Clothing Organization - and PLEASE don't send me to SimPE!!!

[Hecubus]

Remember way back in the Sims 1 days when someone had created a utility to look at skins ON a model so you could see what you were deleting/recategorizing? And it helped you find skins without meshes and meshes without skins so you could do some housekeeping?

Remember?  ::::: wistful sigh ::::::

I want this for Sims 2! I have searched high and low and can't find anything even remotely useful....and SimPE has crashed my computer more than once AND prompted me to completely reload the Sims (plus expansion packs). And when I had it actually working, I couldn't get it to do what I wanted anyway.

If you say SimPE is my only option, I will have to get Stephen Colbert to put you on notice. (For the uninitiated, go to www.colbertnation.com.)

Thanks.

[MistyBlue]

Did you try the clean installer? It doesn't let you see the clothes on a model, but you can see the whole texture. If you remember what your clothes look like, then you should be ok. It will not help you find meshes, though. That is the downfall, but there are other tools for that, too. Can't think of them off the top of my head.

[Norahs]

You can use BodyShop to delete and re-categorize skins. The deleting is self-explanatory but to recat you have to actually clone each piece and remove or add categories where you want the skins to show up. The other part you can do without SimPe is find textures without meshes - if the skin displays in BodyShop or CAS as a maxis skin and it has the CC daisy then, you have a texture without a mesh.

[BlueSoup]

There's a clothing tool in the works.

[witch]

Whose works? This would be such a great tool for us plebs...

[BlueSoup]

jfade.

[miros]

jfade rulez!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  BAAAH!  BAAAH!  BAAAH!  BAAAH! 

[jfade]

Yup, I am indeed working on a tool for this. It's still a ways off though, so, don't sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for it, heh.

Goal at this time is mid March, but that still may not happen, especially if Seasons makes the file format change for whatever bizarre Maxian reason they have. And at this point my inclination is to think they will change the format, or at least will add something to it. But who knows, I may surprise you all and finish it sooner, and I'll likely have at least some sort of test version soon that I, and possibly a few testers, will get to poke around with.

[witch]

If you put a call out here I can't imagine you'd possibly be short of testers.  Though I don't know if you're affiliated to any other site.

[jfade]

If you put a call out here I can't imagine you'd possibly be short of testers.  Though I don't know if you're affiliated to any other site.

Heh, well, I already have a group of testers that I've used in the past, and provided the majority of them are still around/willing, I'll use them again. If I need more though, I'll be sure to post a thread here for more testers. Although I usually do make a thread here when I'm closer to release anyhow, it's just that the earliest versions of the programs are never up to my definition of ready for public testing until about the 5th or so version. But anyhow, I will keep that in mind and if I need to, I'll make an "open call" for testers.

And, BTW, I'm not really affiliated with any site, just have my own site.

[witch]

Oh yeah, I have seen that site, but not for a while. Didn't link you with it, but am off for a browse now.

[jfade]

While we're at it, actually, anyone have any ideas about features they would definitely want to see in a "skin/hair/accessory/whatever other CAS content there may be" editor?

General idea of what I have planned so far:

Change categories
Change ages
Color bin hair
Change tooltips on content
Make existing stuff backwards compatible for non-Pets games
Remove unneeded ages from hairs
See preview of image in (hopefully, not yet guaranteed) Maxis style format (IE I'm hoping to pull the thumbnails generated by the game.)
Mark multiple things for deletion at a time and delete them when you're finished
Change shoe sound of skins
Identify what version of BodyShop the content was made with. (Not a precise expansion version, because of a weird thing with the NL and Uni BodyShops flagging content you make with it in the same way. In other words, within the file, there's a version tag. NL and Uni are BOTH 2, OfB is 3, Pets is 4. Of course, this doesn't tell the user exactly what expansion the content requires, but can give a general idea, and it can be helpful in finding content made with the Pets bodyshop that may not be compatible. Though with the patch, that now too is not a conclusive flag. But I'm babbling now. )
Orphaned mesh scanner type deal

And ... that's about all I can think of ATM. So. How's that sound? Anything blatantly obvious I'm missing? Any other super nifty features you want?

[BlueSoup]

The ability to family the hairs, so if you switch from color to color, your Sim keeps the same hair.

Another awesome thing I'd want to see, though I have no idea if it would actually be feasible, is the ability to remove the shoes off of an outfit.  Like swimwear with high heels, blech.  Maybe Seasons would actually make that part easier, I dunno.

[jfade]

The ability to family the hairs, so if you switch from color to color, your Sim keeps the same hair.

Another awesome thing I'd want to see, though I have no idea if it would actually be feasible, is the ability to remove the shoes off of an outfit.  Like swimwear with high heels, blech.  Maybe Seasons would actually make that part easier, I dunno.

Never heard of putting hairs in a family. Not sure what that would involve, but will look it up.

And by removing shoes, you mean like ... changing a mesh? Or are you talking about the sound the mesh makes?

[BlueSoup]

I guess changing the mesh.

[jfade]

Meh, not feasible, for me at least. I know nothing about the 3D meshing aspect of the game's file formats, plus I have no clue where to start/how to do things with 3d Meshes to change them so that certain parts would be added/removed. Sorry. But maybe you can find someone who can manually change the mesh for you? 

[J. M. Pescado]

I think what Bobblehead meant was "mesh changes", as in, switching a texture to use a different mesh, such as mapping "super-deformed" outfits back onto regular Maxis meshes.

[Magicmoon]

Never heard of putting hairs in a family. Not sure what that would involve, but will look it up.

When I color bin hair I give all the colors of the same style the same GUID. That keeps them familied. You can change colors or ages and the hair remains the same style. Also, only one gray is necessary in the elder bin because no matter what color their hair was, it will default to the one gray since it has the same GUID.

[V]

I'd love it if we could remove shoes from outfits as suggested by BlueSoup. What if it wasn't a mesh, but was a recolor of the foot area to "nude"?

[witch]

Some of these shoes - usually stilettos - have the mesh remaining, it would just look like a flesh covered stiletto. 

[TaWanda]

 I have an idea. Please forgive me if it's totally stupid, but if it's at all posssible to do I'd be in heaven.
 I want to know if it would be possible to somehow be able to identify which is the mesh item when looking at the thumbnails.
 My trying to clean up what I consider ugly or unwanted hair colors/textures from within CAS or bodyshop has unfortunately resulted in deleting a couple of  meshes. Trying to use clean installer is mostly useless for such a project as this. So if there were an easy to use program where I could look at a hair style, recognize which hair style it is,  be able to tell which one of the three shades of black is the actual mesh, and then delete the unwanted colors on the spot...that would be awesome.

[miros]

1) To remove sneakers or other flat shoes, you'd just have to mask off the foot area in the alpha layer.  You'd have to make sure you displayed all the catagories that a garment is available in.  You wouldn't want to remove shoes from "undies" and discover that it's also used as "athletic wear."
 
2) Theo's got the source code up for his SimPE hair binning plugin.  Maybe you could peek at that to get ideas.

3) TaWanda, you've got objects and hair mixed up.  Objects have a "base" color packaged with the mesh, and if you delete that, you'll delete the mesh.  Hair (and other BodyShop stuff) has the mesh completely separate from the colors.  Maybe you're thinking which one has gray and toddler varients?

[J. M. Pescado]

1) To remove sneakers or other flat shoes, you'd just have to mask off the foot area in the alpha layer.  You'd have to make sure you displayed all the catagories that a garment is available in.  You wouldn't want to remove shoes from "undies" and discover that it's also used as "athletic wear."

Not all shoes are maskable. If the shoe looks distinctly shoe-like, masking it off will just give your sim clubfeet.

[Hecubus]

jfade, you are my HERO! ::::strikes up the band and ticker tape parade:::::

Your list of probable features looks terrific. The other feature that would be of interest to me is the skin/mesh matching. Perhaps you can provide a way to examine a mesh and see a list (picture?) of associated skins? And on the flip side, a utility to find skins unmatched to meshes would be good too.

I would willingly be a tester, obviously.

Thanks!

[Kristalrose]

jfade, you rock!  I too have been desperately needing this tool!  Thank you thank you! 

You know what else bugs me about meshes?  It drives me crazy when the mesh shows up in the clothing cataloge! I have so many downloads that I don't want to have to wade through the ugly meshes, too.