Hi, all!
So, I'm trying to gender-convert some TS4 hairs to TS3.

I always use Daboobs and Milkshape to make hair, and it's sometimes problematic, since Milkshape only allows 30k polys or less before it starts crashing.
A lot of TS4 hairs are twice that if not more, so I usually end up having to go hardcore with DirectX Mesh Tools in order to shave off the polys.
Then I have to mess with weld/unweld, smoothing, and align normals, in order to get the hair to act right and stop crashing, exploding, etc.

Sometimes everything works just fine, but other times I end up with this nonsense, and I don't know why.



Clearly I screwed up somewhere, because hair just shouldn't look like this; it's never happened to me before.
They look perfectly fine in Live Mode though!
But I'd feel uncomfortable uploading content that looked that crappy in CAS, so I wanted to know if anyone knew the reason the hairs are doing this, and if it can be fixed.

Update:
When I tried to fix it, the hair looked EXTREMELY plastic-y and shiny, like it's wet.

Usually shininess on objects like that in CAS is when UV maps are overlapping, haven't figured out myself how to fix it! :/

UV maps. Lovely.

@murfee
I'm not sure if you're still looking into this and I wanted to message you about one of your cc, but maybe it's kinda related?

I hope you won't mind if I use the super great dreads you converted as an illustration, but in CAS those hairstyles were quite shiny and they rendered perfectly well in Live Mode.



Is that the same issue you're having here?

Because I think I was able to fix it to some degree.
In S3PE, I took a look at the GEOM files and saw that they didn't seem to reference the right Diffuse and Specular maps. When I edited the TGIs for each GEOM for Diffuse, Alpha and Specular maps so that the images present in the package were used, it seemed to show in CAS without the shine.



Is it possible you were experiencing something similar?

WOAH! You literally just solved the main problem I've been having with ALL of my hairs since day one! They always show up shiny in CAS -- now I know why! (What the heck are TGIs?) God I'm such a noobtard.
It's strange how the GEOMs aren't reading the textures correctly -- why does that happen? Is it because I use Daboobs? I'm just putting the textures in the textures slots; why isn't it using them?

I don't know if it's related to the weird unrendered/greyed out business I've been having with the 2 hairs above though, but it's definitely worth looking into; thanks so much!

Psst TGI stands for Type, group, instance. Which you've probably seen before when using S3PE

If blyss's suggestion doesn't work (Which is a great one! didn't think of that one yet! ) Then maybe lower the shininess in the shaders? But it is possible DABOOBS is causing some issues with exporting that are kinda hard to code in I suppose? Could always be a good thing to report if that really is the issue!

Haha, yes, thanks for the translation!

And as an example for the Diffuse map, I looked at those 3 names and made sure they matched:


And that was basically all I did.

I've never used DABOOBS, so I unfortunately can't say if it's an issue with the program, but at least there may be a work-around, if some of the shininess is due to those unmatching names.

If it keeps happening, going forward I guess I'll use TSRW and see if the plasticnness goes away -- that was something that's been on all of my hairs that I could never figure out how to get rid of; got my CC looking like a TS4 playdough travesty.