If you already had these hairs installed, you must remove them first, or else my fix will not show up!!!
Now, the tutorial:
First of all, a big thank-you to @sweetdevil-sims , who was the person to discover this fix and help me with it through DMs. I’ve just formatted her instructions into a tutorial. All the credit is hers.
This tutorial will hopefully teach you how to get rid of the plasticky shine that some hairstyles leave on your sim’s faces.
The hairstyle I’ll be demonstrating this tutorial on is Nightcrawler 07, retextured by Fanaskher, modeled by my little meow meow Mortimer Goth. For some reason, every retexture of Nightcrawler 07 I’ve ever used has this pesky problem, and today we are putting a stop to this nonsense. Enough! Our male sims deserve better!
You can follow this procedure to fix any hairstyles with this problem.
Disclaimer: I’m not very familiar with hair cc, so I apologize if some instructions are unclear or incorrect. But hopefully you get the general idea of what to do.
One of those things I really wish somebody showed me how to do a few years back
Maybe you’ve noticed that sometimes see-through textures in the game have lighter edges, even if the PNG looked fine?
That’s because PNG format doesn’t support true transparency channel. There is always a background, even if you can’t see it. If the background is white, the edges can pick up the colour.
Here’s how to fix it:
A tutorial:
How to remove transparency artifacts from .PNG files
I was asked by someone on discord to share numbers I type in blender and milkshape to get right proportions for distant terrains. I updated them recently, so it should be better now. I was gonna make a video how I create them, from A to Z, but my laptop couldn’t stand rendering. It was about 1:20 hour, but maybe it’s better, because my english is tragic comparing to typing.
So I lost a lot of time for recording it, but during last week I made a PDF tutorial. I mainly focused on blender side - shaping mesh, glitches you may encounter in game and how to prevent them, etc. I’m not an expert when it comes about creating CC, I only made some posters and distant terrains, but I share what I think it’s noteworthy when creating them.
So, I tried to keep things minimalistic per site, and I ended up with 90. It’s fast-readable though. There might be some typos, because I wrote it down at evening-night, and my chaotic gemini energy doesn’t help, but there should be enough. I use 2.93.4 version of blender in this totorial, btw.
So, I was talking with enable_llamas on Discord about this shader and I told her of my method, so I guess it’s a good idea to share with the public.
All right, the first part is knowing what’s the opacity on the translucent part of the multiplier in Photoshop - I use CS3, I’m pretty sure it works with CS2 or newer versions too.
1. Open your multiplier (the object for this one will be released soon) and use the eyedropper tool to check the opacity on a translucent area. In this case, 41%. The pointer did not appear in the screenshot but trust me, it works.
If your translucency is uniform, that’s it, but if there’s different opacities, choose the one with the lowestvalue.
2. Basic math: open your calculator and multiply 256 the value you found. In this case 41% (or 0,41, for the nerds like me who cut corners). The result will be around 104.
The number you got is the upper limit of your AMT value: higher than that, and it will look invisible in-game. It helps to round down (and ALWAYS down) to the next number that ends with 5 or 0 for easier memorization. In this case, I used Alpha Mask Threshold = 100.
3. Test in-game.
Looks great! But if you have some invisible lines / pixels, that’s because some parts were more transparent than your AMT. Check your multiplier again, hover the eyedropper around the problematic areas, and start again :P
Way quicker than fiddling with TSRW and restarting the game many, many times!
