Theo's Shack

This step-by-step walkthrough attempts to show a typical color binning session.

It has been broken down to four steps: Examining the downloaded hair, Basic tool usage, Selecting the Grey recolor, Reviewing Options and Saving

In this example, we're going to use Plicka's Long Female Hair (downloadable from MTS2).

The first version of this document didn't contain these words, but I think it is important to make it clear: I don't use this example with the intention of disparaging the creator's work. The main problem arises from the fact that all creators use an incomplete tool (ie BodyShop), that does not allow the correct binning of recolors in the first place.

If you already know what recolors you want to keep, proceed to Step 2.

As the creator didn't have time to put the recolors in the correct color bins, that burden falls now on us.

So we'll open BodyShop, and see what we can do.

Here is the blond recolor for the adult age:

We can already notice something wrong: changing to blond hair makes the brows change to black! But the tool will automatically take care of that :)

Next, the same blond hair for the elder age:

Again another annoyance: The elder hair catalog is filled with copies of elder textures, and in this case, the creator didn't even used a really grey color.

So the plan of action is to leave just one grey recolor.

The catalog for the teen age:

We can see that it contains a new texture for a standard Maxis hair mesh, so we might as well remove the recolors, but the decision is all up to you.

The same applies to the child and toddler hairs, so if you really like the recolor you can keep it, otherwise it's better to remove the duplicates from the catalog (as we're going to show in the next step).

Start the tool by using SimPE's menus Tools > Color Binning Tool. SimPE will begin to load the FileTable, so it may take a while before you can load any package.

After starting the tool, we can see there is a Tabstrip with the names of the colors.

Each tab can hold one package file.

All we have to do now is to load the package files into the correct color tabs!

In the selected color tab, use the menus to Open a Package.

A file select dialog will appear:

Althoug sometimes it's impossible to know what file contains the desired color, in this example the color can be easily discerned.

Now that we opened the file we can select which recolors we will keep.

But wait! Oh noes, with all the haste we mistakingly put the blond recolor in the Black bin!

That's where the "Move To" function comes handy, allowing us to correct the blunder.

After that mishap, we can load the black color file into the Black color tab.

To remove an age group from a package, simply uncheck the respective item.

As we had decided to remove the toddler and child recolors, uncheck the items accordingly.

This is a matter that has caused so much confusion, that it deserves a step for it!

Remember when we saw in Step 1 that the elder age group had also four recolors for it?

When correctly binned, the hair must have only one grey recolor, so we'll select just one of the four available.

That's why the tool automatically unchecks the elder recolor items in normal color tabs, so that you can simply check the desired grey recolor, instead of unchecking three.

In our example, we don't have a really grey color. So we'll select the one that most closely matches a grey hair: the blond one.

Of course you will query: What about the Grey tab?

Well, if someone made a new recolor package with grey or white tones available for download, we could simply add the file to the Grey tab and uncheck the grey items from the normal colors.

In our example however, no such file is available, so we'll leave it empty.

Open the Options dialog. Each tab shows the relevant options for that category.

Package Settings:

• Guid: In this field you can review the family guid for the loaded packages. Recolors of hairtones should have the same family guid so that the game catalog will keep the same item selected when changing the hair color. You can click the link button to generate a new guid, or you can edit it manually. It will be automatically applied to the output packages.
• Text: Here you can set the tooltip that is displayed in the catalog (English only).
• Hide From Catalog: This is a global setting that will apply to all loaded packages. It has the same effect as unchecking all recolor items plus setting a flag in the Hairtone Xml (if applicable). It will not remove any referenced resources in the package.

Output Settings:

• Disable Source Packages: When checked, the package files that were used in the session will have its extension changed to .packagedisabled, so that they won't cause conflict with the newly generated packages. If you are absolutely and positively sure that you don't need the files anymore, you can delete them move them to a backup folder.
• Generate Single Package: Instead of creating a package file for each color, the tool can create one package with all the colors. It's recommended that this option is used only when creating the final package; On test runs, it's better to create a file for each color, so that it will be easier to load them again into the tool.
• Remove Unchecked Recolors: * It is recommended that you leave this option off *
  When checked, the unselected recolors are actually removed from the output packages, otherwise they'll simply be hidden from the catalog. Note that this setting is overriden by the Hide From Catalog setting.
• Compress Textures: Check this option to keep the file size within reasonable limits. Compressing textures will slow down the file save process, and might not work with all the textures.

Hairtone Settings: This panel is only visible after you load the first hairtone package.

• Proxy for Custom Colors: Select the base color perceived by the catalog, that is applied to the packages loaded into the "Custom" tab.
• Hat: When checked, the resulting hair will be considered as a hat, mainly for turn-on/turn-off calculations in the game.

After you done all this work, it's now time to save it. On the Package menu, choose "Save As", and a file select dialog will appear.

Choose the base name for the output packages.

The color name will be appended to each package's filename, unless you checked the "Generate Single Package" option.

Open BodyShop and you should see the hair in the correct color bins.