Skin tone with Normal-mapping ?

[BeosBoxBoy]

Sometime in 2005 Semloh made a skin tone with a normal-map (which is no longer available at either MTS2 or Sexy Sims 2).

Last night I tried to make a skin tone with a normal-map with mixed success.

What I did:

• I made a clone of a Maxis dark (s4) skin tone in Body Shop
• I made a recolour of the adult male suit, I chose this clothing because it is a known normal-mapped clothing
• I made a recolour of the adult male suit, this time resizing the BMPs in the project folder to 512x512 before importing into the game
• I opened the suit recolours in SimPE and extracted/exported the normal maps
• I opened the skin tone clone in SimPE and imported the normal maps
• I changed the material definitions of all the existing skin tone parts to use a single texture based on the size of the original reducing the needed base textures to 2
• I changed the Group, Instance (High), and Instance data of the imported normal maps to match two of the no longer needed base textures
• I added normal mapping data to the material definitions
• I removed all un-necessary textures.
• I saved my work and checked it in Body Shop to see if it would display, it did
• I tried to clone the skin tone to make a re-colour edit, it exported all the various files for the skin tone including normal map textures as BMPs, then crashed trying to display the newly exported file
• I started the game and checked to see if the skin tone would crash the game in CAS, it didn't crash but locked up.  I was forced to use the Windows Task Manager to kill the game.

I would much appreciate it if someone would duplicate my work and see if they get a similar result, and I would also deeply appreciate it if anyone could post a copy of Semloh's original skin tone with normal mapping so I might compare the file with my work.

Thanks in advance!

[BlooM]

yup, tried it your way and the way i do cloning/adding/ and messing up things myself.

Same results.
The changes looking promising(see his burned skin )
But when running it through bs again it crashes when viewing the male before importing it in the game.

Edit:
AH, when i opened the latest recol with simpe i noticed bs has changed the names of the normal texture images......
Did that happen with your recol also?
It also screwed up the stdbasetexturenames here......
And from the 3 normal textures for cut/normal and soft there's only one left now.

Ok, fixed those but,
It crashes cos it keeps changing the normalmap textures to DXT1 instead of RAW(in my package that is...)

[BeosBoxBoy]

Thanks Bloom - very similar to my problems, I will keep poking at it until I get it to work :lol: