Friends, please tell me, why do we need the SimStandardMaterial type at all?

So far I only found out that it looks bad compared to StandardMaterial

The first screenshot is SimStandardMaterial, and the second is StandardMaterial. The hairline texture looks much better

But it can't be useless, right?

The "StandardMaterial", when used on sims, has several weird effects, on accessories in particular. They show up see-through, or as if the normals are showing inside out, and usually get a metal-looking shine or washed-out colors, even if reflection and all other effects gets removed in the TXMT. This also gets much worse with the "Blend" option in the TXMT (see-through issue in particular). Haven't tested it with hairs, though it's likely similar effects can be observed (and I think I've seen an example or two of hairs and clothes, with bugs related to the setting). It's possible some of it isn't as easy to see on one-layer items that overlap with something else, or on a black background, or maybe you really did somehow find the perfect combo of TXMT settings to avoid all these issues. A while back I spent more than enough time troubleshooting accessories, figuring out StandardMaterial was the culprit for at least 2-3 problems I frequently had with the files (there's an issue in some of the original files - some TXMTs have an arbitrary mix of "SimStandardMaterial" and "StandardMaterial" settings in the same file. When you make a recolor, the issue transfers to the new item). If I remember correctly, StandardMaterial also creates some weird effects for skin (I think it's how people have made the "ghostly" and effect-type skins. Usually not something you normally want). So no, the SimStandardMaterial is not useless. It's the regularly used one for all non-SimSkin CAS items. StandardMaterial is used for buy/build. (It's likely they have somewhat different handling of transparency, though. It's always been a bit of an issue, but could also be partly an ingame problem. Bodyshop and CAS seem to use somewhat different shaders and texture handling than what's used on-lot).

Thanks for the answer! I don't play that much, so I might have missed some of the issues.

Although I think I already had problems with StandardMaterial display when I made an object with multiple groups, texture animation (which is why I had to use this material type) and blend mode. Then with 3 groups, parts of accessories just didn't show up, and if I combined everything into one group, I had transparency issues. But I didn't realize that the material type was to blame.

Bad news everyone...

Unfortunately, the release of the sclera accessory is delayed because I have a problem that I can't solve.

I worked for a texture that would suit me, and at first I checked how it looks only in Bodyshop, where it looked good, and then I checked how it looks in the game, and it disappointed me.

The screenshots show how smooth the gradients and transparency of the texture look in BS and CAS, and how rough it is in the game.

I tried SimStandardMaterial, StandardMaterial and SimSkin, AlphaRefValue 0/127/255, AlphaMultiplier 0/1 — but all in vain.

It seems that shaders in CAS and the game work according to different rules. I have already encountered the consequences of this when I wanted to make an accessory with transparency, an animated texture and several groups. Then the object also looked good in CAS and bad in the game.

If you have any ideas on how to solve the problem without redoing the textures, please share.

Good news everyone!

In short, it turns out that the problem is very easily solved by switching to StandardMaterial. But I didn't see the effect, because I simply deleted the game cache, thinking that the appearance of the accessory would also be updated.

It turns out that you had to change the sim's appearance through the mirror for the changes to take effect.

I'm so happy that it's just my stupidity and not some unsolvable problem. So I'll keep working, yeah.