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.
https://i.imgur.com/8HQDwo5.png?1

Open the Scene panel and choose Load CLIP
https://i.imgur.com/BK92RWS.png?1

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.
https://i.imgur.com/t2zrD0E.png?1

Select the Sims 2 skeleton. The yellow keyframes will disappear. Go to Pose -> Animation -> Bake
https://i.imgur.com/aAmd5EU.png?1

These are the settings I used.
https://i.imgur.com/7tZu1mI.png?1

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.