Initially, all skin files for the Sims and its first expansions came in neat FAR files. Then, along came the first big update that overhauled the skin system: Hot Date, with a few mistakes in CMX files that were to persist through the subsequent expansion packs. The new skin type - "buyables" - were not FARed but put unprotected in a separate directory where they could be easily overwritten. Was the hurry to put out a new expansion pack at the expense of quality? Likely, and the result was more than unpacked files and typos. As I found when warping HDplus buyables, the new meshes were fundamentally flawed. As were the Winter meshes that followed them.
The texture mapping is slightly worse than the usual shoddy asymmetric "aah just slap it on" that has probably irritated many skinners, because a pixel on the left shows bigger or more slanted than the same pixel on the right. When making improved skinny male defaults, I noticed the edges of the leopard underwear didn't meet. This is a texture map mistake that clearly went completely unnoticed.
When warping child swimsuits, I noticed the crotch seemed to shift to one side. This cost a lot of editing to correct. The cause: vertices that are horizontally in the body's centre should be shared between opposing limbs. In the old and better meshes, the crotch vertices were part of L_LEG, the left upper leg joint, with equal and opposing blend vertices in R_LEG. In many HD swimsuits - most swimsuits that weren't "nude body" variations - the central vertices were shared between L_LEG and the PELVIS joint. So if one was warped more than the other, the vertices shifted. This was mostly in the male meshes.
Almost all Winter outfits had the same problems. This affected meshes for both sexes. An additional Winter problem was that apparently the meshes had been texture-mapped by laying out one band of faces after the other, which means that one spatial vertex equalled two or more texture map vertices, even when the texture map points were in the same position and should be welded into one. Unnecessary double vertices occur in many Maxis meshes, and I could already see by the sharp lines in Bodywarp that not much vertex welding had been done on the Winter meshes. This meant that there could be four to eight vertices where one would have sufficed, because the superfluous vertices also had superfluous blend vertices... It was a real pleasure to edit these monsters. I was tempted to remake them from scratch.
The worst of the worst, however, were the funny chest meshes: L403FA, S403FA, S404MA, S406MA. These were very different from all other meshes because vertices that would normally have been part of SPINE2, the top of the back, were now in L/R_ARM, the top of the shoulders. These meshes had characteristic rounded shoulders, or characteristic hunched-up shoulders or even pointed ones, depending on how well, or not, they had been modelled. They also had differently structured chests, which meant I couldn't stick a FABBS accessory on them but had to edit the chests directly. This is when I ran into something I'd already noticed in the game: that when the arms of these meshes are raised, the chest comes up with them, as if the Sim had gruesomely broken its ribs. The *_ARM joints don't only steal from SPINE2, but also from SPINE1, the ribcage. I had a jolly few months reassigning vertices to their proper joint and repositioning them, fixing the normals and adjusting the UVs - only to discover more misaligned vertices, fortunately blend vertices and easy to remove. Most irritating of all was that these meshes were clearly an attempt at a smoother, more natural body shape, now if only that idea had been executed properly! And oh yes, the maker of the S403FA (last-century swimwear fashion) meshes had clearly used the business suit mesh as base, and the arms were squeezed at the bathing suit sleeves but chunky and suit-sleeve-shaped below that, with thick square wrists - more editing for me.
This short piece of text stands in bitter contrast to the long, long,
LONG time it took to sort all this out and not only get the custom body
dress sets done, but make proper replacements for the standard meshes -
time I would rather have spent skinning, or playing the game. GRR!