Recategorising hair with SimPE

[ElenaRoan]

cool notes down the names thankyou 

[cristalfiona]

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.

Had a random brainwave at some wierd hour this morning: Does this mean that if i gave all of my custom hair the same family value, the game would pick the right colour hair, but choose a random style from within all the styles that have tha same family number?

[dewshine]

yes.

[cristalfiona]

Thank you, now I can give all my sims custom hair, and never have them use maxis styles again, but still be genetically correct colour-wise. Which i still havnt done because im lazy. Decided id rather go to bed last night than actually spend time doing my sims hair!

[jennydeenyc]

Inspired by this thread, I downloaded DatGen to recategorize my custom hairstyles. For the most part, this has worked out well, and I really like having the custom hair in the right color bins rather than all glommed together in one place, but I have a question. Mostly what I'm doing is using the Bulk Hair Updater to drag the hairstyles to the correct color swatch, then dragging the "grey" skin to the grey swatch after that, but I find a lot of hairstyles that have a "grey" skin noted, but the image that shows up in the browser isn't grey at all, but brown or black or blonde like the rest of the hairstyle's skins. Should I still drag those skins over to the grey bin anyway? I've put off on recategorizing those hairstyles until I figure out what to do with the greys. Thanks in advance...

[dewshine]

If you want the elders to have access to non-grey hair then yes... drag them to grey.  If not then don't.  Elders are the only age group using grey.

[jennydeenyc]

Good point. I never let my elders have non-grey hair...at least so far! Now to figure what to do with the hairstyles that have no skin textures visible in DatGen at all! :-P

[yetyak]

After I'm all done with the recategorising, I'm going to go thru and keep only the grey or partly grey ones.  The no grey at all on elders just looks funny, imo.  I'm *practically* an elder myself, and have (according to my taller than me daughter) a "whole shitload" of grey hair. I especially like Hairfish's distinguished line.  Very real.

[Swiftgold]

You'll want to be careful with using DatGen, unfortunately. I had gone through and categorized most of my hair using it. However, now some of the scalps of my custom skins have been replaced with a random categorized hair texture (I can even identify which one it is is most cases, particularly now that there's a painted-on flower on some of my Sims' scalps). So I'm going to try the SimPe way and see if I can fix that. Unfortunately I sent things to DarkMatter about it around the day he decided to shelve DatGen so I don't think the program itself will be changing soon.

[cwieberdink]

Okay, I know necromancy is bad, m'kay, but I have a further question.  Dewshine, could you be more specific on deleting the extra toddler and child hairs?  I have loads and loads of identical looking toddler hairs and I don't have a clue which I can delete or how.  Sorry for being so dense!

C

[MokeyHokey]

I followed this easy tutorial at MTS2.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=89652

[cwieberdink]

I followed this easy tutorial at MTS2.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=89652

Thanks MokeyHokey.  I've used cleaninstaller to try and sort them (although some are showing up differently colored than what the name says, and some are greys for elders to use, which I'll have to do when I feel more confident.... but my downloads folder is slowly getting organized, I deleted a boatload of hairs and lipsticks and clothes that I'll never use and then went and downloaded more at simpathetic and I'm hoping to get everything in order before too long.

C

[angelyne]

Oops I've read the tutorial and I haven't been doing it the way it's shown.  I've only been deleting the textures and the property set reference.  It seemed to work in any case, as the Maxis hairstyle was gone for the ages I didn't want but I wonder if that will cause a problem.

[Swiftgold]

Oops I've read the tutorial and I haven't been doing it the way it's shown.  I've only been deleting the textures and the property set reference.  It seemed to work in any case, as the Maxis hairstyle was gone for the ages I didn't want but I wonder if that will cause a problem.

That's what I did, and it seems to work okay for me. It appears to mess up things if you're trying to clone and recolor those hairstyles, but since I'm not, I'm fine with it.

[cwieberdink]

It's working!  I'm so excited.  LOL.  What a dweeb I am.  Anyway, my next question is, if the name doesn't say what color it is, and the picture that pops up in clean installer is indecipherable, how can you tell which color it will show in the game?  For instance, I have some backwards hats.  The hats are different colors, but so is the hair that peeks under the hat.  But in cleaninstaller, the hair under the hat looks gray.  I know it's not gray, but I don't know how to tell what it really is.  Also, sometimes the pic in clean installer looks blonde, but the color name says red.  Is the picture always the right color in clean installer?

C

[Swiftgold]

It's working!  I'm so excited.  LOL.  What a dweeb I am.  Anyway, my next question is, if the name doesn't say what color it is, and the picture that pops up in clean installer is indecipherable, how can you tell which color it will show in the game?  For instance, I have some backwards hats.  The hats are different colors, but so is the hair that peeks under the hat.  But in cleaninstaller, the hair under the hat looks gray.  I know it's not gray, but I don't know how to tell what it really is.  Also, sometimes the pic in clean installer looks blonde, but the color name says red.  Is the picture always the right color in clean installer?
C

You can click next on the preview in CI to see all the texture files in the package. When I was sorting my collection I put all the ones that weren't all one color plus elder in a seperate folder. Oftentimes, especially when there's a new mesh that's only for adult, the child/teen hair won't be recolored to even match the adult hair, so you'll find all sorts of colors in there and even with the name in the file it's not exactly trustable. I have quite a few filenames in my red hair folder that say blonde or brown...

[yetyak]

That's where having the file name in mouseover is so handy, you can write down the file name of anything that looks weird in CAS, and change it with SimPE quite easily.  That helped me with the few child and toddler hairs I forgot to delete, or didn't do when I first started and didn't know it was ok to delete them.  And some of the colors, it is just hard to tell till you get the game loaded up. I've had probably 30 or so files that I've put into a different color just because it looked more like a different one.

[Zeljka]

Thread necromancy again, but this is a great thread and I have a couple more questions.

I've been using PE to bin hair and delete the unwanted ages but apparently I'm confused on the family part. I just can't seem to get it to work.

I tried copying the family code from the first hair to the others, (ie. Family code from Black Property Set copied to Red Property Set(s) and Hair Tone XML) as well as copying to either and not the other but the 're-familied' hair never shows up. Obviously I'm missing something...

Another question, is it possible to have hair that's not available for all ages point to a specific existing hair?

I downloaded Melodie9s hair from MTS (extracted from Maxis and converted for toddlers/children)  unfortunately, it puts duplicate copies in age groups that already have it. I can delete the dups, but I'd prefer to have it point to the same hair for the existing ages. (ie. shortcute as a toddler will transition throughout a life unless hair is changed somewhere in between)

Either that, or I'd like to make a default hair replacement so that every half decent Maxis hair is available to all ages, possibly over ambitious for someone who can't even get Families to work, but I'd rather do it all now and get it over with so I can just play.

[angelyne]

All I did is copy the family string from the black hair and paste it into the family string of all the other hair.  They it smoothly transitioned across all the colors.  The hairtone should have the code that corresponds to the correct color red, black, white, blond.  That code you can find upthread.  Could that be your mistake?

Not sure about the rest of yoru question. It's beyond my feeble abilities. 

[yetyak]

I ended up deleting the others and keeping the ones that Melodie did for all age groups; just seemed easier that way to me.  Most of the hair that I did, had the family numbers ok so I just left them alone.  There were a few that didn't transition correctly, but not enough to make me want to fix it...

[Zeljka]

All I did is copy the family string from the black hair and paste it into the family string of all the other hair.  They it smoothly transitioned across all the colors.  The hairtone should have the code that corresponds to the correct color red, black, white, blond.  That code you can find upthread.  Could that be your mistake? Not sure about the rest of yoru question. It's beyond my feeble abilities. 

Darn, I was afraid of that.
I binned it first and made sure it worked before trying to make it 'family'. I pasted the 'string' (not code, heh heh) into the other colours and it disappeared. Then again, my game turned into a fiery ball shortly after, so who knows?

For the second part (sorry for such an incoherent post - too much coffee and no sleep )

What I'd like to do is have Melodie's hair replace the Maxis hairstyles so they will show for all age groups instead of 'in addition to'.
I'm not thrilled about Maxis hair but it looks cute on toddlers, don't want to fill my bins with excess Maxis teen/ya/adult elder stuff just to get it for them.

[angelyne]

I'm very interested in how the programs work and how to change details at will. Could anyone maybe also tell me how to change the family name so that, when inherited, the child get the right color but hairstyle totally random - both maxis styles and custom?

If you bin the hair color correctly, then this is what will happen.  Children (and new townies, NPC's) get a hairstyle taken randomly from your color bin custom or Maxis.

Another thing I've tried to do is to change the hair so that only one version will show up in the "elder's bin", but then the transition doesn't work as supposed to, only for the color that I used for the elder's version, if I make myself clear. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

I'm not quite sure how you have done it, but you need to copy the family number of the color you used for the elder version ( I always use black to be consistent) and paste it in all the other colors.  In this way if you click on a hairstyle and change the color, it will transition smootly to all the other color, in the same style.  If you have not done that, if you click on a different color, it will pick a random style. It sound like you have deleted the gray texture and the elder line in your other colors but not added the family number of the hair style

[angelyne]

Glad you made sense of that answer, because re-reading, I can barely understand what I meant lol.

One caveat that I can see; I have removed most of the toddler hair that wasn't custom from the custom hair package, to avoid multiple instances of default maxis hair in the toddler bin..  So that leaves very few real custom styles, there are less chances the game will pick a custom style.   That doesn't bother me however, since the first thing I do after a baby grows up is use the mirror and change their hair, and put on lyran.net healthy blush.

[jmtmom]

When I started w/ this, I used one set of hairs that I messed up repeatedly b4 I finally reached the result I wanted.

Sorry to bring this thread back to life, but here's a moronic question. How do I use the .bak file to restore the original? 

Feel free to laugh and point. 

[ari_]

delete the .package, rename the .bak to .package. That's it.