Yet Another Hair Catagory Question - Datgen

[myskaal]

I've read through all the threads I could find on the matter of re-catagorizing hair into the genetic bins. A lot of helpful info. After some deliberation I've decided to go the DatGen route, because I'm lazy like that and because all the numbers in SimPE tend to  make me dizzy after a bit.
Everything is working great. I've gotten all my hair into the right bins and they all show up perfectly. After going through them all though I realized I forgot about changing the grey hair to the grey hair tone key.

So I've only one question regarding that.

In this post: http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=2504.msg71453#msg71453 - aqualectrix says to set the elder file grey (i.e. efhairstylewhatever-grey) to the grey hair tone key. Going through my files now I am noticing that not all the "grey" textures are listed as elder. I have some that are "efstyle-grey" or "emstyle-grey" but the majority of them are listed as adult (i.e. amstyle-grey).
I imagine this is because the creator did not include an actual elder texture (maybe?).

Anyway so my question is, even though they are not named as elder but rather adult, do I still need to set them to the grey hair tone key?


I'm trying to get them all catagorized first and then plan on going through to delete all the age textures that aren't aren't included with them in SimPE (gods help me).

[Renatus]

No, they have an elder texture, but if I remember DatGen correctly you have to have an entire separate package to set to the grey texture. In SimPE you can just designate one of the grey textures of one of the colours as showing up in the bin. When I used DatGen I'd usually have to make a project out of one of the colours in Bodyshop, copy the grey textures to all age groups, import it, and then do the thing in DatGen. Pain in the ass.

SimPE really, really isn't that hard. You find Dewshine's post, keep it open, and copy-paste the numbers. Really. It's all copy-paste. You can pretend that the strings are random gibberish if you have a number phobia.

[myskaal]

Ok.

So if I don't assign the grey texture to the grey hair tone key - they do nothing? Don't show up? When the adult ages the hair they get is... ? or this has no effect?

I've noticed that the files I assigned to the key are showing up in the grey hair bin for elders regardless of age association :/

Since they apparently aren't actual elder hair textures am I right thinking they'll eventually be culled when I go through and delete all those textures that are from the custom hair but show up as a default maxis hair?

[Renatus]

Hm... I can't remember precisely, since I went and recategorized all of my hair with SimPE recently. :\ I seem to remember that what you are seeing happen happened to me too - whatever I assigned a genetic with DatGen also showed up in the grey section, but four copies of it! Not always, though, since I had some hairs missing... it may be both, depending.

I'm not sure about the second question, I can't quite seem to parse it right now (really tired - sorry about being waspish in my first reply).

[myskaal]

No worries. I do believe I understand what's going on with it now - and seems not to matter if the grey hairs are put into the grey bin at all. That bit about the 4 copies makes sense too. I appreciate you taking the time to reply at all.

[Renatus]

Well, if I'm going to be puttering around on the Internet I might as well be useful so it's not a total waste of time.  You're welcome.

[Sleepycat]

SimPE really, really isn't that hard. You find Dewshine's post, keep it open, and copy-paste the numbers. Really. It's all copy-paste. You can pretend that the strings are random gibberish if you have a number phobia.

heh, SimPE wouldn't let me copy&paste, I had to type them all out...so what am I doing wrong? it would make the next batch I end up doing go alittle faster although I can now type the damn things in my sleep 

Does it depend on which mode you start up in? I usually end up using the classic gui since its the first one my cursor gets to in my start menu *laughs*

*is just bin fixing* the rest is beyond my abilities atm 

[kaarinah]

Sleepycat, this may be a stupid question but did you try right-clicking or ctrl+V? Rigth-clicking don't work at least in hair categorizing but selecting the field and using ctrl+V does (at least for me).

I have deleted all the grey textures except from the black hair, as long as all colours in the group has the same family number the grey hair will show up without duplicates in the bin. I read a thread at MTS2 some time ago: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=55427&page=1&pp=25 and have done as RGiles describes in post 67 (on page 3).

I have seen that some creators seems to make a separate package with only the grey in a family, this works fine too but takes a lot more work unless you are making a new hair. If I ever do recolour any hair I think I would do like that.

As RGiles points out in the thread you loose the grey texture if you delete the colour you kept it in using his method, but I still find it easiest.

[Sleepycat]

thank you kaarinah, I didn't know about using ctrl+V, I only tried right-clicking 

One day I will actually spend some time really learning how to use SimPE, for now though I usually manage to figure out how to do what I really want to do *laughs*  maybe later I will attempt getting rid of the extra grey hair although it dosen't really bother me much to have them there (I rarely even look in the elder hair bin)

[BlueSoup]

Yes, Ctrl+V is really helpful, but it's not a SimPE-only thing.

I finally started categorizing all my hair and after a trial-and-error thing with changing some numbers (OK, I admit, I pushed some random buttons  ), I finally trashed the entire hair folder I had and started over.  It's not such a huge loss though, I didn't have that many.  I went to three sites and had everything back again (although one of them was TSR and that took forever to go through again).  I did the black hair category last night and everything showed up as it should, in the right category, except one that I still don't know why.  I must be missing a mesh but I was really careful about that. 

Anyway, no more custom hair for me, only genetically sound hair. 

[Karen]

A question for all of you who've been recategorizing custom hair using this method:

Is it still possible for babies to inherit custom hair that has been recategorized in this way?  If so, what happens when the baby turns into a toddler?  Do they automatically get the custom hair style, or do they get the Maxis default toddler hair style ("afro type" for boys, "lawnmower cut" for girls) and have to use Change Appearance to change it later? 

If this method really results in custom hair being treated exactly like "normal" Maxis hair, meaning that the hair style is not passed down automatically to offspring, then I won't waste my time recategorizing any of mine. 

Karen

[Renatus]

When you recategorize hair so it sorts into the colour bins, it means that rather than that hairstyle being genetic (as how anything in the * bin is if it is set as the hair in CAS), the haircolour is genetic. Rather than passing on that single style, they pass on the colour, like real life. It will work just like Maxis hair. So yes, the toddlers will get a default style in whatever haircolour they have upon growing up, but there are a number of ways to change the appearance of a toddler via hacks (clothing planner by JM, toddler mirror on MTS2).

If you have an odd colour of hair you want to be passed on, then you will need to stick to hair in the * bin - the problem there is that any descendent that is not of the right gender for the hair will not get that hairstyle, but will default to whatever the other parent has. It is possible to set the gender of hairstyles to work for both genders in SimPE, but many hairstyles are gender specific in their looks, and more problematic, the hair for female YA/Adult/Elders does not fit the head of males - and vice versa (although I've found various male hairs don't look too bad on women, if they cover the back of the head enough and they look okay even when jutting farther forward than they do on the guys).

[Karen]

When you recategorize hair so it sorts into the colour bins, it means that rather than that hairstyle being genetic (as how anything in the * bin is if it is set as the hair in CAS), the haircolour is genetic. Rather than passing on that single style, they pass on the colour, like real life. It will work just like Maxis hair. So yes, the toddlers will get a default style in whatever haircolour they have upon growing up, but there are a number of ways to change the appearance of a toddler via hacks (clothing planner by JM, toddler mirror on MTS2).

That's what I thought.  Thanks for confirming....

If you have an odd colour of hair you want to be passed on, then you will need to stick to hair in the * bin - the problem there is that any descendent that is not of the right gender for the hair will not get that hairstyle, but will default to whatever the other parent has.

Actually I'm pretty used to this now.  In my game, ALL of my Sims have inherited custom hair of one form or another, except townies and NPC's.  If the "male" hairstyle is dominant for a girl baby, I switch the dominant and recessive values around in SimPE so that she gets the "female" hairstyle instead.  If it's a girl with only "male" hairstyles for both recessive and dominant, she will end up with a Maxis default.  (Which I then modify in SimPE.)  And obviously the same approach works for baby boys too....

Karen

[aqualectrix]

In answer to the original question: My initial instinct is to say "hey, if there's only one thing ending in -grey, it's probably meant to be an elder hair and needs to be dragged to the grey swatch".  But I haven't really been paying a lot of attention to the prefix parts of the names.

Can you link to one (or more, more is good) of the hairs with this seeming weirdness, or attach the file, or PM me so I can give you an email address to send it to me?  I'd like to take a look at it, then maybe I can give you a more definitive answer about what causes it and what to do about it.

[Sagana]

Not sure about specifics, of course, but I believe there are some gray hairstyles out there for download that are meant for adults. I remember some being listed when people said - but hey my hair went gray at 30 (as well as some not gray styles for the elders). So it could be actually meant as an adult style... I think... unless it's a senior gray sort of moment....

[BlueSoup]

Not sure about specifics, of course, but I believe there are some gray hairstyles out there for download that are meant for adults.

There are some grey hair styles for adults at TSR - quite a lot of them actually.  From charcoal grey to bright platinum white.  I did a huge spree there last night. 

[myskaal]

Sim Scribblings hair are good examples. I'll attach one of them. Pretty sure this is just an alpha changed hair and doesn't require a custom mesh.

I catagorized this one into the black genetic bin and left the grey file alone -so it's under the black bin also.




[404'ed!]

[aqualectrix]

Yah, this confirms my suspicions -- it needs to go in the grey bin.  As it is, the _grey hair is categorized as age = 16 (elder) and hairtone = 1 (black).  So the hair won't show up except for elder sims -- except only category 5 hairs show up for elders, so it will show up for no-one at all.

I binned a bunch of stuff this morning and also saw some of these a..._grey skins, which also were normal elder hairs.  Maybe if I were a recolorist I would know why these names are a bit wacky; as I have no artistic talent and stick to messing about with files, I haven't a clue.  Anyway, the prefix doesn't seem to matter.

I stand by my original instruction: if it ends in _grey, drop it on the grey swatch.  (For hat-hairstyles, there'll be two separate _grey skins, both of which need to be grey-ized.  Confused the heck out of my the first time I saw that.)

It's not necessary to grey-ize the _grey skin if you haven't binned the hair at all, of course: otherwise we would never have seen any custom elder hairs at all!

Grey hair for adults will not end in _grey.  It will end in _black, etc., depending on what base color the recolorist used.  These should be categorized into the appropriate bin or left as custom tones.

[myskaal]

Aha!

Thanks for getting back on it, then. Back to the bins I go.