Custom Locomotion Animations

[Kodiak]

What are the points to take note while making a custom locomotion animation?

When I tried to replaced one of the locomotion animation with a custom one, the game ignores my custom animation and skips to the next locomotion animation but there is a pause between where mine should be. Why is that?

[Jasana_BugBreeder]

What's mentioned in Sims2Differences (http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1542952#post1542952) are probably the only notes about locomotion, though they are not exactly about making animations - rather, about how they are used - but still may be helpful.

[Kodiak]

Well it did provide help, but it takes many experiments to get it working. Thanks for the link but I've already got the notes.

I had greater success, quite a while back, when I use Wes' AniMax scrips to disassemble the original locomotion animations and replace only the animation data, then recomplie them back. It's still not 100% perfect or functioning the way I want it to but I would consider the results worthy of a release.

[WesHowe]

AniMax will allow you to do far more than is possible in MilkShape. But the lack of visual editing capabilities makes it difficult for people to envision what can be done.

For instance, adding (or replacing) a head movement in an idle animation for a dog could be done by using MilkShape to make the wanted head movement, exporting as an ANIM file. By disassembling the Maxis original and replacing the head/neck movements with that part from your new animation, and editing the timecodes in your addition to match the Maxis cycle time, you could create a new or replacement animation.

As far as I was ever able to tell from my testing, the flags for locomotion, pose and so on seem to be for classification outside of the game engine. Game play seems to treat all the 'types' the same. BodyShop will use only the first frame from any animation, while the game will run a full animation even if you call it a Pose.

<* Wes *>

[Kodiak]

Indeed, Wes. AniMax has also been proven useful when, at one time, I accidentally deleted my Milkshape project file for an animation but I still have the ANIM file. As all the joint data was exported using AniMesh, the animation data stored in the ANIM file would thus be fully disassembled using AniMax and then imported back into Milkshape by frames.

As for facial movements, I prefer using SimPE to do the editing. Not because it has visual editing capabilities, but for simplicity and convenience. All I need is to change some values and commit the file. You do have to experiment with the values first to understand how they work though.

Despite treating all the types of animation the same, somehow the game engine prefered something closer in representation to a locomotion ANIM file than an animation that I create from scratch.