02 outfit update

Like promised, I returned working with creating new content, and obviously tried looking back at the 02 outfit + rework I started making in the month of April. Yes, 4 months ago. It is probably my longest project and as I looked back into where I stopped, I have realized why I almost drop it.

After creating the mesh in Marvelous Design, exporting to .obj so I could import it to The Sims 4 as a playable outfit, I'm greeted with a very annoying issue:

The game decided to interpret the mesh like this:

Which is annoying, because I can't fix the problem if it looks like everything is okay except for in-game:

Basically, the first render I took (bellow) is from a model that was exported from The Sims 4, meaning that: I created the mesh using Marvelous Designer, exported to The Sims 4 and after creating the 02 sim I used SimsRipper to export back to blender and make renders from it. As you can see, there's no issues in the areas of interest bellow (the buttons specially).

The issue with the buttons is unexistant, Blender recognizes them as part of the same body.

Furthermore, I decided to take a look in The Sims 4 studio to see if the mesh had actual problems, as expected, the answer is none, S4S reads the outfit as it should be:

See? no issue with the buttons.

So I decide to take a further look into Blender 3.7 to see if the mesh editor identifies issues with the meshe's surface, and obviously, it doesn't:

The tiara works great, thus why I released it, I had the expectation that my progress wouldn't be halted by such an annoying glitch with the outfit.

I was confided this mesh was going to be released at least 2 months ago, before I got very busy with College, but that proved to be impossible, as I couldn't focus on college and work on small issues in The Sims 4 at the same time. Issues caused by the game itself because it's a nearly 10 year old unfinished game EA created to pump money from its fanbase. 

I could just remove the buttons altogheter and make them part of the texture, but I find that ugly and lazy. Or I could just release it as it is, because it's barely noticeable when playing the game from the very far away distance, but it looks like dogshit up close.

Having said that, I'm working on a solution that, so far, has not proved to work.

Thanks for the attention and the support,

_Volfe_