New hair mesh works fin in CAS, but crashes livemode!

[amehime_chan]

As the title says, I made a new hair mesh by combining two existing ones and it works perfectly fine in CAS, but once I leave CAS and actually play the game, it crashes. Can anyone help me figure out why?

[BloomsBase]

Only thing i can think of is that there is something wrong with the lower detail meshes.
Those are not used in the CAS but are ingame.

[amehime_chan]

Hmm, I thought I did those right. I will take another look and redo them and see if that fixes it.


EDIT: So I redid the package and used the lod2 and 3 from the original mesh that I used a major part from (which work in game), but it still crashed. I still don't know why.

[BloomsBase]

and lod1?(if it has 4 lods?)

There are not so many things that crash the game, a corrupt(or maybe a wrong) skeleton is one of them.

[amehime_chan]

I'm not sure how to know if the skeleton is wrong, but I did lod1 all over again, and it still crashed. So, maybe it's the skeleton? How do I know and fix it?

[Elexis]

Open your mesh in Milkshape, assign it all to head_new bone and make your package again. If there was something wrong with the skeleton, it should be fixed that way.

[BloomsBase]

Always make sure you have started with a basegame hair in Milkshape and that each lod has the correct TGI links to the skeleton, they are diffrent for each lod.
If a vertice is unassigned it will snap to the floor wich i do not think is the case here
With wat program did you create the hair?

[amehime_chan]

I've used CTU, Milkshape and DABOOBS.

[Esmeralda]

With hair, you need 4 LODs: LOD0, 1, 2 and 3. You can use LOD1 for both LOD0 and LOD1.

If your LOD1 is OK, then try packaging the hair with LOD1 in all four LOD categories just as a test, to see if that works without crashing. If it does, then you know something is probably off within LOD2 or LOD3.

If you used DABOOBS - does your hair have more than one joint, or is it all assigned to Head_New? I use DABOOBS to make my hairs and they're fine as long as they can be 100% assigned to Head_New, but if it has more than one joint (eg, some of it assigned to neck and/or spine as well as head), it crashes in-game. I don't have this problem if I make multi-jointed Hat Hair using CTU. Don't know if it's just something about my particular PC and/or graphics card, or if DABOOBS does really have a problem with hair that has more than one joint (come to think of it, I find that DABOOBS itself can crash if I make hair with more than one joint), so I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has experienced this. If it's not just me, than that COULD be your problem - if your hair has more than one joint, as a test you could trying packaging your hair with CTU as a Hat Hair, and seeing if it still crashes.

[amehime_chan]

They should all have just one joint, since it is a short hair. I am going to try setting LOD0 and 1 as the same mesh, to see if there is something wrong with the LOD I made. It's a good thing my game loads fast, or else I would have given up by now haha.

[Elexis]

That's weird, because I always make hairs with more than one joint and they never crashed my game neither in DABOOBS, nor CTU. One of my hairs has 8 bones and it works fine.

[Esmeralda]

That's weird, because I always make hairs with more than one joint and they never crashed my game neither in DABOOBS, nor CTU. One of my hairs has 8 bones and it works fine.
Ah, that's interesting Elexis, thank you - so the crashing in DABOOBS must be something to do with my PC somehow. Maybe I'll try it on another PC and see what happens. I never have a problem with CTU, just DABOOBS.

They should all have just one joint, since it is a short hair. I am going to try setting lod0 and 1 as the same mesh, to see if there is something wrong with the lod I made. It's a good thing my game loads fast, or else I would have given up by now haha.
Hopefully that will help - I always test my hair using LOD0/1 for all 4 LODs if I have a problem with my one-jointed hairs crashing. It usually turns out that either LOD2 or 3 has lost its joint assignment, or something equally weird.

[amehime_chan]

Okay, I think I got it sorted out. It hasn't crashed after I changed my sim's hair to the one I made and it even let me save. So I think I solved it.
I replaced the LOD1 with my LOD0 that works and it seems fine now, so there must have been something terribly wrong with my lod1. :lol:

I really appreciate all of your help. I never would have thunk to use LOD0 as LOD1, as well. I would have probably just kept trying to make the lower LODs and wondered why it never solved the problems. Thanks a ton!

[Esmeralda]

Oh, that's great, glad you got it to work!

[robokitty]

You really should try to make all the LODs properly rather than using LOD 0 for everything.

Did you copy over the comments from LOD 0 to all the lower LODs correctly? I've noticed that is usually the culprit when my game crashes from lower LOD hairs. Issues with bone assignments usually don't crash the game, and they look totally different... like the hair snapping to a different location when I zoom out.

[Esmeralda]

@amehime_chan, I got the idea you were saying you were only using LOD0 for all four LODs for -testing- purposes as I recommended, not for your final version? If not, then yes, you need to make the lower LODs properly or your hair can cause slowdown in your game (or in other people's, if you're going to share it). Also, yes, not copying the comments to the lower LODs will make your game crash (the other 'something similarly weird' I must have been thinking of in my previous post, but it's been a long time since I made a hair that crashed the game so I couldn't remember what it was!) - it will crash as soon as you zoom away from the sim that's wearing the hair.