Binned hair sharing

[kaarinah]

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?

[Renatus]

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.

[SaraMK]

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.

[Motoki]

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.

[veilchen]

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

[Jysudo]

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 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

[DoomPuppy]

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.

[Ephraim]

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. 

[liegenschonheit]

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"*

[Ephraim]

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

[liegenschonheit]

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

[cyperangel]

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.

[Simsbaby]

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

[Jysudo]

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

[gethane]

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.

[Metalkatt]

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.)

[Simsbaby]

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

[pinhead]

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.

[twistingsims]

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.

[idtaminger]

Did you save after deleting?

[twistingsims]

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   

[Motoki]

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.

[rome_raven]

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?

[Motoki]

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 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.

[Jysudo]

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.  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.