Recategorising hair with SimPE

[cristalfiona]

I have couple of questions, and was wondering if anyone could help me. I used the information that was posted on here a couple of weeks ago, and started to recategorise all my hair. But I have some problems.

It said to change the hair colours to whatever colour it said in one of the strings in the property set (sorry, im on my work computer and dont have the information with me), eg black for all the colours and grey for the elder hair, but shouldnt that colour be whatever colour the creator used as their base point, and not necessarily the colour it is now?I have one hair colour, where it said black for all the property sets, but when i go into CAS and look (have never used bodyshop), all my colours of one hair style are now in the black hair section.

So I thought, what if there's a picture somewhere in SimPE that I can use. I went back in and looked, and the only thing i could find was the template. But this started to confuse me. On most, there is one colour, then a gray, then another colour, which i assume is base, mesh and recolour. But some have base, mesh and 2 recolours, or even 3, and still 5 or 6 property sets, which doesnt match (again, all say (eg) black, even if the recolours are blond etc). Also there are some without gray colours. I would say they were maxis recolours, but the only maxis recolours i have are things like pink and green for my coloured skins, so i know its not these.

I cant use the name of the package file to help me, as it usually doesnt include the colours.

So, is there anyway to find out for definite what colour each one is, so I can categorise them correctly, or do i have to clear out all my packeage files and unrar each of my rar files separately so that i can do each one right?

I had another question, but cant remember it now. Will post it later when my brain kicks back in.

[Twiki]

Recategorizing hair is the ONLY thing I don't do in SimPE, because there's too much little stuff to remember. I use Datgen because it does almost all of it for you. (Except putting it into the right families - that's broken in the release I downloaded, so I do just that part in Simpe.  It's a somewhat optional step anyway.) If you need a walkthrough of how to do it in Datgen, I'd be happy to help. Datgen is available from http://www.datgen.info/default.aspx .

As for telling which hair color is which, this is made more difficult when creators only change the style for one or two age groups. For example, let's say they clone a black hair style, then recolor the adult and teen hair to be burgandy. In this file you'd have at least five textures:  black toddler texture, a black child texture, a burgandy teen texture, a burgandy adult texture, and a grey elder texture. It gets confusing fast. What I would recommend doing (at least in the beginning) would be to recategorize one complete hairstyle at a time, all four colors. Doing it in a batch should make it easier to tell which color is supposed to be which, and you can move on to your single hairstyles once you get the hang of it.

I'm sure some of the resident geniuses (genii?) will be along with more info - just didn't want you to think you were being ignored.

[cristalfiona]

I did have Datgen, but i got rid of it because i never really liked it and it was just taking up space.. Ive always preferred SimPE. The walkthrough for SimPE seemed so simple, reading it, and it is easy to do, its just that the creators of the hair make it more difficult.

If you're happy to do me a walkthrough, ill give it a go in Datgen, i think i read somewhere that it can show you pictures of the hair you are moving? If it does I could make notes and then finish later in SimPE. I did go back to the Datgen site, but its been pretty much abandoned now, and it doesnt tell you whats included in each of the versions.

I would try to recategorise complete hairstyles, but in my download folder its all called stupid stuff like 'myhair0000007' or something, i renamed all my rars when i downloaded them, but wasnt sure if renaming the package files would change anything in them or not.

I have managed to do most of the ones i tried right, but when i went into CAS to check it, that one was totally screwed up, and it kind of put me off carrying on. Also, the only way for me to find out which one it is is to go through all the ones ive already done, try changing them individually, and loading my game after each to see if its right (due to the whole crappy name thing). I would be ok with it, but my me sim has the hair that is in the wrong category, and now shes genetically black haired.

I went into bodyshop to see if i could do it from there, but the interface is totally foreign to me. And it takes almost as long to load as my game!

[dewshine]

well, I'm also catagorizing my hairs into the correct bins.
Here's what I'm doing:
1) ignore what the creator's original base was that they used for the recolor (because most of them will use black as the base for all their colors and I don't want my blonde hair in the black bin)
2)use clean installer to look at the color of the altered layers.
3)sort hairs into folder based on actual cololr.

This was before even using SimPE.
Because I don't want 100 styles in toddler and elders that are all the same I'm also deleting the info for those ages that are not colored to match.  I picked one set of colors for my elder "base" for all the styles.  (I decided that the blonde hairs would be the "host" for my elder slot, so for the the black, brown and red's I'm deleting the "*grey" textures and whatever files I can remove without breaking the package. ) If the elder shade in a certain hairstyle is different in one of the other colors I'll keep it.

The reason why you are seeing lots of texture and property set files is that there is one for each age connected with the hair.  For a few of the new meshes the creator made it so that all the ages use the same texture, but Maxis wasn't that clever.
There is a picture of the texture in simPE, it appears in the "plugin view". Each time you want to look at the texture you have to click on the name and make sure you are in plugin view.  It won't show the texture how it looks on the mesh or sim but the raw texture layer.
At the very least if the mesh/style changes from one age to the next there will be one for toddlers, one for children, one for teens-adults, and one for elders.  If the style stays the same of course there will only be 2 texture files (tot-adult and elder).  You will find though that in many maxis styles that there will be far more of these files and the many are exactly the same. I asume they are set up that way because of how Maxis packaged the files for the game in large bundles of textures instead of having each mesh with it's own file.

Most hairs that are new or recolored are done for Teen-Adult. Clean Installer shows the preview of the "template" too, but you can use that to help sort.  If you sort first then you can do each color group at a time and have the go into the correct places.  Still you'll have to decide which color will host the elder files so that you don't end up with 4 copies (or more) of each elder color that are the same.

I don't use datgen either, as I like to know exactly what is being altered inside the files.

[cristalfiona]

I bever even thought of doing it like that- i've only ever used clean installer to check for hacks. Ill try it that way tonight, hopefully by tomorrow i will have a nice collection of categorised hair. If it doesnt work, ill be on here later asking for more help.

Where do you delete the elder multiples? In Clean installer? And how do you delete the ages that havnt been recoloured? I wanted to know that, but figured i would just leave it if i couldnt find out.

[dewshine]

I do in in SimPE.  Because the elder hairs are linked to a color set you can't do it in clean installer.  Just go to the grey texture file and delete it. then go to the property set with the "Age" line that has the value of 0x00000010 listed and delete that. If you have all the colors for one style with a matching "family" value then the other colors should "link" to the remaining elder texture.

you can do the same thing for other ages that are not recolored too.

[Motoki]

I also used Datgen. It's too complicated in SimPE for me, too many manual steps.

Here's a tutorial for doing it with Datgen:

http://www.datgen.info/tutorials/sm_hairtone.aspx

I believe the latest debug version/developmental release from 10/19 does fix the family issues. Their server has some serious issues though and it took me many tries to get that file and when I finally got it, it was SLOW to download and I'm on broadband.

[cristalfiona]

Thank you!! Datgen actually looks fairly simple. Ill try to download it later on my horribly slow dial up, and if dewshines way doesnt work, ill try that. Or I might just try it anyway, to familiarise myself with it, in case I ever actually need Datgen for anything. You can never know too much!

Edit: Just read through the tutorial, and where it mentions grouping into families, it doesnt mention any specific data, but the figure looks similar to the one for SimPE. Does that mean I can just use the family value that i was using there and set all my files to the same? Thats the only bit i didnt understand.

Although i never understood why the family value always had to be the same in simpe. If anyone could explain that to me, id be happy.

[ElenaRoan]

could I beg for a more detailed explanation of what to do in SimPE?  I'm kinda a novice at it and like to make sure I understand before going in and messing about...

[yetyak]

I've been doing this recategorising of hair for quite a few days now.  I have one problem that I can't seem to find an answer for.  Some of the hair files don't have the text list in the resource tree.  (I'm putting the file name in all the text lists so it show up on mouse over.) So far, every one of the hairs that don't have the text list don't show up in the game.  Is there any way to add this to an existing file? Or should I just delete those ones?

I'm doing this in SimPe, would Datgen solve this problem?

[dewshine]

Well, I can try ElenaRoan...

First of all, the family number tells the game that the colors are related so that if you switch from say brown to blonde the same style shows up. Without that info the game will spit up a random hair at the age transition of the sim.  If you don't care about that, then save yourself the extra work and leave it alone.

Okay... using SimPE to catagorize hairs:
(please sort them by color as suggested above first, it'll be easier that way)

click on the package file you want to recatagorize to open it.
The resource tree is where you want to start. That sorts the files inside the package so that you can just click on what you want without wading through everything.

So in the resource tree, click on "Property Set (GZPS)"
All the property set files will appear in the window to the right.
Make sure you have the plugin view active (if it's not, look under the window tab and there will be a plugin view option on the dropdown menu)
Click on the first property set file in the right hand box and the infomation inside that file will appear in the plugin view.
you will see that on the left is a series of lines with numbers. It looks like this:

(note that the order of the lines will change depending on what version of bodyshop the hair was made in, so you will have to look over the property set for the correct lines.)
 
Here's a close up:
 

Now the Age line tells you what age group the property set is for (I'm going to throw some numbers around...)
0x00000001 is toddlers
0x00000002 is children
0x00000004 is teens
0x00000008 is adults
0x00000010 is elders
If you have University then you have young adults too. the age number for them is 0x00000040.
These numbers can be added too, and if you want to know how I'll post that later.

The Family line will have a long string of numbers and letters behind it. notice that all the property sets inside the package will have the same family number.

But it's the Hairtone line that you really need to alter, and you can get away with only changing it if you want.
Notice that the custom hairtone line values usually look like this:

What a mess, huh?
But that's what bodyshop does, and that's what we have to fix.
Click on the line and notice that on the right side the info will appear in the boxes. that's where the numbers are changed.
To sort the hair into the correct bin replace that long string of numbers and letters with the following values:
00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Black)
00000002-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Brown)
00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Blonde)
00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Red)

The Elders property set will say "a*hair******_grey"
If you want those to sort into the elder bin then change the hairtone value to 00000005-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (grey).

After you alter the haiirtone value remember to hit commit before moving to the next property set.
once you have all of the changed then save.
By default SimPE will make a .bak file.  If you are not sure that you have done everything correctly you can revert the bak file to .package and restore the original file. Once I test the hair in CAS or Bodyshop to make sure that it is showing up where I want it to I delete the bak file.

really that's all there is to it.
 
And yetyak, I think that those files without a textlist were made without bodyshop.  I'd figure they are broken. Try contacting the site where you got them and tell the creator that they don't work. If you have the mesh showing up in the game you could reapply the textures in bodyshop to "fix" the files.

[yetyak]

Thanks, dewshine.  Unfortunately, I have no clue where I got them. And so far, none of them have any indication who did it.  I started this project with a little over 1,700 hair files.  (addicted? no, not me!!) I did get rid of quite a few crappy ones, and am now down to only 483.  I feel pretty good about that, but it seems like I haven't played forever because I took out all my non hair downloads to make checking up on these much faster.  And restoring the .bak file does work, had a few I really messed up on.

[dewshine]

wow, that's a lot of hair files!  I thougt I was bad at 800...
I'm down to about 600 now and expect that to drop as I edit and sort my files.

[yetyak]

Guess I should have said 576 are done, and 483 left to go.  I think any new meshes I get I'll put that file name in the recolors, too. I know it is more work now, but will be worth it in the long run.  Deleting something I no longer like will be much easier then.  When I get this all done, I think it will be easier to sort out which one of the ten recolors of each style is best...

[idtaminger]

When I started w/ this, I used one set of hairs that I messed up repeatedly b4 I finally reached the result I wanted. After fiddling around w/ Datgen, cuz it seemed easier, I'm now using just SimPE. DatGen has issues w/ the selecting, so you can only select one file at a time, and some changes don't stick, and dragging dumps everything in one bin, which is problematic for customizing elders. Correcting the little issues takes more time than just straightforward editing in SimPE. So now I just manually go over everything in SimPE when I d/l it, and on top of that manually prune my files to delete the non-edited textures. I wish I'd have discovered how to categorize earlier, though, cuz I've got tons of hair files in my d/l folder, and I'm waiting for the day when I'll feel like editing them all.

[yetyak]

It is a time consuming project, but the results sure are worth it!!  I can do one in less than a minute, but the sheer volume is what makes me wonder if I really am crazy to even be doing this.  I wish I'd heard of this sooner, too.  I think my next project will be to add the file names to the clothes, to make pruning those easier. Over 3,000 files there, and that is after I got rid of the crap!

[dewshine]

yes, I've been doing the renaming thing too.  I hate the strings of numbers that bodyshop uses.  I know the program is designed that way to avoid overwriting files, but what a pain in the arse.  I have loads of clothes and genetics. The objects are not too bad beacuse creators have to name them in simPE anyhow but the bodyshop files are a horror.

I've been renaming my files I put up for download too, eliminating the numbers and doing the catagorizing so that downloaders don't have to do it. I love the fact that I can tell the game what color bin the facial hair should fall into also. 

[angelyne]

So what is the prevailing opinion then.  Should I use Dategen or SimsPE.  And could someone point me to the original thread, I did not manage to find it with a search.  Recategorizing hair would be awesome.  I am currently not using custom hair because I hate the way it messes up the genetics.  You might inherit a hair color from your parents but whoever heard of inheriting a hairstyle.

On the subject of file namesI never extract packages using TS2 default installer for just that reason.  I systematically use the multisims2packextractor program to extract sims 2 files and manually move the file into an appropriate directory.  If I want to check out a premade simmie for example; i'll extract the files to a directory that corresponds to the character name.  Then I'll check her/him out in SimsPE and decide which of the custom content I like.  I'll clone the character using only the content I want.  Then I'll manually move the custom content (assuming I am keeping any, which is fairly rare) to its appropriate folder. Then I'll delete the character folder.

The same applies for houses.  I'll extract all the content to a folder and place it in my download directory.   I'll remove all the custom content from the package using clean installer and save it under a different name.  I'll install just the lot segment into the game.  If I don't like the house, then I only have to delete the house and after remove the folder.  The house is completely gone from my game.

This way I have very very few numbered files. 

[dewshine]

well, there were several threads over at MTS2 about doing this, which I read.  Personally, I perfer doing it the slow, hard way... which is SimPE. I like it because it puts me in control of what goes where, and I know why the game is doing what it's doing.

Also datgen is now unsupported as darkmatter is shelving the project for the time being. It's kind of sad in a way because folks do get a lot of use from it. So if you want to use datgen remember that there's nobody to go back to if you have problems.  That said, datgen is a nice program as motoki will attest. if the numbers bother you then datgen is the way to go. backup your data, sort with clean installer first (and rename each file so that you know the color it belongs to because I think datgen tends to sort by whatever the base color was that the creator used originally (the proxy color?) and that's why people say it sorts stuff wrong. 

[ElenaRoan]

thankyou dewshine   that was a big help

[dewshine]

Hey ElenaRoan, I love your white lion avie.
I hope that it did help you, because I know when I was looking around for the info I had to read through pages and pages of posts over at MTS2 to figure it out.
If you decide to sort your other files... (like facehair??) you follow pretty much the same steps but with the following changes:
look in either "texture overlay XML" or "mesh overlay XML" for the hairtone line
and remember that the numbers to be altered for the sorting is slightly different than what is used for normal hairs:
00000001-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Black)
00000002-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Brown)
00000003-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Blonde)
00000004-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Red)
00000005-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (Grey)

Yes, oddly enough maxis switched the blonde and red bin numbers for the facehair.

I've sorted my eyebrows, custom stubble, and beards as well as my hair styles.

[ElenaRoan]

Hey ElenaRoan, I love your white lion avie.

thanks I seem to have a thing for big cats at the moment

makes a note of the differences thanks, don't have much in the way of custom facial hair at the moment but since I just downloaded some beards that's going to change

[dewshine]

 
If you look in the thread about the site owner's sim you will find that I've made a series of beards that are already sorted... Just in case you decide you want some more.  LOL

[ElenaRoan]

that's actually the beards I have, figured they were already sorted but now I know how to do it myself I can get some more...and hope they actually look decent...downloaded some eyebrows shortly after I got the game and they were a brown smudge in the general vacinity of the eyebrow ridge...turned me off facial hair downloads until I saw those beards

[dewshine]

hahaha...

if you get a chance head over to MTS2 and look for beards by allenABQ.  He's used maxis textures and alterd alphas to create some cool combos of beards, mustaches, and sideburns.  SimderZ has some wonderful eyebrows (at http://simderz.moonfruit.com/). Helene (?), who is hosted by MTS2, has very nice eyebrow sets.

I'm very picky about face hair and har textures so if they don't look good I won't use 'um.  My avie, who is a Vin Diesel sim, uses Helene's eyebrows.