Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Instructor
Original Poster
#1 Old 27th Jan 2018 at 12:02 PM Last edited by sam&skye : 24th Apr 2018 at 9:28 PM.
Default Making stairs recolourable
I got Jonesi's modstairs to be recolourable after a long combat, but I really don't understand why the thing that fixed it did fix it, and it would be really helpful for future projects if someone could shed some light on that. I've made things recolourable before, so I'm generally familiar with how to add and edit an MMAT or enable designmode, but stairs confuse me. So I opened a bunch of recolourable stairs in SimPE and had a look at how exactly they're different.

On to the actual issues/questions:

● None of the stairs I looked at had the "tsMaterialsMeshName" block in their GMND unless they were slaved to other stairs. Yet my edited Jonesi modstairs seem to need one of the 10 included meshes as a master of all others, otherwise they will tell me "object is not designable" in game.
● All 10 SHPEs contain 2 subsets linked to 2 different TXMTs, but all 10 GMDCs have only one each. Which one is used in game depends on if/where you used the railing tool (which seems to have a pattern that must've made sense to Jonesi somehow, seeing as the meshes are labelled accordingly. Like [...]leftrailing_gmdc has the "metal" subset listed under groups while [...]rightrailing_gmdc contains the "glass" one.)

Have I messed up somewhere, or are these stairs just unusual in some way, or why do they need the tsMaterialsMeshName??

What's up with the 2 subsets? Do they have a purpose that I don't see?

How do I determine which cres I put in the MMAT? Does it even matter?
Attached files:
File Type: rar  jonesi modstairs.rar (156.4 KB, 18 downloads) - View custom content
Advertisement
Echezzman Nwokeoma
staff: senior moderator
#2 Old 27th Jan 2018 at 4:37 PM
Have you read this. It could share more light to what you want to know. http://modthesims.info/t/495135
Instructor
Original Poster
#3 Old 27th Jan 2018 at 5:18 PM
No, I hadn't until now. Wish I'd had that link sooner. Sadly I only found one thing that I've done differently (the defaultMaterial value), and correcting that seems to break it... would have confused me if not to be honest, since all the stairs I've looked at were the same.
Instructor
#4 Old 5th Feb 2018 at 7:36 PM Last edited by d4RE : 5th Feb 2018 at 7:47 PM. Reason: more typos
Quote: Originally posted by sam&skye
Have I messed up somewhere, or are these stairs just unusual in some way, or why do they need the tsMaterialsMeshName??

What's up with the 2 subsets? Do they have a purpose that I don't see?

How do I determine which cres I put in the MMAT? Does it even matter?


@same&skye:

The unusual thing about these stairs (or at least the oldwood ones- which are all i've opened and looked at, so far) is that the metal and wood parts both point to the same txtr. I haven't looked at the mesh in Blender, yet, but I suspect that both metal and wood subsets are in fact the same exact mesh, not two separate mesh groups that are mapped to different parts of the texture. It's almost like they were purposefully made unrecolorable.

The purpose of the subsets (usually) is to have a distinct part of the overall object that is colored and/or recolored differently from the rest of the object. As I said above, I 'm not too sure these stairs have more than one subset, even though it is named differently in a couple of GMDCs.

The CRES you use in the MMATs is the CRES for the norailing mesh.(I suspect this is just a convention - I'm trying to make some mod stairs with rails that not only recolor but also change mesh, and I'm hoping to use the tworailing CRES to link all the others to, but it's too soon to say for sure that it works. For now, though, we know that using the norailing CRES works fine.)

You also want to slave the other meshes to the norailing mesh, if slaving is needed (usually is).
The reason for this, as best as I can understand it, is: You have a TXMT for each subset, even if they are not recolorable. Two of these TXMTs can be made recolorable. To make them recolorable, you follow the tutorial linked above, which basically says, for every recolorable TXMT add six MMATs, all identical except for the GUIDs, which come from the six OBJDs in the package, and the family strings which you get from the hash generator. In addition, you need to add into all ten GMNDs a tsDesignModeEnabled entry which includes the name(s) of your recolorable subset(s). .... Anyway, then you may or may not need to add the tsMaterialsMeshName to all but the norailing mesh, and point your subsets to the norailing CRES. To be honest, I've forgotten why, but I think it has something to do with those two recolorable TXMTs being for the entire package, instead of making two for each of the ten meshes, then 12 more MMATS for each of the ten meshes, and so on...

I see you downloaded some of my glass rail stairs the other day. Open them up and you can see how I applied HugeLunatic's instructions to this problem. Once you get a sense of the logic of it, then open the set called "Multi-step" and you can see how I altered which two of the three or four subsets were to be recolorable.

Hope this makes sense, and helps you get your project done.
Instructor
Original Poster
#5 Old 5th Feb 2018 at 10:29 PM
Yes, that was very helpful, thanks. Just one last thing has stayed unanswered for me, which is why on earth all the mod stairs I've opened recoloured fine without either having a thousand MMATs or all the meshes being slaved to the norailing one. But I'm starting to think that all of those stairs are "normal" and it has to do with the weird two subsets. I'm gonna test that some time when I'm really bored...
Instructor
#6 Old 5th Feb 2018 at 11:41 PM
lol Yeah, mine are unusual and not normal in that respect, because I added something like 48 recolors directly into the mesh package instead of making separate recolor packages for them. Still, even if the RC's are made separately, there will be six MMATs for every color you want to add. They add up really quick.
Instructor
Original Poster
#7 Old 6th Feb 2018 at 10:50 AM
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean your's aren't that unusual per se (other than that you bothered giving us a seperately recolourable railing, yay to that), they're just main and recolour packages combined, aren't they? What I thought was that stairs where the meshes aren't repositoried would need 60-120 MMAT's (6 for every mesh and 12 if it's 2 recolourable subsets). And for the ones that I made recolourable, that seems to be true. But for some reason, I've come across a bunch of mod stairs where the game was just like "Oh it's fine, it's stairs, I see. I'll just let you recolour all of these with no additional work to do."
Instructor
#8 Old 13th Feb 2018 at 8:32 PM
Quote: Originally posted by sam&skye
they're just main and recolour packages combined, aren't they?


Pretty much so. What happened was, I opened a lot of Maxis packages and a few CC objects to see how to make each recolor have its own name and simple readable cres when I hover my mouse over it in build mode. I really don't like it when I see the same exact "whitesurface" designation on every recolor, even when it's obviously some shade of red. I have a lot of things in my game (BB Nooks for example) that have TONS of recolors, and I get really annoyed when I can't tell what the name of the color is, and who created it (usually because I like it so much I want to see what else that creator has made that I might want to use). So I learned that to make them plain and separate, you put the all the recolors in the package.


Quote:
What I thought was that stairs where the meshes aren't repositoried would need 60-120 MMAT's (6 for every mesh and 12 if it's 2 recolourable subsets). And for the ones that I made recolourable, that seems to be true. But for some reason, I've come across a bunch of mod stairs where the game was just like "Oh it's fine, it's stairs, I see. I'll just let you recolour all of these with no additional work to do."


Which ones? I'm curious to see this myself. I know that a few, like the Holy Smokes and Wooden stairs were made recolorable already by Numenor, and I think Huge Lunatic has made the rest of them recolorable. If you have some of those packages in your game, it makes it a whole lot easier to clone game stairs ready to recolor, and may account for the stairs you find that are "ready to go'.
Instructor
Original Poster
#9 Old 13th Feb 2018 at 9:56 PM
I think it was (among others) these: http://modthesims.info/d/314804 (can't check right now, no SimPE on this computer)
Me? Sarcastic? Never.
staff: administrator
#10 Old 13th Feb 2018 at 11:40 PM
You need one mmat for each subset you want recolorable, simple as that. Some, like the jonesi set you made, has twice as many as necessary. Why? Because the mesh only has the one subset and not two like the ones it was cloned from.

As to the tsMaterialsMeshName requirement, I suspect is because they were cloned from the base game loft ones after she installed the numenor's ones. Plus, that package is all kinds of messed up. lol

Those domino ones have 10 mmats, one for each subset of the mesh.
Back to top