Fixing arms' position (tutorial)

WARNING: This mini-tutorial is to be considered experimental. In contrary to my main tutorial series, in this case I don’t understand the bigger picture and all the connections between different options. Still, I think it’s worth writing, as when I was struggling with it myself I found close to zero information on how to solve the problem on the net - in the best case some small mentions which might have put me on the right track (and a couple which put me on a completely wrong one :P).

It’s not a part of my main tutorial series (check HERE!). This is some more advanced stuff and requires you to have already basic understanding of S4S.

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Let’s say you made a dress. It’s all ready, uv unwrapped, weight and vertex painted and such. It looks beautiful in Blender and in S4S. You check it in game - and it looks beautiful too. Everything is perfect. That is, until you tell your sims to sit down and you notice this:

What now? You duckduck for help and read that it’s most probably caused by invisible weights, which you can’t edit. That the best solution to the problem is to re-paint the dress, ideally adding skirt bones. But what if you’ve already spent 5 hours perfecting the weights and the very thought of undoing it all makes you want to cry? Is there really no other way?

Good news coming: there is! Or at least seems to be.

To solve the hanging hands problem, you’ll need to dive a bit deeper into S4S settings.

Open your problematic package and import the mesh. That’s very important. Even if exactly the same mesh is already there: re-import it. Then go to the Warehouse tab.

Click on the Geometry of the LOD you’ve just imported and switch from ‘3D Preview’ to ‘Data’.

In the ‘Material’ section you’ll find ‘SlotRayIntersections’. Click the ‘Edit Items’ button to the right.

You’ll  see a crazily long list of different slots. As far as I understand it, they determine how different parts of your sim’s body move/behave in game. The ones we’re looking for are called b__L_ThighFrontTarget_slot and  b__R_ThighFrontTarget_slot. In my case so far they’ve always been located in the same place: 3rd from the top and 10th from the bottom -  not sure if that’s some fixed rule though.

If your slots have no names, you probably ignored me and didn’t re-import the mesh :P.  For some reason the names disappear after checking the mesh in game.

Also, best note down their position on the list, so that you wouldn’t have to re-import the mesh again and again after every check!

Look for a line called ‘OffsetFromIntersectionOs’. The 3 numbers given there determine the position of your sim’s hands while sitting and represent 3 axes: x, y and z. As we want to make the palms go down, we have to alter the last number.

I can’t tell you one ‘correct’ number which you’re supposed to put there - it all depends on the mesh you’re using. So far I’ve always used -0.1, so maybe start with this one and change it later if necessary?

Do the same for the other slot.

Save and check in game.

OK, that’s another dress, but same skirt, same problem, same solution

If you’re still not happy with how it looks, go back to S4S and further fine tune those 2 slots. Once it looks fine, repeat the same for other LODs. Watch out: as other LODs use a bit different meshes (at least I hope you’re not just re-importing LOD0 over everything! :P), it might be that different numbers will be needed. Change your sim details to medium (or lower if you want to) to be able to properly see how the palms behave when you zoom out and adjust the values as necessary.

And that’s it! Hopefully the problem got solved.

…I’d  like to say ‘let me know if you’ve got any more questions, I’ll try to help’, but the truth is, if that didn’t help, most probably I’ll have no idea what else you could do (-.-). But you can always try me!