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tutorial: making slider-compatible earrings

this uses quite a new feature, the BlendID vertex colour layer, and as far as i know there's no complete tutorial or explanation of how it works out there, so this could probably still be improved. i still use old Blender, but feel free to translate this to other versions.

in simple terms it's a new vertex colour layer that gives each vertex of the head a unique colour, and you can use it on your CC mesh to attach it to a specific head vertex. for small detailed meshes like earrings it does this better than uv_1, which makes them go spiky.

to start, the earrings should be placed on the s4s rig's ear, even though it's way smaller than the smallest preset in-game. if you have several piercings close together, separate them (P) into different meshes because it makes transferring the colours so much easier.

there are some limits to this, each CC vertex can only be attached to one head vertex, so you can't do chains or anything that would need you to blend between two verts. the industrial does work because it's just two clusters of verts with nothing in the middle, and for this tutorial i'll treat it as two separate earrings. finally, don't expect it to perfectly preserve the placement - evenly spaced piercings will end up uneven, and on extreme occult ear presets the earrings will probably still come away from the ear.

selecting the source polys

check that the head mesh (head for mframe, head_2 for fframe) has a BlendID vertex colour layer. if it doesn't, re-export the CC from S4S or import it into a freshly exported blend file.

enable editing the head.

for each piercing, select a poly that contains the vertex you want to attach it to. for me it works best using the outside of the ear. it takes a lot of trial and error to find the best one, so don't expect it to be perfect first time. (you need to do this for both ears, you can't just mirror the mesh after you're done because the colours are different)

separate the polys (P), then undo so they're still part of the head mesh.

switch to editing the new separated mesh.

move the source vertex for each earring as close to the middle of it as possible. the whole of each earring should be closer to that vertex than any other, this is why we separated the ones that were close together at the beginning.

move the other vertices well out of the way.

transferring data from the head

if your CC mesh doesn't have a uv_1 map and a BlendID layer, create them and name them.

transfer the BlendID layer from the separated head polys to the CC mesh. use Nearest Corner Of Nearest Face, not Nearest Face Interpolated like you normally would for uv_1 maps.

do the same for the uv_1 map. (this might not be necessary, but it won't hurt.)

in edit mode, select and assign the whole mesh to the head group and delete any other groups. (side note: if you do this for face piercings you'll still need to transfer weights from the face as normal. i'd transfer them from the separated head polys using nearest vertex, so each piercing has uniform weights. you might need to do separate versions for both frames too.)

in vertex paint mode and wireframe view, check that each earring has a uniform red colour. in classic EA style some of them are impossible to tell apart, so use the colour picker (S) to check.

switch to the Col layer and paint the whole mesh (Shift+K) with #007F00.

bet you wish this was over

if you separated the CC into multiple meshes, do the whole thing again on the other mesh.

select all your CC meshes on object mode and join them together again (Ctrl+J).

hide the polys you separated from the head.

the mesh should be ready to import into S4S now! sometimes in my testing it was being weird though, and i had to import it several times or delete the BlendID layer then undo and reimport it. i'll try to update the tutorial if i figure out why.

trying it in game, you can see which parts still need tweaking, the higher stud is especially bad because it isn't that close to any of the head vertices. you can either try a different source vertex for them, or try moving them around. if you're designing an earring set from scratch, it might be easier to choose placements that are close to a vertex on the ears.