Hi I'm back from self-imposed exile due to the belief I utterly failed obligations I had
Okay so HS is old. We all know that. But HS is also just CHOCK FULL of plugins now that can do things you might not realize. You probably know all about dynamic bones and FK+IK with HSPE and all that, and I'm sure you're at least aware of Rendereditor, but they can make things that otherwise would be either impossible or a major pain either possible or way less of a pain. I'm going to explain some by using Pricomthug7 here.
View attachment 101352
I like Pricomthug7, she's got a slender frame, but her big pouty lips and glasses give her a much more intense look than a weak one. I imagine she might have a name like Meagan or Rachel, and usually dresses more conservative; but the pricom outfit makes her feel daring and she's excited.
Anyway, she's got a secret that I've been trying to hide. You might've noticed something off with her in the first picture I made, or noticed that she's always facing one side of her away from the camera in the other 3. This is for a really good reason.
View attachment 101331
See, the hair she's got doesn't fit her head. It never got ported as an accessory either, so I've never been able to do anything about it. I've tried other hairs but this is the look that I want and I think suits her the most. So the times I've done anything with her I've always turned her around to make sure it was hard to tell something was wrong.
But, HSPE can help! It can solve the issue I've had for a while, where you get custom characters ported in and their hair is good but doesn't fit any other head. Not all of them get ported to accessories.
View attachment 101332
The Adv. Mode button(this is short for “Advanced Mode,” it's a technical term) allows you to adjust any bone on a character. I'm sure those of you who've used dynamic bones or expression blending have skipped RIGHT past this for a while now and I don't blame you, I did too. Opening any of those folders is strange and unless you know how things are broken down in there it's just a baffling experience. However, the search is usually helpful for finding what you're looking for.
View attachment 101333
Yeah hair's right there. Everything has an easy reset button too, so if you're not sure you can just mess around and see if it does the thing you want. If it does, you're good. If it doesn't, you can just reset. In this case, I can adjust the size of the hair to what looks right and solve a problem that's pestered me for like, I donno, almost two years? Oh god, almost two years? What have I been doing?
View attachment 101334
Anyway now there's a new problem. This isn't unexpected, I adjust the headphones every new character in order to get them to look right. But I'm not in the character creator anymore and I didn't save it to a bonemod txt either, so what do I do now?
View attachment 101335
Oh yeah remember how it can adjust any bone? Accessories are bones too. So you can resize and move things to your heart's content.
Still more on pricom. So the boots I use are non-canonical sexy heels cause I like 'em. But I love the look of the gold soles, and I can't do that with normal color adjustment. But Rendereditor lets you change the color of basically anything that has an entry, so we're going to use that to our advantage.
(SCREENSHOT MISSING SOMEHOW, I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT WENT)
See? Change the color. So I'll make it gold, and the sole of this sexy boot will be gold and that'll be a nifty touch that someone might notice and go “hey, that's a nifty touch.”
View attachment 101336
Onto something that I've had an issue with forever, the socks and gloves. KK has a texture overlay, and while I don't know what Strangejack is doing you'll notice that his pricoms now have actual bands on their socks and gloves, along with the pricom triangle icon. There's lots of ways this could've happened, but one of the ways is either to overlay or replace a texture on an item. If you were creating a new item for one of these games, this can get tricky. I know because I spent like 3 days trying to list a jacket I made recolorable as a different item until I just gave the fuck up
Anyway, while there's no way around making or editing a texture, Rendereditor can really help out in replacing them. It's literally just a button. Like, look:
View attachment 101337
View attachment 101338
View attachment 101339
Whabam. Changed. No problem. They're dark, but I used the official canonical Shabazik colors so this is officially, canonically the way they look. I can't argue with canon.
Anyway since I use the band-aid things once you zoom out enough the alpha layers start to mess up and look weird. Since that's just on a texture, I'm sure if I remove it it'll be fine, so
View attachment 101341
I cannot say I expected this. Okay, so I guess I have to make a texture for that, too? I'll just paint over the one it uses to make it solid.
View attachment 101342
There. Done. The look of the band-aid, though, is also created by bumpmaps. I have no idea how to edit or make one of those, so I'm not gonna. Instead, I'll reduce how much the bumpmap is used so it doesn't look like a band-aid anymore. It's not the best solution, but it'll do what I want.
View attachment 101343
View attachment 101350
And okay! There we go! Pricomthug7 in her new getup is guarding some sort of payphone. Who knows what it is. It's orange so I can't
really make it gold, but in order to do that I'd have to do a similar trick to it, as I've done up above, find the texture, then dump it, then make it black and white, so I can change it to the color I want. And I mean, that's just too much
View attachment 101344
So when you're doing this, the most important thing you can do is first use that search bar. Make a guess about what the thing you're looking for would be called, and type it in. If you're lucky, you'll find exactly it. If you're kinda lucky, you'll find it and a whole bunch of other things that are like it. If you're unlucky it's in another language or called something else. If you're really unlucky everything is in one big item and you can't do anything about it. Either way Rendereditor has this cool green box that pops up around the thing you're selecting, so you'll at least kind of know if you've got the right part.
View attachment 101345
The best thing to do to make sure you're on the right track is just disable whatever you've selected. There could be a lot of parts in it so changing the color might not work, but you'll know what all of the parts are in the thing you've selected after you've turned it off. In this case, I'm lucky, cause every part of the phone is there. So it's just down to finding the paint, dumping it, and then changing it to a black and white version.
View attachment 101346
I did that. Now, we can recolor it.
View attachment 101347
Done. Good. But what about that ad? Shouldn't it be a pricom one? I mean, it's supposed to be a pricom phone in this scenario I've imagined, so shouldn't the ad be one too? Well, what if I try and change the texture to something that looks right...
View attachment 101348
That doesn't work. It doesn't work because the original texture was sort of off to the side. I could go and edit that one to replace the lettering with this pricom ad...
no I'm not gonna. This was supposed to be fast
View attachment 101351
So I hope that helps someone. There's a ton of tricks you've got up your sleeve when you're making things with this software, and you can really dig in and pull off some nonsense. You can be very creative, so don't be afraid to try! You might be surprised at the dumb stuff you can do!