a maxis one. That actually can present an annoyance for me, since when I make a sim I see what it looks like in all ages and both genders, so I know how cute his/her kids will be. I don't want to reselect the mesh, I want the family properties intact. Can I keep the properties but hide the age group?
Also, how do I redirect the texture to a maxis texture not refrenced in the package? The elder hair is a custom texture, the name of the file when redirecting mentions Jeanette. So in the elder bin I have four elder hairstyles, three of them do not have textures just that weird text covering.

Oh! Thanks a lot, sara dippity! Your problem now is showing exactly what i was trying to say before! :)
That's what i'm talking about broken functionally when you delete Property Sets from the package. That's a good example of what will cause.
All the files stored in the package are required to link each other together, saying to Bodyshop or the game what files need to be loaded when changing ages and colors
in the Bin. If the game or bodyshop didn't find something, will change to a maxis fallback, that use a different family an mesh set. So, if you change ages
will change to a fallback that uses a different family hash and the next age will use that family hash to call the next age mesh.

About the texture of this hair, in this case, you need the original texture from the original JB mesh to point to the base texture.
If you don't have it installed, the textures can't be found
by the game (because isn't shipped with the game).

to hide the ages, select the PSET of the age that you like to hide and change to this:
flags (dtUInteger) = 0x00000009 ----> if the flag is setted as 0x00000000 or 0x00000008
flags (dtUinteger) = 0x0000000B ----> if the flag is setted as 0x00000002 or 0x0000000A

0xB is used to hide only Hats PSETs and 0x9 is used to hide normal hairs.

i was using 0x1 to hide normal hairs and 0x3 to hide hats, but with OFB somehow those hidden ages
are showing only when you try to plan an outfit for your employees at a business lot (i don't know how is
called this function in English games, but is when you choose an uniform used by all your employees in the work). So, i presume
that will be good use the values to hide as the same that maxis uses.

But i didn't tested yet using 0x9 and 0xB to see if those hidden hairs are appearing there too.

Simsbaby put a link to the files here:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=3856.0

Pinhead: I think that option is just called 'set uniform' or 'plan uniform'. :)

Sara: Pinhead is right. Basically just go to the property set for the age you want to hide, look for the value called flag and change the last digit from a 0 to a 9.

I just asked Theo in his thread if there was an option to hide hairs in the CAS and have to tool set the flag. It's not hard at all to set the flag manually, but it would be nice if the tool could do it. :)

THANKS THIS IS GREAT!

Um, I mean, thank you.

Okay, I have my hairs all binned properly and have properly deleted unwanted textures as outlined by Pinhead.  Now my next question is, as  sara_dippity asked above . . .


Is this part of the solution? . . .


If not, is it possible to have some of the recolors of new meshes or found meshes, such as the female hair mesh Sims Connection found and recolored, point to original Maxis colors or textures, the black, brown, red and blonde?  I do like the Maxis colors and some recolors are too bronzey or orangey, etc.

Thanks again for all the great info.  Happy Binning  ::)

yes, it's possible. but it's more work to do. :)
Anyway you need to know the exact name of the texture to search for it in your game.
i already did a binned ofb hidden meshes, using a different process, to make meshes, textures and TXMTs been
used with what maxis included shipped with the game.

the name of that hair style is afhairlonglayer and amhaircurly.
you can use the Resource Finder of SimPE to locate the names of the texture to
copy them to apply in janna's TXMTs.
in the TXMT's stdMatBaseTextureName field.

Did anyone remove the extra textures and elder colors from melodie9's hair that she made for all ages?

Does this mean you can use these values to hide the chicken hair unless you want to use it to plan a uniform?
I have one hair I downloaded that will not vainish when I'm putting the 0x00000009 flag in, is there a way to play with the numbers without causing explosion? Like a list somewhere of things people have tried?

   (would I need to change the name in the FileList tab too?)

Thank you Pinhead, I did try copying "afhairlonglayer - brown" and pasting it in janna's stdMatBaseTextureName field, but it didn't change the texture's color in Bodyshop.  I also noticed there isn't any "ufhairlonglayer" TXMT's or TXTR's in the search results which is usually what I have been seeing in the FileList tabs.   The reason why I was wondering about that is because there is no efhairlonglayer - grey just afhairlonglayer - grey  and I didn't know if that would help to point to Maxis's grey texture or not.

So I guess this also means I cannot point to any maxis textures for any new meshes by creator's eh?  If not, I guess I will have to live with the colors there.   :(

If possible and I wouldn't be out of line in asking, could you PM the ones that you did, just for the found female set.  I don't really care about the male one until someone can fix the wild animation of it.  It's just crazy  :o

Thank you for listening  :D

This is where I started having problems getting rid of extra textures.  Maybe it's because they pull meshes or something from adult hair? Or maybe I'm a dipshit and don't know what I'm talking about..maybe both :P.

Just add 1 to any clothing or hair flag to hide it.

flag 0x00000008 becomes 0x00000009, flag 0x0000000A becomes 0x0000000B, etc..

This'll leave all the sorting intact.

Clothing/hair hidden this way will not appear in the catalog unless testing cheats are enabled in CAS, but /will/ be available for uniform plotting. I've fixed the Maxis chicken pre-order this way and hope to hide all the other uniforms this way as well.

Actually simsbaby, if you look at the size of those recolors for Melodie9, they are all fairly small compared to most of the hair packages.   Around 199 to 292 kb.   They also all only contain two actual textures except for one of the bobhair ones which was 1795 kb  :o

There was actually 16 textures in there but the rest only have two, so I followed Pinhead's instructions and checked all the stdMatBaseTextureName fields and deleted all but two of the textures, same as the others.  They only thing I had to do with Melodie9's was properly bin them.

Hope this is helpful.

hi twistingsims! :)
sorry take some time to answer you. I just didn't notice your post before.


isn't required change there (in Filelist). The game will read the stdMatBaseTextureName of TXMTs to render the texture.


sorry. In fact you need to point the exact name of the texture. You are saying "afhairlonglayer - brown" but must be "afhairlonglayer-brown" (without spaces)
and sorry that i said a wrong name. I didn't touched the TXMTs of those hidden meshes and i didn't know what is the exact name of those textures.
elder textures generally is afhair..-grey (when is maxis textures, not cloned). So, if is grey is for elder. Doesn't matter if is using af or ef in the name. :)


sometimes you can't. If the creator changes UV Maps you may find the texture messed in the mesh. So, sometimes is required to use the same
texture that the creator included. In fact, that tip to copy the Filelist name to stdMatBaseTextureName is to call a maxis texture for ages that were not created
a mesh. Those ages are using the maxis mesh and the texture is included by bodyshop in the package. So, is wasting space and making the package bigger.


yes. i can send to you. no problem. :)
in fact, the size of the package is just 19kb. :D
wild animation??? i didn't saw wrong animations with that hair yet.
the male hair is using the same size of the female (19kb). if you like, i can send both and then you see that isn't exist wild animation.
at least some townies of my neighborhood are using and i didn't notice anything wrong with that hair...

Could you please send them to me too?

I ran my hair files thru the plugin. I like it. It's easy and has some great features. I found a few files that wouldn't go 'thru' it, but there were just a few. I trashed them. What a great addition to SimPE!

I recently made my first attempt at "binning" hair using Theo's plugin, and the hairs didn't show up at all in game. I'm pretty sure I followed the instructions carefully, but still could have made a mistake along the way. Is there anything I should be aware of / look out for or any common reason they might not show up in the game?

Maybe I can help! Hope you haven't deleted them.

Atfirst, mine wouldn't show up either. my cc all showed up but the hair I had run thru the plugin did not. I started reading around and I came across some thread talking about hair and clothign not showing up. the solution was--get this!:

Take everything out of the game DL folder.
Delete the folder
Install anything using the Maxis installer (I had a sim sims2pack sitting aorund)

That makes the game generate the dl folder.

Move everything back into the new DL folder (in the game folder)

THAT worked for me. Weird, yep. Maxis has out done themselves, eh?

Good luck.

Strange - but I'll give it a try. Thanks!

Again, pinhead thankyou for replying. hope u got my pm  :D




I actually found at um (name not spoken) new meshes by DJ Mur, had redone both female and male hidden meshes and fixed the animations of both, however now the female has no animation.  :(    I do hope yours does, as I do like the animated hair styles.  I did replace the male hidden mesh in my game, but if you can tell me how to take a picture in CAS of a sim with the male hairstyle, I  can show this wild animation if you like.

Also thank you for clearing up the changing of the stdMatBaseTextureName only when those ages do not use new mesh.

Where can one find this new binning tool...or is it only available to the awesome ;D

I'd like to try binning again and this sounds easier

http://theos.home.sapo.pt/ts2/index.html

And there's a thread about it here:

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.net/smf/index.php?topic=3844.0

Thank you Motoki,

I didn't see that thread there...off to try this binning thing again ::)

Thanks Motoki and everyone involved! Now I think I'll be able to do this myself!

 ;)

Does anyone have the XMS hairs properly binned and aged?  Some of you know I lost all my d/l and I'm trying to rebuild.  I had just finished geneticizing all my eyes, skins and hairs and POOF.  Point and laugh JM, you know you want to.

C

/me points and laughs at Dumb Cwieberdink-Type-People.

 >:(  ugh!  Fae, that's awful!

I just KNEW there was a reason to not have much in the way of CC!

I have a couple of them, I can send them to you later. Properly aged though, nope.  I totally skipped that part.

I just finished doing some, but I don't know about the aging part.  I mostly got rid of the unnecessary toddler and child colors using Theo's tool.