Anyone want to help with 3t2 body animation conversion research? (I have already had success with this)
 

I've been experimenting with this after finding this thread on 3t4 animations. Predictably, it works best with simple animations. It requires Blender and Milkshape and some familiarity with those programs (plus the add-ons to get TS3 animations into Blender and TS2 animations out of milskhape. Some of the animations port perfectly, but some have a few glitchy frames even though they look perfect in Milkshape. I'll try and post some videos later.

I'm not sure if the glitches are due to the complication of mixing Milkshape and Blender or if it's just a problem that's happening on my end. For some reason, my computer does not like Milkshape, and it gives me weird animations sometimes, even without adding blender into the mix. I know there are not that many people who know how to get an animation into the game, who know how to use Blender and who might be interested in playing around with this, but if you are, let me know and I'll get you the files and explain things. If you are only familiar with animesh and Milkshape, and you wanted to help, you could test one of the Milkshape files that have given me glitches. I will post all the files here and write up little guide eventually, but it won't be a priority to do it soon unless someone else is currently interested in using it.

edit - the tutorial on reddit was deleted. Adding it here.

First, start with an armature that is in the default rest position.

For each bone that needs to rotate, you need to do the following things:

(All of these need to be done in Pose Mode.)

Disable "Inherit Rotation" on the bone.
Rotate the bone to make it match as closely as possible the corresponding TS3 bone.
Insert a rotation keyframe on the bone.
Add a "Child Of" Bone Constraint to the bone.
Select the TS3 rig as the target, and the corresponding TS3 bone as the bone of the "Child Of" constraint.
Deselect the Location and Scale axes on the "Child Of" Constraint.
Select "Set Inverse".

Now, just do this to all of the bones that need to rotate!

For bones that need to physically move and not just rotate:

Add a "Copy Location" constraint.
Select the TS3 rig as the target, and the corresponding TS3 bone as the bone of the "Copy Location" constraint.
Set the Space to both "Local"
If it's still animating oddly, you may have to experiment with the "Invert" options on the axis, if you have to do this, it's usually X or Z.

Pretty sure it's not possible, at least not in a useful way, since the TS3 and TS4 skeletons have a lot more bones and have various different bone placement, names and rotation than TS2. You won't get the arms right, and while the adults have similar heights, the toddler (and child?) skeletons seem to have a different height and even more differences in bone placement.

I also don't think you can import finished TS2 animations/poses to Milkshape or Blender (but correct me if I'm wrong). You can import TS2 skeletons to Blender, but there isn't a TS2 animation exporter for Blender yet, as far as I know anyway.

TS3/4 skeletons have a lot more similarities between them than any of them have with TS2. There's a bunch of steps you need to do to convert clothes from either game to TS2, and while possible it doesn't give a particularly good result (usually the bone assignments get borked up a lot).

However, if you have found a way to do this, maybe post how you did it so people can experiment?

ETA: I was so excited to share this that it didn't occur to me that people would be skeptical without proof. It's late here now, but I'll make a little proof of concept video tomorrow.

It is possible, and I've done it. I can see how the original title can be read like I'm asking if it's possible, so I'll edit the post to make that more clear. I just wanted ask if anyone wanted to play with this any time soon, or possibly help out. I said earlier, while I do plan to post an in guide eventually, I'm not making it a priority unless someone is currently interested in trying it out. I want to spend my Simming time playing with this, but I wanted to let people know that it can be done and see if anyone else wanted to try it. And I'm not saying I'm going to keep this to myself forever, but if someone wants to try it, I'd try and get everything packaged and written up within a couple days, but if not I probably won't post everything until next week. Although people who already know Blender and have worked with TS3 animation won't need my help - I followed the guide in the reddit post that I linked to in the OP, and I just made a couple of changes to account for the fact that TS2 has a root rot and root trans, but TS3 combined those bones into one. But since Sims 2 people tend to be milkshapers and not blender users, I'm planning to write something more in depth with pictures etc., which will take time.

Anyway, I came back here to edit the post and say I figured out that the solution for the glitchiness is this - even though the mesh wasn't turning 360 degrees, the fix is the same:

A 180 degree rotation from one key to the next in an animation probably isn't what I'd do (at least not for a sim). If you absolutely needed to it would be much better to set three keys (one as a midpoint, or what the old Disney animators would call an "inbetween") instead of going from one to the next, so the animation flows better between them. People just assume the animation program does all the work for you, but the ones and zeros aren't always smart. Most movements tend to slow down or speed up (humans aren't machines), and kinda look unnatural when it just flows in the same speed from one pose to the next. No idea if this can even be achieved in Milkshape without a LOT of work.

I'm quite rusty on animating (I know the hows , and have some old knowledge from 3D Max, but my brain can no longer handle the timing), so I mostly keep to static poses. Still, could be interesting if it's possible to use Blender for animating (Milkshape is a sorry mess when it comes to animating), and if someone could come up with (Blender?) rigs for TS2 with IK animation for hands and feet, I'd be thrilled to try it. Not sure how useful it would be to convert poses or animations from TS3/4, though (Is it a lot more work, or is it an easy and quick process?).

The most I've messed with skeletons in Milkshape was when I repurposed a toddler skeleton to (kinda) work for infants. Been using it to convert clothes. and making deco babies and such. No idea if it would work for anything ingame, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi6...eature=youtu.be (ignore the pie menu names in my test painting lol)

Ignore the arm flap at the end. That's a little test thing I made in milkshape; it's not part of the conversion. Anyway, this is the Sim doing an animation from the ts3 wave station and some animations from the witch's broom arena. They are not perfect, but they are better than anything I could've made in milkshape, and I believe editing them will help. It will definitely be useful to me to convert these animations, because I create new interactions and functional objects, and there are some items I've always wanted from the newer games (like the broom arena, for example). Converting an animation takes me about ten minutes. It's just importing the TS3 animation into Blender, exporting a milkshape file out of Blender, then exporting a 5an file out of Milkshape. The tedious part is in preparing the skeleton, but that only has to be done once, then you can use it over and over again.

Blender can import and export MS3D files, so it's already possible to make your own animations in Blender and port them into Milkshape. All the copies of Blender that I have already have the MS3D import/export installed, but it's not active. You have to go to your user preferences and turn it on, then import the milkshape file that contains the TS2 rig, make your pose, set the keyframes. Go into object mode, right click the sim mesh (not the rig). If you've done it right, it'll be outlined in light green. Then export as a milkshape file and use animesh. I'm not sure how familiar you are with Blender, so let me know if this doesn't make sense, and I'll help you out (I'm no animation expert at all, but I'm pretty comfortable with Blender). What kind of IK rig did you want? Because if you just wanted to lock the foot or hand in one spot, you should be able to do that with IK empties in Blender. https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=626272 (It's for Sims 3, but it should work in TS2 as well since the empties don't become part of the skeleton). I don't think it'll work for an animation, but it should be okay for a pose. I do wish we could get the IK rig that the game uses, because there are Blender add ons that convert IK to FK.

It's probably best to make a general thread on Blender if we're going to keep discussing it though, so that people who aren't interested in converting animations won't miss it.

Those animations in the video look promising

IK for legs (for walking/running and general leg movement animations) and for hands (picking up things and holding the hands static while the rest of the body moves) would've been very useful.

I have't done any animation in Blender, but I'm slowly learning the interface, and I'm willing to learn (using Blender would open up a lot of possibilities in TS2 animation). I haven't rigged anything since 2010, and haven't done much animation since then, so most of my previous knowledge is gone, but I can always look at some tutorials.

Someone said earlier (no idea where that topic went, sorry) that it's possible to set up the skeletons with IK and have it work for an ingame animation even if those parts of the rig aren't part of the skeleton (they may have ben talking about TS3/4). If it was possible to make an animation exporter that could export TS2 animations directly from Blender, then maybe Milkshape wouldn't be needed at all.

Do you need any plugins for Blender to exp/imp MS3D files? And which Blender version are you using? (I currently only have the one that works with S4Studio)

I really like the idea of converting animations! Do you think it is also possible to convert TSM and TS4 animations?

Yep. I already did a couple of ones from TSM (TSM sims and TS3 sims use the same skeleton). I haven't tried doing a 4t2 animation yet, but I don't see why it wouldn't work. I think converting TSM animations would open up a whole world of possibilities for medieval players, like maybe default replacement dancing anims.

I have the one Blender that works with Sims4Studio too, and it came with the plugin to import/export Milkshape files, but the feature is turned off by default. You go to your user preferences and turn it on. One thing I forgot to mention though is Blender's MS3D importer only imports the bones if the MS3D file was saved in Milkshape 1.8.4. Even if the file was originally made in 1.8.5, all you have to do is open the file with the Sim body in 1.8.4, save, close and then import it to Blender. If you don't have 1.8.4, I can send you the bodybases that are compatible with Blender. They're the ones you made, actually. You gave them to me last year when I was trying to learn to animate in Milkshape. The only change is that they've been opened and saved in 1.8.4. Once the file is exported from Blender, it doesn't seem to matter which version of Milkshape you open it in, just as long as it's compatible with Animesh.

I currently only have 1.8.5 (couldn't get 4 to work no matter how much I tried)

I'm quite advanced in Blender with animation, and this thread is pretty interesting to me even though I don't really work with The Sims 2 anymore. If anyone needs my help, I could build up an IK rig for TS2, or help with converting animations

Edit: Would this be any sort of help with exporting the animations from Blender? It might however, be too outdated to use though http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=246658

^ That would be very nice! IK would be really useful (it's basically the reason I haven't made animations with Milkshape, because they always end up looking weird without the leg and arm control IK gives you)

Just out of curiosity, but would it be possible to link up the infant skeleton somehow so it's possible to animate it? Currently it's got only joints and no bones between them. I'm not technically advanced enough to figure that one out. I think someone did this a while back for Milkshape (I have the files), but the skeleton ended up looking rather weird and was flat on the floor instead of standing up (and had some other flaws as well), so it didn't really work.

I have a reshaped toddler skeleton for non-animation projects that I made (basically to make it easier to make baby clothes conversions and to test if the clothes work without having to go in and out of the game), but it's got a lot of flaws since it's only an approximation. I'd really like one that works with posing, because I'm currently using the toddler skeleton to make baby poses, and getting it right is a nightmare (plus the babies get really weird thumbs and their arms never end up in the right position). Would be nice to have the full set of animation bases

Thanks for the offer to help and the link @TheSweetToddler. Unfortunately the program in that link is outdated. For some reason nobody was ever able to get good results importing SMD animations into TS2, so the community moved to the .5an file format. If you're willing to build a TS2 IK rig, that would be incredible.

About using Blender to animate, here are the simsbodybases saved with 1.8.4 - http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1126163/

This is the site I learned from. https://clarkcorrina.wixsite.com/si...on-with-blender - There isn't a Blender animation exporter, so you can't bypass Milikshape, but Blender can import and export the MS3D (Milkshape) format. The add on to allow this is already included in the last several versions of Blender, but it's disabled by default. The link also says you need Blender Source Tools. There's a link to the tools and an explanation for how to activate them and the Milkshape Import Export here: https://clarkcorrina.wixsite.com/si...imation-tools-1

I had a couple of random issues that no one else seems to have encountered with Milkshape, but I'll put the fixes below just in case.

Rarely, when I import an MS3D file into Blender, the mesh will be way off to the side, or too high. If that happens, just Click File > New in Blender, then re-import.

Nearly every time I export an animation from Milkshape, the mesh will end up being too low in the game. Hopefully no one else will encounter this, but the fix is easy:

@simmer22 Hmm, I don't really know what you mean, perhaps you can send some pictures or the files even? Anyways, so you're using a reshaped toddler skeleton, possible if you can get the baby skeleton, you can try and position the bones to be the same as the baby's? I'm really sorry if I'm not making much sense here, I'm not very technical with TS2 as I am with TS3 lol

@omglo I'm not really familiar with Milkshape, as I only use it for exporting clothes to TS3 (I did use it for making TS2 poses but that was some time ago!). What I did was export one of the skeletons from MS to Blender as an smd file and from there build up the rig with constraints and textures (it's still not finished yet, I'm just writing a tutorial on Blender basics and how to use IK and FK with the rig).



I'm only using the toddler rig because I had some old textures from Beau Broke, but perhaps if my friend (or someone) can send me some textures for the other ages I'll get them done, but I mean, they're not absolutely necessary, but it looks better with textures, if I am allowed to add them. And it should be easy to convert the constraints and bone shapes to other ages as I have done this for TS3.

Wow, that looks great. I'm not really familiar with milkshape either. I tried using it to animate, and I wasn't happy with the results, so I gave up until I found out TS2 users could animate in Blender too. I could get you some skin textures, but they wouldn't have the little outfit like your toddler does.

Thanks, and it's nice to know that you can animate TS2 in Blender too, I might even make some animations myself!

That would be great, and don't worry about the outfits, I add them directly to the mesh as a new texture.

Here are the textures. Hope this helps.

http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1126308/

^Looks like a few of the skins might be missing?
I went through and exrtracted the LIFO files (needed them anyway) - couldn't find the teen female face, but I think it uses the AF face. Added the file below.



Here's a Milkshape file with the original infant skeleton/mesh, with the head/face properly assigned (Milkshape 1.8.5, not sure if it works for Blender).

It has a different body position than the rest, and no actual bones - just joints that don't move together. The baby skeleton has fewer bones (missing most fingers and hairs, plus some skirt/shorts bones, I think), and they have different names. The main joints have similar numbering , so it's possible to convert clothes without having to fix too much for bone assignments, but animations aren't so easy.

Didn't include the reshaped skeleton, because it's not done with precision and I'm pretty sure is not useful for animations.

I just extracted the skins through bodyshop and took out the extra scalps, since it looked like the same texture, and normal bodies, not the fat/fit states, since the fat/fit/normal Sims all use the same skeleton. But I don't do CAS stuff, so maybe that wasn't right.

^ The skins showing in SimPE sometimes skip a few ages (usually if the textures are identical, may also depend on the skin you clone). I noticed the toddler body skins were missing, and they look a little different from the rest.

Oh yeah, I forgot I deleted the toddler since TheSweetToddler says she already has that one.

Ahh, simmer22 I get what you mean, I opened the baby rig and exported it to Blender, and I know why the bones move in a somewhat weird way. It's because they aren't connected, so when you move one of the bones, they just move the area where the bone weight is. And about the baby position, most of the babies in Sims games are generally positioned differently in their rest pose, for instance, babies in TS3 are layed down with their arms out, meanwhile the rest are A-posed because my guess is that babies have some sort of different body/skeleton to the rest of the Sims. But anyways, I'm connecting the bones right now in Blender, so hopefully the game will be okay with this "new" connected baby rig.

And thanks, omglo!

^ That's the main problem with baby skeletons. They're kind of considered to be objects by the game, so they're animated via joints only (like other animated objects). There have been tries on fixing the skeleton before, but so far without that much success.

Thanks for trying, and hopefully it'll work with the game

@simmer22 Alrighty, well I've finished connecting the bones of the baby anyways, and I modified them a bit so they move normally, basically like the rest of the rigs.



I was able to pose them and everything, so now maybe it's time to test if the game accepts the rig?

That's adorable. Even if the game doesn't accept the rig, I'll bet you could use the same basic process that's used for converting animations. Make an animation with the new baby rig, then transfer it over to the game rig using bone constraints.

Looks great

Have you guys made progress on this? I'm extremely interested in converting animations to and from all the Sims games (2-4 and TSM). @omglo @simmer22 @TheSweetToddler

I haven't done anything else with it. I'd been hoping to get the skeletons that were set up for IK before going further. But, like I said earlier, doing 3t2 animations were going pretty well. It's not currently possible to port Sims 2 animations to the later games though, because nobody ever developed a tool to extract full Sims 2 animations. If you are familiar with Blender, I can send you the 3t2 female file that I made, and you can experiment with adding clips to it and importing them into TS2.

I haven't done anything either. Waiting for the IK rigs, I guess. That's what I'm most interested in, since I so far have only worked on making TS2 poses.

I'd love that! It's a shame no one has figured out the S2 animations. I'm wondering if we need a more powerful tool to extract them. Or maybe we could try asking EA, see if any Guru's may be able to help. I'm dying for the Sewing skill in 3 and 4 but I fear I may need to make the animations from scratch. Do I need this program to import animations to Milkshape btw? http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=239060 First time working with S2 animations/poses.

I'm subscribed to the thread for any future info. I'm still new to Blender and I can create poses, but that's the extent of my knowledge but I'm driven to learn. Could you possibly write up the explanations you were mentioning before? Especially about how you were able to match the bones.

Has anyone made one for TSM yet? I'm thinking that because TSM and TS3 are so similar in appearance and such, they may be easy to convert between. I'll have to give it a go at some point once I understand this better.

TSM and TS3 use the same skeleton, so you can use the blend file I'm going to post to convert things from TS3/TSM to TS2. You can use animations made with an adult skeleton for teens, adults, young adults and elders, male and female. Yes, you are going to need Animesh (the program in your link. You'll also need Milkshape, Blender 2.67 and Cliptool - for TS3 or TSM animations. https://sims3cliptool.wordpress.com/ I would recommend familiarizing yourself with the Sims 2 animating process explained in the Animesh thread because you'll need to follow those steps to get the animation out of Milkshape and into the game. And sometimes Sims 2 animations need to be edited by hand in SimPE afterward, so you'll need to be comfortable with all of that before doing animation converting.

You parent the TS3 skeleton to the TS2 skeleton using the process explained in the link in the first post. You won't need to do that unless you wanted to work with children or toddler's skeletons, because I'm giving you an adult female skeleton that's already parented.

Spoiler on setting up the skeleton in case you wanted to do it yourself -

For conversion - Programs needed Sims 3 or TSM, s3pe, ClipTool, Blender 2.67.

Go to the place where you've installed Sims 3 (or TSM), likely in program files. The CLIPs are in Fullbuild0. Open it with s3pe, Scroll until you find the CLIP you want, right click it and export to file.

3t2 Rig - http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1270955/.

Open Blender. Go to File -> User preferences and then type MS3D into the search bar. Check the box next to the Milkshape Importer/Exporter and save the user settings.

Open the 3t2 rig in Blender. Right click on one of the bones on the Sims 3 skeleton - there are some long bones protruding out that are good for this.


Open the Scene panel and choose Load CLIP


Navigate to the place you saved the CLIP you extracted and import it.

If the keyframes are longer than the timeline, you can click the number in the "end" box and raise the number. Press the play button to see how the animation works.


Select the Sims 2 skeleton. The yellow keyframes will disappear. Go to Pose -> Animation -> Bake


These are the settings I used.


Go into Object Mode and right click the Sims 2 body. Once you do this, it'll be outlined in green. Go to File, Export, then export as an MS3D file. You can leave the export settings at the default. Then follow the usual steps in Milkshape and in SimPE to get the animation into Sims 2. Any Sims 2 pose tutorial will explain the steps.

When I saw this, I said to myself 'Wonderful !'. I was hoping for something like this for years, as I love functional objects too. Thanks a lot, eventhough I haven't suceeded to make it work yet.
The sim is stuck in the ground, then it is litterally disarticulated after the anim has been ended ; it's really funny !

I'll try again later, in order to find what I did wrong or which step I missed.

the funny pics in-game !

Okay, now I've used the WesHowe's rawANIM Plugins trick.
The sim doesn't go in the ground anymore.
However, the rotation of some rigs still linger. I don't understand why.
Is that because of the way I've extracted the anim or is it caused by my pose box creation bad skills ?

Edit : When I start the anim, the whole body rotate to the left. Then when I stop the anim, the legs get back to their previous position but not the upperbody... as if the upper body position was overriding averything else. yet I used animate, not animate overlay primitive....
What I have noticed is that in the anim file, there's no 'submesh' : 'auskel' is not in the submesh list but in the joint list. However that's like this in pose anims usually...

@ankoyume - I don't know. But anyway, I made a new 3t2 rig Blend, and you can try that one and see if you have better luck. This one was made in 2.79b, and I'm not sure if it'll be backward compatible with a really old Blender. Contrary to the documentation about Cliptool requiring 2.67, it also works in 2.79b.

http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1270955/

On the research front, I've discovered that object animations don't look the same in Blender as in Milkshape, which is goingt to make some object conversions challenging. I converted a couple of broom arena animations for the Child Witch mod (shared on my tumblr). Nothing I tried made the broom fly correctly. Since the broom was going to be snapped into the Sim, I just used some c2o animations, and left the broom itself un-animated, but that obviously won't be a solution for objects that need to move on their own volition.

Thank you for the new rig. I'll try it during christmas holidays and I'll tell you if it worked.

@ankoyume did you have any luck? Someone just posted an interaction converted from TS3 genies on tumblr, which made me remember this thread.

Hi all !
That’s a very very interesting find !
Last year I also had the exact same idea of parenting sims 2 bones to another skeleton bones (in my case I wanted to convert animations from Tomb Raider classic games to sims 2). But I never really figured out how to make it properly and my tests ended up with messed up animations, body going through the ground, etc....
With your rigged model and your small tutorial, I was able to make incredible conversions and I’m so happy with it !!
Unfortunately, a lot of animations use rotations of more than 180 degrees and of course it ends up messed up in the game, due to milkshape axis system that works from -180 degrees to +180 degrees while Sims 2 work from 0 to 360 degrees...
And some sims 3 animations have more than 300 keyframes !! So I really don’t see myself fixing each messed up frame in SimPE....

If ONLY someone was able to create a plugin to export anims directly from blender to SimPE, or if there was any way to change Milkshape degrees system so that it works from 0 to 360 degrees...
I spent years trying to find a solution but beside coding (which I reallyyyy can’t do), I don’t know.... :/

But again, that’s an amazing technique and some animations work very well !!

Blender goes from -180 to positive 180 too. It's going to take someone with programming experience to make a solution.

Is it possible to make an extra transition in between, say at 179?

300 keyframes is roughly 6 seconds of animation (not sure if the game uses 24 or 25 or more for a second of animation, but 24/25 is what is used for movies, anyway), so it's not a very long animation (unless you mean 300 keys, which could be anything).

You technically wouldn't make an animation that moves 180 degrees from one keyframe to another, because that animation would in most cases be too fast, so I assume you mean from key to key. When you let the program do the "in-betweens" from one key to another (say you want the sim to rotate their arm 360 degrees from keyframe 1 to keyframe 25), then you'd need at least one, most likely two or more in-between states in Milkshape/Blender for the exporter to even recognize the animation as going in the direction you want it to go. There's very few animations that actually look good if they go from one pose to another and the computer is left to figure out the rest. If you've ever rotated your legs or arms in any direction, you may come to understand that your anatomy will rarely allow you to do a perfect 360 rotation of any joint, most likely not even a perfect 180 turn (a few joints may be able to do it, but most of the time you're moving other joints as well). There's slowing down and speeding up happening, along with a lot of smaller movements in other joints, both connected to the joint you're currently moving, but in a lot of cases other joints as well.

In "old-fashion" drawn animation, the lead artists would draw the main keyframe drawings (doing the job of the main keys in 3D animation), and there would be junior artists who did the "inbetweens" (which in 3D animation is the computer filling in the "blanks") - but unless you as the lead artist give the "blanks" some direction, the computer will fill in those "blanks" in static motions, and depending on the program might not even recognize a full rotation. A lot of animation can happen in a second, so if you only fill in a key at the beginning and one at the end, the result is thereafter - traditional Disney animation was often just 12 frames to save on the workload, but still - imagine the confusion of those "inbetweeners" if they got the task of filling in the blanks of 10 pictures between two very different drawings. Most often the lead artists would draw every other or every third drawing or thereabout, and the "inbetweeners" would fill in just one or two drawings between those. That's kind of how you have to think when you make animations on a computer, too - you don't need to do as much inbetween work, but at the same time you also need to give the computer directions on how to do the work for you, or it will just fill in whatever it has to work with.

I'm guessing the animations extracted from the games were made in such a way that the remaining keys have leftover 180-360 degree rotations, but it's probably not a problem in the program the game creators used. The creators probably also have more advanced animation tools available, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are several layers of animation tools in those programs, while we only see the base skeleton of the rig and the positions of the joints in the skeleton.

I've mostly used 3D Max for making animations (it's roughly 10-12 years ago now, so some of the knowledge has leaked out of my head, and is probably a bit old too - there are probably already much better tools and easier ways to do things than back then). I can't remember the rotation issue being a problem there, though. We made everything we used with the available tools in the program, most of the control systems were made from scratch, and some would even go so far as to make custom scripts - we made morphs for face animations and lip synch, rigs with FK and IK animation, targets for holding objects, and various other tools to move our characters around. I doubt our final rigs would even work in any other programs (maybe except Maya, with some tweaking), but it could probably be possible to export the final animation and the base skeleton, possibly also some of the control systems (but probably not the scripting or links between the control systems and the skeleton). I don't have any game creation experience of the same sort, but I can imagine it's similar in that you need more advanced rigs to make smooth animations. If the rigs are tied to one spesific program, you'd most likely need that program or a compatible one to have the full advantage of that rig.

@simmer22 Thanks for teaching us some animation history, I didn't know they were working like that with drawing animations, that was very interesting to learn !
I still don't really get the difference between keyframe and frame (regarding milkshape especially, because Millshape uses "keyframe" word).
Regarding The Sims 2 though, I think you missed the point of what I wrote, so I took pictures and videos as examples to explain myself.

Here, as you can see, the animation (converted from sims 3 animation to sims 2 skeleton) has every keyframes set.
(The skeleton is yellow when a keyframe is set, meaning a rotation or a move has been made on one or several bones, and it becomes blue when the keyframe has nothing set on).
Here, only the last keyframe had a blue skeleton. The animation is 82 keyframes long, and so there is a rotation or move set on 81 keyframes, and the last keyframe isn't set.




The problem with the 180 / 360 degrees rotation occurs especially in those moments : When the body needs to rotate itself completely, or when parts of the body rotate back and forth especially on the X axis.
As you can see, when the sim does the high kick, he turns his body 360 degrees.




When you import the animation in SimPE (exported from Milkshape with Wes' AniMesh export plugin), you'll see the 82 keyframes.
Here I selected the "Root_Rot" joint to show you the rotations associated to it.
You can click the "+" button on each keyframe to see the three axis "x, z, y" and their degrees values.
As you can see on this picture, one of the keyframe is set to 73 degrees, but the next keyframe is set to -172 degrees.
This ends up having the sim spinning 360 ingame. And THIS, is due to the fact that Milkshape (and Blender now that I'm aware of it) uses -180 to +180 degrees, while Sims 2 uses 0 to 360 degrees.




So, here we have a 82 keyframes animation, with some of them having negative values.
It's already a big amount of work to change each keyframe on EACH JOINT that has negative value (by doing some maths, you add +360 to the negative values and it should give you the right value).
So if you have to fix an animation with more than 300 keyframes, it's too much work.

That's why I'd love to have a solution that could solve this problem and revolutionalize The Sims 2 animations !

You shouldn't need to edit every joint (bone). The root_rot will need fixing, and sometimes the thigh joints need to be edited too. That's still a lot of work, though, of course. In an old thread, someone mentioned that WesHowe had a beta version of Animesh that automatically fixed the thigh rotation problems, but as far as I can tell, it was never publicly released, so that's unfortunate.

Right, I didn’t mean literally every joint haha
It’s very often the root_rot or tigh, but sometimes I also had to fix upperarm, or recently with the converted sims 3 anims, the spine joints or even neck...

And still, yeah with more than 100 keyframes it’s wayyyy too much work to fix it all haha
The high kick animation I showed in my example is actually something I can’t manage to fix in SimPE, I’m a mess with math logic haha

Oh wow, shame it was never published... I really wish we could solve this issue...

Oh okay. Are you using the latest version of the 3t2 rig?

Yes I am ! It works perfectly.
What I do is once I export the ms3d file from blender, I open it and export the animation via the RAW Anim export plugin by WesHowe, then I open a milkshape project with a fresh sim body (for example the body base mesh supplied for animations in this thread http://modthesims.info/t/239172 )
And import the raw anim file via the RAW Anim importer plugin by WesHowe, and it works like a charm !
Then export with animesh plugin and import in SimPE as usual

Yeah, that is what I do too. I haven't had any neck or spine issues though, so I was curious which rig you were working with.

I think this animation (kung fu high kick) is the one I have problems with regarding the neck and spine (spine2 to be precise). (The Sims 3 clip name is "a2a_spar_punch_kick_hit" or something close)
Also, as you can see, I don't know if it's from your rig or from the sims 3 animation itself, but the sims 2 body is a bit deformed by the animation on some keyframes (and it also is like that in game).

http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1270955/

I made a little edit, but I think that Spine bone might always be warped in 360 degree animations, just because of the differences between the two game rigs.

Yes probably.
Your new rig is better indeed ! No more deformation on the sims 2 body ! Thanks !!

Sorry that I couldnt do it during Christmas holidays but happy to see that it seems to work well. I'll do my own testing as soon as I can and give you feedback.

Hello all,

I'm getting back to you to ask for help.
I'm actually trying to do my own parented rig, between sims 2 skeleton and Lara Croft skeleton (from Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness).
The rig is almost complete, but there is something off with the arms and hands, and I can't find any solution to fix this issue. If anyone could take a look at my blender file and find any thing that could fix this, I'll be super greateful !

I uploaded the blender file on this post.
It comes with an animation from Tomb Raider (in the blender file "TRAOD ANIM Head Stand") so you can append it to the "armature" skeleton to check if it's rigged correctly.

It's late here, so I didn't test, but I see that you turned off inherit rotation on the wrists even though you didn't put a bone constraint on them. That's not going to work because if the bones don't have bone constraints and they're not inheriting rotation from the parents, they're not going to move. I can't say that'll totally fix your problem, but that's part of it.

Thanks a lot for your help ! It actually fixed the biggest issue haha.
Now I still have to understand why the arms are moving totally wrong compared to the Lara animation... Anyway thank you so much !!

EDIT : FIXED IT ! Just by redoing my bones parenting on the arms bones. Now it works almost perfectly !

Glad to help.

I am necro-ing this thread just a tiny bit because I felt it was worth it to make a post and report. Purely thanks to the ideas and possibilities presented in this thread, I was able to successfully complete TSM and TS4 conversions to TS2! This resulted in a mod that my modding-partner-in-crime, Laura and I just released for historical games. It replaces all of the default greetings in the game with period-appropriate ones from TSM and uses a salute from TS4.

Greet Expectations

A couple of examples:


So I just wanted to say thank you so much @omglo for starting this conversation and for all of your help along the way. Also to everyone else in this thread whose experiments helped me to troubleshoot as well! I had been told before that this absolutely was not possible and so had abandoned the idea of ever having stuff like this in my game. Now that I've successfully completed the entire process, I hope to make a comprehensive tutorial for people looking to do the same. No promises as to when I will have time to do that, but I will do it

I'm happy to be able to help this become a reality. When I first read about animation conversion, I thought it'd be perfect for historical neighborhoods. Thanks @Mortia and Laura for putting in the work and making it happen.

Tutorials Here
 

I'm bringing this thread back yet again because I've finally had some time to sit down and write up some proper tutorials for how I got this working. Thanks as always to omglo for starting this thread and getting me curious, and for making all those rigs

Converting Animations from The Sims 4 to The Sims 2

Converting Animations from The Sims Medieval/The Sims 3 to The Sims 2

Hope this is useful!

Wow! I just wanna say you are all doing such an amazing work! And it's so great seeing so much stuff being done for TS2 and people still experimenting and modding it!
If anyone ever finally cracks the face animations in sims 2 I think I'm gonna cry!

I agree with kacpi33 : you all have done a great work. Animations was THE thing that preventing me from fulfilling my best dreams for TS2. Great thanks !