I decided after poking around for awhile I would try my hand at something I have seen FEW passes at so far.
I decided to try altering, massively. a pre-existing hair mesh. now because i used Verts that were pre-existing and duped and moved and resized and such it doesn't look how I would like it too, however. it actually worked, and that is what this was about.
Now I'm unsure if this is really the place to post this but I felt like I wanted to share a pic of my experiment

this hair is TRYING to look like Gaiaonline's Moira. (so is the Sim, loosely)

While I can plainly see I am being ignored, I'm going to post an update on the mesh anyway. This time I took to Milkshape and used a second hair mesh, stole the ponytails off of it, and attached them to the base hair model I was using, and created the bangs from scratch by chopping up a sphere and applying the material to the new bangs as well, and this is what I came up with.


its actually fully functional, and its a sort of proof of concept.
I am currently working on something that would be even more proof of concept.

I'm not really sure what kind of response you're wanting. It's cool that you're experimenting, but what you're doing is something we already know we can do. I've succeeded in getting completely new mesh parts and textures (replacing defaults) working, with some additional fiddling as there is extra vertex data that needs to be edited in order to get things to work right in-game. The issue right now is getting non-default stuff working.

nah I was expecting some sort of response, was cause the other one labeled "first hair mesh" was still getting replies. XP
yea if I knew more technical things I may be getting somewhere on that but I can't figure it out every time I try something in that direction it just causes a total crash on the game, so I'll just skulk around until someone here figures it out.

Well, you didn't ask any questions, so there was little call to action.
The second one looks a lot better, to me anyway.
If you are inetrested in haor meshing, get the updated MilkShape 1.8.5 and the updated Q-Mesh plugins, as the TagVal data makes a big difference in the appearance of the hair mesh.

<* Wes *>

I think at this point folks are just (im)patiently awaiting the non-defaults. Which are coming... eventually. Hopefully. Delphy's working hard on them but is getting frustrated - they seem enragingly complicated and I can't even begin to understand all the gubbins he's working on.

Oh, perhaps I should have asked a question... heh oh well that was then.

A new milkshape is out? excellent I've been wondering when another would come out. I've owned a copy of Milkshape since... uh, well shortly after it came out, which was forever ago, when you could buy a copy for 5$
I downloaded the Q-mesh plugins yesterday, has it updated since then?

Okay I feel better now, I will go back to quietly poking around the files until something catastrophically fails again.

How did you know what file to export for the hair mesh? I was looking over the geoms in postal, but i'm not sure which to export.

Well, I use postal and S3PE together. S3PE uses the names, which can be plainly read by you and I, and makes it easier to find the specific genoms that are the right ones.
BUT it doesn't lead you to the bones, so you take the instance from S3PE and search with postal and get the goem and the bones.
in S3PE the right ones will be named something along the lines of
[age][gender][name of part]_lod(#)
#=0, 1, 2, or 3
the number has to do with detail level, 0 is what you will see up close like in the CAS area. 1, I'm not sure
2 would be zoomed out some and 3 is likely to be at zoomed as far away as possible, I haven't experimented with any other than 1 and 0 however.
like this:
afHairBobStraight_lod0
some will have an additional part.
like
afHairCowboyHatLong_lod0
and
afHairCowboyHatLong_lod0_1
these go together, one is the hat and the other the hair, so far I believe that the _1 is usually the hair, but I haven't actually paid enough attention to be sure.

Ooh. Okay, Thanks! I was always confused about the _lod files.

By the way, I used to switch from postal to S3PE as well. I found that if you click "Workspace", and click "Show NMap Names" it shows the names of the files.

I know you are working hard on these. I have had a beta of the MilkShape 1.8.5 for some time, but since it was a private release, I could not pass it on, and MilkShape has users that need other stuff besides Sims 3 (can you BELIEVE it?).

However, while I was a bit frustrated by not being able to share, I was able to get the additional stuff tested and pretty much ready to go, releasing the new plugins the same day Mete released the new MilkShape.

So while non-replacements are not a reality yet, I would believe there is no reason that people cannot start polishing their meshes to get ready for that tool. Hair for Sims 3 has an incredibly rich set of capabilities that are only evident on a few hair meshes. I would not say so if I didn't believe it, but I know of no reason that a hair mesh built as a replacement would need any reworking later to be used as a new hair, just proper repackaging with the right other files.

<* Wes *>

wow, seriously? must be from the latest version of postal lol. COOL that will streamline my work-flow thanks for that little tid'bit.

@Wes: I can't wait till its figured out. right now I'm sorta not a very good mesh maker, I can alter preexisting things good, but its beyond me on how to from scratch make a mesh that doesn't look like trash lol.

Next up, I need to learn how to properly create DDS files. currently when I save something as a DDS it looks really weird, all the detail washed out and ugly colors(when saved in color) or just washed to solid gray when I save it monochromed.
I am using a preexisting mesh from models ripped out of Zelda TP.
(cause I suck at making my own meshes) I am trying to make Zelda or Link's hair work. I got the size right, the position right and the joint assignment right, now its down to making the textures work.