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Adding a Cloned Alpha Part to a Body Mesh
by Grizzelda

If you want the mesh that I created as I wrote this tutorial, you can DOWNLOAD it, along with one recolor.  Or, read the tutorial and make your own ....

As confusing as the title sounds, if you are an intermediate to advanced body mesher, you will fly through this and wonder how you didn’t think of it yourself… (You were too busy creating fun stuff!)

First, you will need:

• SIMPE

• Wes H’s Unimesh plug-ins

• Milkshape

• Body Shop

Today, we will make a Female mesh with alpha sleeves.

This tutorial assumes you understand basic meshing using the Unimesh plug-ins and uv mapping. There are tutorials covering both if you don’t already know these things. Also, you should know Milkshape and Simpe fairly well. A good place to start learning about body meshing, before you use this tutorial, is NeptuneSuzy's great tutorial right here at this site.

IMPORTANT: Autosmooth needs to be UNCHECKED at all times!

Step 1. Create your project folder. First, make a mesh package using the hula girl from the base game or ANY clothing that has an alpha mesh in the usual way. This will save a lot of time and effort. There are ways to add an alpha part to a mesh package that doesn’t already have it, but it’s complicated and I haven’t done it but once. If you feel you’d rather do that, search at MTS2 for Sunair’s post about it. Save the mesh package in your Saved Sims folder naming what you like.

Step 2. In Simpe, find the GMDC to which you want to add the alpha part. I’ll use the GMDC from my “sexy-slacks” mesh. Extract the GMDC and place it in your project folder. We are going to clone the alpha part from the arms, so I am only extracting the one GMDC, but you can also clone from a different GMDC and add in Milkshape.

Step 3. Import the GMDC you just extracted into Milkshape using the Unimesh importer.

Step 4. Select the body mesh—this is important as it has all of the bone assignments unlike any morph parts! Duplicate the part.

Step 5. Now, you need to select the sections of the part that you want to keep! Make sure to hide all of the parts except for the new one!

     A. Select the sections you want to clone

     B. Invert the selection

     C. Press the delete button!  You now have two portions of arms left.

Step 6. Reshape these as you like. Have fun and come back when you’re all done!

Here’s one part of my sleeve!

Step 7. We need to steal the comments from the hula girl now. Paste them into your duplicate part and then rename your part to body_alpha.

Step 8. Now you’ll want to make sure your UV Map is set. And that you don’t have any underweight bones as you normally would! Then export the GMDC and replace the file in your mesh package as usual.

Step 9. Now, you need to link this mesh to a texture. Do this in the normal way, but make sure you are using the hula or any other texture that has an alpha part. The reason is that you would have to ADD the extra textures and that is very complicated (at least for me.)

Step 10. In the texture file that you linked to the mesh you will now need to make 2 changes to the MATD for the alpha layer to get a sheer effect.

A: stdMatAlphaBlendMode:blend

B: second stdMatAlphaTestEnabled:0

Check your mesh in Body Shop. If it’s not working, go back and see if you made an error. If parts show through, tweak the positioning etc.

And now you’re done. You may need to tweak the mesh and you’ll definitely need to recolor. But your part should be working! You have probably been wondering about assigning vertices. This is unnecessary because we cloned a part that already had the vertices assigned. We didn’t need to export as an object file, so we didn’t lose any assignments!

Special thanks to Wes H, Dr.Pixel, PAF, and Sunair. Also, my thanks to Buntah for hosting this tutorial!