Hair Bone assignment For The Sims 4

Introduction:

A very basic tutorial to add bone assignment or movement to your hair mesh by coping the bone assignment of a base game hair into your hair. You need to know some basics in Milkshape before reading this tutorial cause it's geared towards people who already made their hair mesh and searching for a way to add bone assignment to their hair mesh.

Requirements:

- MIlkshape, You will need the 1.8.5 BETA version
- TS4 CAS/Mesh Tools, latest update
- Q-Mesh GEOM Plugin for Milkshape, to export your hair as simgoem file

Tutorial:

This tutorial is provided in steps with pictures to facilitate the process, if you don't get a step just leave a comment below.

Steps:

Clone a hair:

Open CAS/Mesh tool

Click on "Game CAS Parts", then choose a gender, age and type from the drop down menus. Select an item and then clone a color from the menu on the right (Tick on a color) and click on clone. Don't forget to remove the bump map and specular map.

Export The reference mesh:

(In this step you will import your cloned hair in mesh tool and then extract the reference hair mesh for your bone assignment)

Open CAS/Mesh tool

In "package mesh importer/exporter tab"> Select your package > (Export S4) Lod 0 mesh number 2.

*Don't use mesh number 0 and 1 (are only used in hats) as a reference mesh for bone assignment (use mesh 2 as a reference mesh for all lods)  

Extract your mesh:

Open Milkshape

Import your mesh>go to file>Export>Q-mesh plugin

*Make sure your hair is UV mapped and regrouped before applying this step

Assign your mesh:

Open CAS/Mesh tool

In "Auto conversion" tab, 

1- import your .geom mesh that you just exported in the first box.

2- import the reference mesh in the second box

Click go (you shouldn't experience any crash) 

import your mesh:

Open CAS/Mesh tool

In "package mesh importer/exporter tab"> Select your package > in replace mesh tab (import) your assigned mesh in Lod 0 mesh number 2.

*Repeat the same steps to import mesh number 0 and 1 if your hair is going to be hat compatable

Save package and you're good to go.

importing texture:

This step is not related to this tutorial but if you're confused and want to import texture/change shader for a transparent hair, just import your package in S4 studio. 

click on My project> choose your package and the hair should appear without any problem.

Credits:

This tutorial was requested by my dear friend Ness White.