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20th Jan 2006 at 1:30 AM
Last edited by tiggerypum : 1st Sep 2006 at
8:29 AM.
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Converting clothes to different age groups
Tiggerypum and I were discussing the confusion over age conversion on the other tutorial thread here, so I made this for you all in the hope that it will clear some things up. Please note that the only numbers I give you here are for conversions among Young Adults, Adults, and Elders, as these are the only conversions that will work without making entirely new meshes. Please don't ask about converting Children or Teens - it simply won't work.
This tutorial is designed to take you through age conversions step-by-step. You should have some experience with Body Shop already, so we’re skipping pictures for the first few steps. You fire up Body Shop, start a new project, pick the outfit, export it with a distinctive filename you’ll be able to find in Saved Sims, and then Import to game without changing anything. After you do this you will see, as in this image, that the outfit shows up twice in the same age group. Since this outfit is custom to start, you see both on the same screen. If you use a Maxis item, the outfit will show up at the beginning as custom as well as in its regular spot in Body Shop. When this is done, quit Body Shop.
From your start menu, go into My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/SavedSims.
If you have a lot of custom content, “Search” will come in very handy. And here you see why you gave your outfit a distinctive name.
Keep in mind, you need to have
SimPE already installed so that when you double-click on the file name, it opens it in
SimPE so you can edit it.
As soon as you double-click, this is the screen you will see. We’re going to be playing with only one little piece. You want to double click on “Property Set” from the top left list, then click the “Plugin View” tab below.
You will see a whole list now on the left. Click on age, and the numbers you need to change show up on the right. For adult, the number will be 0x00000008. Young Adult is 0x00000040. Elder is 0x00000010. You can change the outfit so it’s for one age group, or by ending the code with 48 (for adult/young adult) or 18 (for adult/elder) or 58 (for all three).
Other age groups have different skeleton sizes, and age conversions will not work properly. Clothes that are for a smaller skeleton will result in your sim’s head floating over a sliced-open neck. Clothes that are for a larger skeleton will result in a small head being swallowed by the neckline of the clothes.
When I look at this recolor, I can see that I already had the outfit available for 48 - which means young adult and adult. So now I want to make _this_ recolor available for elders also. I'm going to change the value to 10.
Now the outfit will show up – after we do a couple more things. First, you click on the “commit” button in the lower right.
If you’ve done everything right, then you’ll get the little “changes were committed” box. Click “OK”. Don’t exit yet. Select “Save” from your File menu.