Meshes vs Skins vs Textures?????

Zirconia Wolf · 12-15-2007, 04:01 PM

Okay, I give up.

I get that a Mesh is the 3D wire frame that forms the "skeleton" for Sims & the "framework" for the different clothing styles.

I get that a Skin is something of a catch-all term for "the-specific-pattern-that-makes-clothing-look-like-it-does" & that a Skin is laid over (i.e. referencing) a given Mesh.

I get that a Texture is the thing that makes clothes & such appear ribbed/smooth/wrinkled & such.

But when I see a Sim naked in the game am I only seeing some kind of Maxian default 3D Mesh or am I seeing something more along the lines of a clothing-like Skin/Texture that is merely referencing a given Mesh?

In short, is "naked" just another clothing style for a Sim or not?

(If you haven't guessed it, I'm not getting much in the way of help on other sites in my quest to make my Elders appear less saggy when they are naked in my game. Clothing swapping is easy, but no one wants to answer my nude questions. Grrrrrr....)

Miros1 · 12-16-2007, 01:11 AM

Actually, mesh=wireframe. The skeleton is something separate that makes elders have bad posture even when they have on adult clothes so they aren't so saggy. Normal/bumpmap is what makes the clothes look bumpy or indented in the game.

Have you checked out this tutorial on nudes: http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=26227 It's by BeosBoxBoy, the master of nekkid Sims!

Greg · 12-16-2007, 02:09 AM

A bit more precisely:

Mesh - The 3D model that defines the shape of an object. A mesh is defined by its vertices (in this useage, a vertex is a point space), wireframe (the lines that connect the points), and polygons or faces (the triangles that connect the points).

Texture - The same thing as a skin. The texture is an image that gets mapped onto the mesh and gives it its color. In The Sims 2, these are .bmp format pictures stored in the .package files. SimPE uses .png images for exporting and importing textures for some obscure reason that assuredly makes sense in some alternate universe.

A texture can have 2 or 3 parts:

Main texture - the color of the clothing with all the nuances and details.
Alpha - a black and white image that tells what areas the clothing covers. Black is no coverage, white is solid coverage, shades of gray are partially transparent.
Normal - also known as a bump map, shows where the shape is smooth or bumpy. Often used to make things appear to be raised or ribbed in clothing. Often omitted entirely. The normal causes the graphics card to calculate shadows but does not actually alter the shape of an object.

Skeleton - Also known as the bones, the skeleton is a three-dimensional stick figure that's tied to the mesh. The skeleton has the joints that move to adopt a pose, or by moving through a series of poses, an animation.

For example, here is a sim that I just installed this evening.

Christie Maas
Christie was created by Bunniewren; her clothing and silly name are my fault. Clothing mesh by BlooM.

Note that Christie's dress is very thin and that you can see a bit of her skin through it. That's because in the areas you can see through, the alpha in the dress texture is gray, not white. In the areas of her dress (and undies) that are opaque, the alpha is white.

The shapes of Christie's body and outfit are defined by the meshes. I used the plural becuase the mesh is a special outfit created by BlooM; it is an "alpha" mesh with separate meshes for the body, dress, and boots. (Called "alpha" because if you mess with the alpha layer of the clothing texture, you will see the shape of the separate body mesh through the holes.) Each one of those meshes has the full set of texture images associated with it.

This allowed me to have a transparent dress with Christie's nude body visible beneath it. (Well, nude except for her undies, which are mapped onto her nude body mesh.) Beneath her dress, nude body mesh is Warlokk's 34De36 mesh. It's that shape because BlooM included a mesh of that shape with his dress mesh. Christie also happens to have that same body shape assigned as her nude mesh but in reality any sim with any nude body shape could wear this dress and would have exactly the same body shape shown here.

Here we see Christie climbing stairs.

She is excuting the "climb stairs" animation because the game is moving the joints of her skeleton, and in turn, the skeleton is pushing the meshes that define the shape of her body, dress, and boots.

Was that at all clear?

Greg · 12-16-2007, 02:14 AM

Addendum: Naked is the innermost layer of texture that your sim wears. The sim's nude skin tone shows anywhere on a clothing mesh that clothing texture doesn't cover.

When a sim is truly naked, there is no clothing texture and the sim uses the default nude mesh that is listed in that sim's data file.

Miros1 · 12-16-2007, 02:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

<snip>In The Sims 2, these are .bmp format pictures stored in the .package files. SimPE uses .png images for exporting and importing textures for some obscure reason that assuredly makes sense in some alternate universe.<snip>

Actually, I think the actual images inside the package files are jpeg. BodyShop uses BMP files for export/import for ease of modification (in the minds of the Maxis employees, but who actually uses MSPaint?). SimPE uses PNG files because PNG and GIF are the only formats that support transparency, and PNG files are slightly smaller. Both BodyShop and SimPE (or the nVidea utilities) convert from their prefered export/import formats to JPEG or whatever is used inside the package files.

Greg · 12-16-2007, 02:41 AM

Aha! You must live in that alternate universe where it makes sense to merge the texture and alpha into one file, Rose!

I was just going on what the folks from Maxis said is the internal file format, way back when the game first came out.

There's an important difference between PNG and GIF. PNG supports multiple levels of transparency while each pixel in GIF is either 100% on or 100% off.

Miros1 · 12-16-2007, 03:55 AM

Stray musings:
David Chess and I had a conversation back on the Hullabaloo about internal formats in the IMG resource (used for the Sims' thumbnails), which seems to be JPG (raw dump of resource has JFIF, not BM), but they do have masking, which we couldn't figure out. I almost wonder if they don't use 0,0,0 (normally black) as the mask color on the thumbnails, since Sims with black hair sometimes end up with streaks of the background color where their hair should be the darkest. This is worse on the family screenshot, which I can't find at the moment.

However, the TXTR resources are either Raw8Bit (which is bitmap, but not bitmap format) or one of the DXT flavors. In my somewhat limited poking around, the grayscale normal is Raw8Bit and the colored texture is DXT3 (which allows transparency).

Greg · 12-16-2007, 04:11 AM

It sounds like they use their own format for storing the bitmap, whatever it might be.

Now I'm wondering if what you see when you extract data with SimPE is really what the Maxis guys see. As far as I know, SimPE is just someone's guess at how the .package file is assembled, and even it still has blocks of unknown code.

Miros1 · 12-16-2007, 04:29 AM

Actually, David wrote a splitter proggie (in Perl of all languages), and the JFIF was clearly there. I think PhotoShop would open it as a JPEG as well.

BTW, I just found the family thumbnails... the resource type is... JPG! It also has the black background and the JFIF "file type marker."

I'm thinking Raw8Bit might also be a DXT format. Will ask my friend Cari tomorrow or Monday. She works for Stardock, the Galactic Civ people...

Greg · 12-16-2007, 12:55 PM

Now I'm wondering whatever happened to D. M. Chess.

Miros1 · 12-16-2007, 01:26 PM

Two words, Second Life...

Zirconia Wolf · 12-16-2007, 01:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

Addendum: Naked is the innermost layer of texture that your sim wears. The sim's nude skin tone shows anywhere on a clothing mesh that clothing texture doesn't cover.

When a sim is truly naked, there is no clothing texture and the sim uses the default nude mesh that is listed in that sim's data file.

Firstly, thanks for the explanation(s). It seems some other sites only want to help you if you are already greatly experienced in this stuff.

Okay so to make sure I understand this: naked to a Sim is a combination of a texture & an actual naked mesh.

So my Elders will appear less droopy (but still stooped 'cause of Maxis & their stupid Elder skeleton) when wearing clothes just by making Adult/YA clothes available to them, as the clothes get their "shape" from their own mesh.

Getting Elders to appear not-so-saggy while they are naked however will require me to get Elders to reference a different naked mesh as their default.

So now I just have to track down where Maxis has hidden the naked meshes in the game, so I can paste something better into the Elder one....

Greg · 12-16-2007, 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zirconia Wolf

Firstly, thanks for the explanation(s). It seems some other sites only want to help you if you are already greatly experienced in this stuff.

Okay so to make sure I understand this: naked to a Sim is a combination of a texture & an actual naked mesh.

So my Elders will appear less droopy (but still stooped 'cause of Maxis & their stupid Elder skeleton) when wearing clothes just by making Adult/YA clothes available to them, as the clothes get their "shape" from their own mesh.

Getting Elders to appear not-so-saggy while they are naked however will require me to get Elders to reference a different naked mesh as their default.

So now I just have to track down where Maxis has hidden the naked meshes in the game, so I can paste something better into the Elder one....

Precisely!

Somewhere around here there are references to a tutorial about how to overwrite a default body shape. That one depends on already having a default override that someone else has created, and you replace the reference to the mesh.

Now I'm wondering if it would be possible to modify the game so that elders use the adult animations and get rid of that stooped posture.

Greg · 12-16-2007, 02:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Miros1

Two words, Second Life...

Oh, right! Now I remember that he said he was spending lots of time there.

Miros1 · 12-16-2007, 03:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zirconia Wolf

Getting Elders to appear not-so-saggy while they are naked however will require me to get Elders to reference a different naked mesh as their default.

I think (but not 100% sure) that jwilson5's latest set of default replacement skintones for use with Warlokk's new xhi-res meshes use the adult mesh for the elders.

When you swap in the adult mesh for the elder mesh, you need to replace the skin texture too, otherwise the shading for under the elder boobs ends up half way down the belly!

Oh, another note... Raw8Bit is a DXT format, not some Maxis made witches brew.

Zirconia Wolf · 12-16-2007, 04:35 PM

Okay, the thread I found on InSimAdult by jwilson5 is here...

http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=29695

...but I'm still not understanding if these are default nudes or ones that I would have to create entirely new Sims (with the right custom skin tone) to see. Jwilson5 calls them "nude clothes" so I don't understand if they will just show up when a Sim has no clothes on or if I have to "buy" them & have a Sim "wear" it to get the effect.

All I want is to find a set of default overrides for the Adult & Elder Male (Male & Female) nude state that I can set up to effect the Sims already in my game. It's just the nude state I need help with, as everything else I can control just fine on my own.

I'm not real crazy about seeing genitals on my Sims (that really creeps me out!) but don't mind nipples & "hair", so I was intrigued by the pictures in the above link.

(Man, I must be an idiot! No one else ever seems to ask these questions. Still, I know I'll "get it" one of these days....)

Thanks for the patience!

Miros1 · 12-16-2007, 04:48 PM

No, those are nude clothes, meaning stuff you'd buy or pick in BodyShop or CAS and put on with the wardrobe.

This is the one I was thinking of: http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=29371
She's even got an explanation of what meshes you (optionally) need to make all your Sims hot!
Aliens and plantsims: http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=29976

The girls do peek out a little.

Greg · 12-16-2007, 05:50 PM

Hmm... we're still not there. ZW is looking for a mesh that will override the default body shape for elders so that they don't look like they've been rode hard and put up wet for 110 years.

Or, alternatively, a way to convert an adult mesh so that it overrides the elder mesh.

It seems like it has to be something as simple as duplicating an adult mesh and changing its internal filename and GUID to be the same as the elder mesh that's embedded in the game. We just need to figure out what parameters to change and what to change them to.

Zirconia Wolf · 12-17-2007, 01:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greg

Hmm... we're still not there. ZW is looking for a mesh that will override the default body shape for elders so that they don't look like they've been rode hard and put up wet for 110 years.

Or, alternatively, a way to convert an adult mesh so that it overrides the elder mesh.

It seems like it has to be something as simple as duplicating an adult mesh and changing its internal filename and GUID to be the same as the elder mesh that's embedded in the game. We just need to figure out what parameters to change and what to change them to.

Yeah, that's about the size of it.

I was looking over the instructions (again) for changing the default body shape & wonder if it would be a matter of just pasting the Adult shape into the Elder one?

Thing is I still have no clue where Maxis has hidden their nude skins (they are NOT in the skins.package 'cause I've combed through that with SimPE) so I figure my best bet is to find a nice (genital free) default set of nude only overrides for the Adults & Elders, then try to just paste the Adult one into the Elder one (like the Warlock tutorial) & see what happens.

The trick is finding a nice set of non-genital enhanced default nudes...but I'm a fairly persistent wolf!

Greg · 12-17-2007, 03:05 AM

One of Warlokk's swimsuit meshes might do the job if you can figure it how to convert it from a swimsuit to a nude skin.

12-15-2007, 04:01 PM	#1
Zirconia Wolf Reticulated MoonBat Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: My trusty computer in Issaquah WA, USA. Posts: 848	Meshes vs Skins vs Textures????? Okay, I give up. I get that a Mesh is the 3D wire frame that forms the "skeleton" for Sims & the "framework" for the different clothing styles. I get that a Skin is something of a catch-all term for "the-specific-pattern-that-makes-clothing-look-like-it-does" & that a Skin is laid over (i.e. referencing) a given Mesh. I get that a Texture is the thing that makes clothes & such appear ribbed/smooth/wrinkled & such. But when I see a Sim naked in the game am I only seeing some kind of Maxian default 3D Mesh or am I seeing something more along the lines of a clothing-like Skin/Texture that is merely referencing a given Mesh? In short, is "naked" just another clothing style for a Sim or not? (If you haven't guessed it, I'm not getting much in the way of help on other sites in my quest to make my Elders appear less saggy when they are naked in my game. Clothing swapping is easy, but no one wants to answer my nude questions. Grrrrrr....) __________________ Long Live All Wild Canines! Leader Of The Moon-Bat Revolution! Last edited by Zirconia Wolf : 12-16-2007 at 01:27 PM. Reason: added grrr...

12-16-2007, 02:09 AM	#3
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	A bit more precisely: Mesh - The 3D model that defines the shape of an object. A mesh is defined by its vertices (in this useage, a vertex is a point space), wireframe (the lines that connect the points), and polygons or faces (the triangles that connect the points). Texture - The same thing as a skin. The texture is an image that gets mapped onto the mesh and gives it its color. In The Sims 2, these are .bmp format pictures stored in the .package files. SimPE uses .png images for exporting and importing textures for some obscure reason that assuredly makes sense in some alternate universe. A texture can have 2 or 3 parts: Main texture - the color of the clothing with all the nuances and details. Alpha - a black and white image that tells what areas the clothing covers. Black is no coverage, white is solid coverage, shades of gray are partially transparent. Normal - also known as a bump map, shows where the shape is smooth or bumpy. Often used to make things appear to be raised or ribbed in clothing. Often omitted entirely. The normal causes the graphics card to calculate shadows but does not actually alter the shape of an object. Skeleton - Also known as the bones, the skeleton is a three-dimensional stick figure that's tied to the mesh. The skeleton has the joints that move to adopt a pose, or by moving through a series of poses, an animation. For example, here is a sim that I just installed this evening. Christie Maas Christie was created by Bunniewren; her clothing and silly name are my fault. Clothing mesh by BlooM. Note that Christie's dress is very thin and that you can see a bit of her skin through it. That's because in the areas you can see through, the alpha in the dress texture is gray, not white. In the areas of her dress (and undies) that are opaque, the alpha is white. The shapes of Christie's body and outfit are defined by the meshes. I used the plural becuase the mesh is a special outfit created by BlooM; it is an "alpha" mesh with separate meshes for the body, dress, and boots. (Called "alpha" because if you mess with the alpha layer of the clothing texture, you will see the shape of the separate body mesh through the holes.) Each one of those meshes has the full set of texture images associated with it. This allowed me to have a transparent dress with Christie's nude body visible beneath it. (Well, nude except for her undies, which are mapped onto her nude body mesh.) Beneath her dress, nude body mesh is Warlokk's 34De36 mesh. It's that shape because BlooM included a mesh of that shape with his dress mesh. Christie also happens to have that same body shape assigned as her nude mesh but in reality any sim with any nude body shape could wear this dress and would have exactly the same body shape shown here. Here we see Christie climbing stairs. She is excuting the "climb stairs" animation because the game is moving the joints of her skeleton, and in turn, the skeleton is pushing the meshes that define the shape of her body, dress, and boots. Was that at all clear? __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know? Last edited by Greg : 12-16-2007 at 02:36 PM.

12-16-2007, 02:14 AM	#4
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Addendum: Naked is the innermost layer of texture that your sim wears. The sim's nude skin tone shows anywhere on a clothing mesh that clothing texture doesn't cover. When a sim is truly naked, there is no clothing texture and the sim uses the default nude mesh that is listed in that sim's data file. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

12-16-2007, 02:41 AM	#6
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Aha! You must live in that alternate universe where it makes sense to merge the texture and alpha into one file, Rose! I was just going on what the folks from Maxis said is the internal file format, way back when the game first came out. There's an important difference between PNG and GIF. PNG supports multiple levels of transparency while each pixel in GIF is either 100% on or 100% off. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

12-16-2007, 04:11 AM	#8
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	It sounds like they use their own format for storing the bitmap, whatever it might be. Now I'm wondering if what you see when you extract data with SimPE is really what the Maxis guys see. As far as I know, SimPE is just someone's guess at how the .package file is assembled, and even it still has blocks of unknown code. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

12-16-2007, 01:11 AM	#2
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Actually, mesh=wireframe. The skeleton is something separate that makes elders have bad posture even when they have on adult clothes so they aren't so saggy. Normal/bumpmap is what makes the clothes look bumpy or indented in the game. Have you checked out this tutorial on nudes: http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=26227 It's by BeosBoxBoy, the master of nekkid Sims!

12-16-2007, 03:55 AM	#7
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Stray musings: David Chess and I had a conversation back on the Hullabaloo about internal formats in the IMG resource (used for the Sims' thumbnails), which seems to be JPG (raw dump of resource has JFIF, not BM), but they do have masking, which we couldn't figure out. I almost wonder if they don't use 0,0,0 (normally black) as the mask color on the thumbnails, since Sims with black hair sometimes end up with streaks of the background color where their hair should be the darkest. This is worse on the family screenshot, which I can't find at the moment. However, the TXTR resources are either Raw8Bit (which is bitmap, but not bitmap format) or one of the DXT flavors. In my somewhat limited poking around, the grayscale normal is Raw8Bit and the colored texture is DXT3 (which allows transparency).

12-16-2007, 04:29 AM	#9
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Actually, David wrote a splitter proggie (in Perl of all languages), and the JFIF was clearly there. I think PhotoShop would open it as a JPEG as well. BTW, I just found the family thumbnails... the resource type is... JPG! It also has the black background and the JFIF "file type marker." I'm thinking Raw8Bit might also be a DXT format. Will ask my friend Cari tomorrow or Monday. She works for Stardock, the Galactic Civ people...

12-16-2007, 12:55 PM	#10
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Now I'm wondering whatever happened to D. M. Chess. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

12-16-2007, 01:26 PM	#11
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	Two words, Second Life...

12-16-2007, 04:35 PM	#16
Zirconia Wolf Reticulated MoonBat Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: My trusty computer in Issaquah WA, USA. Posts: 848	Okay, the thread I found on InSimAdult by jwilson5 is here... http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=29695 ...but I'm still not understanding if these are default nudes or ones that I would have to create entirely new Sims (with the right custom skin tone) to see. Jwilson5 calls them "nude clothes" so I don't understand if they will just show up when a Sim has no clothes on or if I have to "buy" them & have a Sim "wear" it to get the effect. All I want is to find a set of default overrides for the Adult & Elder Male (Male & Female) nude state that I can set up to effect the Sims already in my game. It's just the nude state I need help with, as everything else I can control just fine on my own. I'm not real crazy about seeing genitals on my Sims (that really creeps me out!) but don't mind nipples & "hair", so I was intrigued by the pictures in the above link. (Man, I must be an idiot! No one else ever seems to ask these questions. Still, I know I'll "get it" one of these days....) Thanks for the patience! __________________ Long Live All Wild Canines! Leader Of The Moon-Bat Revolution!

12-16-2007, 04:48 PM	#17
Miros1 Goddess for Life Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: NY State Posts: 3,303	No, those are nude clothes, meaning stuff you'd buy or pick in BodyShop or CAS and put on with the wardrobe. This is the one I was thinking of: http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=29371 She's even got an explanation of what meshes you (optionally) need to make all your Sims hot! Aliens and plantsims: http://www.insimadult.net/showthread.php?t=29976 The girls do peek out a little.

12-16-2007, 05:50 PM	#18
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	Hmm... we're still not there. ZW is looking for a mesh that will override the default body shape for elders so that they don't look like they've been rode hard and put up wet for 110 years. Or, alternatively, a way to convert an adult mesh so that it overrides the elder mesh. It seems like it has to be something as simple as duplicating an adult mesh and changing its internal filename and GUID to be the same as the elder mesh that's embedded in the game. We just need to figure out what parameters to change and what to change them to. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?

12-17-2007, 03:05 AM	#20
Greg Da Guy Wut Owns Dis Joint Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Texas Posts: 3,566	One of Warlokk's swimsuit meshes might do the job if you can figure it how to convert it from a swimsuit to a nude skin. __________________ Who are all these people and what do they know?