Body Animation Base Meshes
 

This is a set of animation "base" meshes, intended for use with Wes Howe's Animation Exporter plugin for MilkShape. They were made and tested using MilkShape v 1.80

These should NOT be put in your Downloads/ folder, they are NOT intended for actual in-game use.

These are simply a convienience for those who want to do Sims2 body animations but don't want to go to the bother of digging through the game files to get the mesh parts yourself - you can simply open these up in MilkShape and get right to animating.

What I did was combine a basic "nude" body with a face and head, all properly assigned, to make it easier to see what your animation looks like as you work. There is no "fat" or "pregnant" morph included, the meshes are not meant for actual mesh editing - although they could also be used for comparing bone assignments on a "real" mesh editing project.

I also disabled the animations of the 5 "_hair" bones, since including them in the animations does not produce good results.

Included are all the necessary mesh ages for animating - adult male, adult female, universal child, and universal toddler.

Elders and Young adults are not needed, they share the same exact skeleton as adults and therefore can also share the same animations.

What, no teens? No, they also share the adult skeleton - the only difference is that the CRES of a teen mesh includes a "pre-stretch" parameter (of .94) that scales the adult skeleton down to teen size.

Therefore, teens also can share the same animations of the adult age groups.

Only the child, and the toddler, require different skeletons, and completely different animations.

If you wish to have an animation used only by a certain age or sex, you would arrainge that in the BHAV's of your object.

In short, you could create one single animation using the adult male base mesh, and then use it for every age, teen and older, and for both sexes if that would suit your purposes. Or, if necessary, your could create a completely different animation for any of them.

Please let me know of any questions, comments, or problems. Also feel free to do whatever you like with these, no credits required. They are just Maxis meshes, I didn't really do anything to them at all.

thanks so much Dr. Pixel! is there anyway we can do this with our own meshes.

For example if i have a extra curvy female snaping in a z formation with her hands on her hips, i dont know where to place her hands exactly.

Yes, you can use any body mesh you want. These are just a convienience for people who don't want to bother collecting all the parts themselves.

is there a tutorial about how to do this yet?

Oooh,looks coolness! :D

Do the animations work like they do with Miche's one?
Because when I did this,the animation's where different :D

Callum:

You cannot mix Miche's converter and my animation exporter except at the final product level. My animation exporter will not work with the "SimBody.smd" base, nor will Miche's animaiton exporter work with this.
However, if you put one of your old animations and one made with the new exporter in the same package, they should both be compatible.

The design for the new animation exporter should work on any body mesh that was imported via the UniMesh importer. What Dr. Pixel did was collect the whole Sim in one package, making it easier to see your work, especially things like nodding or turning the head.

AYou make the animations in MilkShape essentially the same way as you did before, but you start with one of these models (or you make your own) and instead of exporting the half-life .SMD file, you use the AniMesh exporter and it will create a .5an file you can put in a package with SimPE.

The animation should work on any saame-size body mesh, regardless of what the mesh looks like in MilkShape, because the animation is only instructions to the game on how to move the joints.

<* Wes *>

i hate to seem anoying here... but you mention making your own models, how do we do this...

The models here were made from the game files by importing the body mesh, the a face mesh and a bald hair mesh. You can use the UniMesh plugins with MilkShape to do this.
Additionally, Dr. Pixel added some comments to the hair bones so that the animation exporter ignores them (this allows the default hair animations to remain).
Dr. Pixel has had some whole body meshes available for a long time. These are similar, except they have all teh joints and are already setup for animating.

<* Wes *>

Hi,

I think the animations would work the same as with Miche's one - I haven't done any with that one, so I can't be sure.

The main differences (that I know about) are:

* Wes' exporter allows for toddler and child ages as well as adult age animations.
* The animations are not reversed - what you see in MilkShape is what you will see in the game.
* You also can see exactly how they will work in MilkShape with the actual Sims2 multiple vertex assignments.

Well, what I think I was getting at was that if you had an old MilkShape .ms3d or .SMD file with an animation in it that you made and placed in the game with Miche's converter, it would not likely work the way you designed it using my exporter, because of the bone ordering and positioning information.

The only other substantial thing I can offer between my exporter and Miche's is that it supports both body meshes and object meshes (although not at the same time). And adding the events and sounds, too.

And the exporter supports all the bones. Miche never quite got all the bones finished, like the clavicle and one of the hands.

<* Wes *>

Wes&Dr.Pixel, thank you. That cleared it up.

I don't explain myself properly,and what I was meant to have asked was,
"Miche's SimBody.smd had better animations than when I extracted the body from TS2 myself.Do they work like Miche's one,as it made the anim's looks better" lol!

Wes,that's good.I might even update my Animation painting-could have smoother animations second time round,huh?
:D

No, these won't work any better (or worse) than extracting them yourself.
That's all I did. I just thought that people who made objects and wanted new animations might not be familiar with body mesh making and extracting, and these save the bother of finding and extracting the body parts.

Thanks P!

You could certainly botch the job, and have your animations be worse.
I tried to make this very universal, but that is a good theoretical goal, but not so easy to do in real life. The final product, as you saw from Miche's converter, depends entirely on the skeleton layout being correct, because that is the way the game engine works.

What it actually has to match against is the way the bones in the CRES are defined. But for body meshes, you can simply import one from the game using the UniMesh importer plugin and animate away. It is easier to see what you are doing with the head, but that is only needed for the animator's benefit... the animation exporter only needs the skeleton and the desired keyframes to work.

<* Wes *>

thanks you dr. pixel
i have one of my own ,but yours will help more :D
thanks

First let me say thank you for such wonderful tools.

I do have a small query, however, and if this is the wrong place to ask, I apologize. Anyway, I've been using these base meshes to create sim poses and I seemed to notice that there are slight inaccuracies. I.E. if a hand is placed exactly on the waist and it looks perfect in Milkshape, in the game it will end up a centimeter or so going into the waist.

Is there a reason this might be happening or is it just something that needs to be taken into consideration when making poses?

I would suspect if the difference is simply not an body shape, then it may well be the AniMesh exporter itself.

I had to do a lot of work to resolve some basic differences in the way models animate in MilkShape versus the game. Since I do not have any access to the inner workings of the game, some of it was tweaking and testing. This job may not be perfect.

The essence of what you are creating in making your pose is really to make a series of bends for each joint to form the position. If the belly on your game sim was fatter than the original, then you might see the effect you describe. However, a small math difference on several successive bends in teh exporter would could also be the source.

<* Wes *>

I'm very interrested in doing some cool poses for stories. I hope I can learn how to do this soon Thanks again, wesh_h

Thank you so much Dr Pixel!

It was so easy to just have the meshes and start to animate, and I realy enjoyed to see my little toddler move in new ways in game.

Than you so much :D

Umm qeustion we put the extracted files in Milkshape 3D Files right not into any other folder such as skeletons etc?

Dezzie,

You should put these files in a folder in "My Documents" or on your desktop, NOT in the Milkshape folder under "Programs". You can name the folder whatever you want, like "animation models". When in Milkshape, you then choose "open" and browse to the one you want to use.

Thanks so much for sharing these with us.

for some reason whenever i open the skeletons in milkshape i get either a blue or green cage looking thing around them.how do i get rid of it?

Go to File/preferences and adjust the Joint Size (under mis tab) to 0,001

new animation installing and applying to a sim
 

I am not sure of the correct procedure for creating a new animation and applying it to a sim.
would one start in milkshape with one of the base meshes and then create a package in sympe. If this is so, how/ where would one put it in sims?

& also, how would one apply it to a sim. Can one apply the animation to an existing sim or is it necessary to use the base mesh to create an entirely new sim? And, if to an existing sim, how does one apply it?

Is the animation built in to the new sim or applied via a pie menu connected to an object?