Creating A New Package
Grab a towel and wipe your brow because the hardest part is over! If you're still with me, then give yourself a big pat on the back!
So, now that we have this fabulous mesh, we have to put it to some good use, right? The key here is to get the mesh into a proper package so we can start texturing it. This can be easily done using our handy dandy CTU.
Cloning
Once again, open up CTU and find that same shirt that we extracted meshes from earlier. When you get ready to import your meshes, you should always clone the original CAS part you extracted them from.
What we are going to do is essentially create a blank clothing package to work with. Meaning, we can skip the formalities, such as setting categories, and go straight to importing our meshes. We will go back and tweak these things later.
Under the Design tab we want to click Add New Design -> Add New Blank. If your 3D preview is enabled, you will see that the original EA t-shirt mesh and all its textures have been generated. This is exactly what we want to see.
Importing Meshes
Next we need to move to the Meshes tab. The first thing you immediately want to do is give your mesh a unique name. It's good to not only include your creator name in your mesh, but also a small description of what the mesh is.
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The CTU uses this mesh name to generate a unique instance for your package, ensuring that your CAS part will not conflict with other clothing. It is also coded into just about every resource embedded within your package. Why is this important? Well, it creates a virtual water mark on your creation, so other users can easily recognize the original creator.
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After you give your mesh a name, it's time to - finally - import the meshes into CTU. If you were making an accessory you would use the lod 0 fields, but since we are making a clothing object we can skip these fields. We are only concerned with lod 1 through lod 3.
Import your lod 1 mesh first. If you are dealing with multipart lod meshes, then import each piece individually. Be sure to import them in order! That is, lod1_0 first, then lod1_1 so on and so forth.
Repeat this process until you have all three lods imported into CTU.
Regardless if you altered them or not, reimport the lod 2 and lod 3 as well. Do not forget these other lods! If you do, your mesh might explode in game! Seriously...
Bump Maps
The last field you're going to encounter is the bump map field. A bump map, also known as a normal map, is a texture used by the game to create "faux" 3D details. Bump maps are useful for when you want to give a mesh slightly more detail, without actually meshing that part on. These details are typically small things such as buttons, bold stitching and zippers.
Most likely at this stage of the creation process you are not ready to import a finished bump map. So, instead insert a blank one if you're not ready to make it yet. You can then edit it later with S3PE. Don't have a blank bump map handy? You can download one here.
Right now you're probably thinking dear god, how do I make a bumpmap?! Don't worry, we will get to this in the next section.
Hit commit, to save your changes so far!
Saving Your Package
If you go back to the design tab you'll see that the mesh did not update! But what happened, we imported all our meshes into CTU, right?
Although you can't see it, rest assured that our meshes are safely imported into the CTU. But, in order to see our changes we'll need to save our package first.
So, go to File -> Save As and give your package a name. It's not very important what you name it, it just needs to be saved somewhere where it is easily retrieved.
Once your package is saved, you may now close CTU.
Linking Bump Maps (optional)
Although bumpmaps are a nice touch, they are not entirely necessary. In fact, their effects can be so subtle that they are virtually unnoticed if removed altogether.
One way to "remove" a bump map is to simply import a blank one and never touch it. Although there is nothing technically wrong with doing this, it does add unnecessary file size and clutter to your upload. Remember, we want to learn to be professional creators!
Instead we can point our mesh to use a universal "blank" bump map created by EA. This takes a little extra tweaking in Milkshape and S3PE and is best saved for the end.
If you would like to go this route, simply leave the bumpmap field blank and follow the Linking Bumpmaps tutorial.
This process can also be used to link one bump map between several CAS parts. This is useful if you're doing a multi age project where similar meshes/textures are used for teen, adult and elder versions. Keep in mind that bump maps (or any texture for that matter) cannot be shared between children and teens/adults/elders due to their different skeleton sizes.
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