Invisible Recolor Tutorial- Manor House Dishes

[amythestfenix]

I was asked to post my invisible recolor for phoenix_phaerie's lovely Manor House Kitchen cabinet dishes. That recolor would hide all of the dishes, but not the glasses as they use a separate, non-recolorable subset of the mesh.

This quick tutorial for modifying the mesh to make the glasses invisible and making your own invisible recolors requires you to already understand recoloring with SimPE using DDS utilities. There are probably better ways to do this, so helpful comments are encouraged!

To modify the mesh so that the glasses are invisible, open the package for cabinet1 with SimPE and click on the PlugIn view. Click on Material Definition(TXMT) and chose cmmanorkitchencabinet1_glass_txmt. A long block of text will appear in the window, but you only need to change 1 thing. Find stdMatAlphaTestEnabled and set the value to 1, click Commit. Save the file and you are done.




To make your own invisible recolor of most meshes:
Begin as though making any other recolor. You must be using DDS utilities so that you can build your image using DXT3 or DXT5 which support transparency.

Edit the Material Definition (TXMT) files for all subsets you wish to be invisible as described above.

Then, click on the TXTR image for each subset and build DXT (use DXT3) to import a transparent image of the correct size. To get this, I generally export the image, promote to layer, clear, save, and build DXT to import it back in-quick and simple. Commit and save file. You should now have an invisible recolor!

[leftywillnot]

awesome thank you so much for sharing and being so creative.

[Kristof]

Thank you so much for the tutorial! It was very useful!

[Enrina21]

awesome)aha
thank u so much!~!

[leftywillnot]

Sorry It took me so long to try this, I was busy with my coffee overload. When I open simPe, I only have 6 files (2 txtr, 2 txmt, 2 mmtx) one is for the cabinet and one is for the dishes...No glass files at all.

What am I doing wrong? Please help.

[amythestfenix]

I think perhaps you are trying to recolor the cabinet. The glass subset is NOT recolorable, so to make it invisible, you have to open the MESH package for cabinet1. The mesh file will have lots of items there including 6 TXMT, 5 MMAT, and 5 TXTR files.

Don't worry about messing it up, you can always download a new copy from MTS if necessary!

[leftywillnot]

Here's what I get when I go to recolor it..did I mess up the mesh? any ideas?

[amythestfenix]

Kim, I can tell by the name of your package (LeftyINV cmmanorkitchencabinet1) that you are not opening the mesh, you have made a recolor package and you are working with it. You have to make the changes to phoenix_phaerie's mesh if you want the glasses to be invisible. They cannot be recolored any other way.

Open SimPE, click on the blue folder in the top left corner. Now select the mesh cmmanorkitchencabinet1.package. That should open the mesh so you can make the changes to make the glasses invisible.

[leftywillnot]

do I choose recolor or clone? if I choose recolor then I only get those files in the pic above, and the file name is what I saved the file as.

[amythestfenix]

You don't do either. You are not making a new package, so you don't start Object Workshop at all. You just need to open the mesh package phoenix_phaerie already made and change some of the things in it.