Big Cat Animation

[aldehydebends]

Hey guys,

Im not sure if this would be the right place to put this thread so if someone wants to move it go right ahead :)

Im trying to make a Jaguar!! not the car but the cat! ooo awwww big fun!!

i know that becuase of size issues and bones and stuff if i altered the mesh to make the cat bigger it wouldn't match to the bones right and well it would just be a big mess in the game. the one thing is that i really dont care :p all i want is for the cat to be able to move (walk) and have the animation be right. Is there a way to alter the bones to make them spread out more so this can me done? or should i take this in a difrent direction? i was thinking maybe if there was a way to stretch the sketon like this normal sims and that one cheat code... but i havn't played with this yet. and then my other idea is if we could take the bone settings of the dog and simply just throw them on a cat....? anyone who would like to offer any sort of information on this please do!

[WesHowe]

There are additions to pet meshes I never finished decoding. So while UniMesh will read the mesh parts, I don't know if the exported mesh will work properly in the game, although I do not know that it won't, either. What I do know is there are some elements of a pet mesh that will not be saved to the export that were in the original.

If you import a cat or dog mesh, you will find that it is not linked together like a body mesh is inside MilkShape. It was also found that MilkShape will not handle the pet skeletons, a few of the vehicles and probably other ones becase some of them have odd joint list orders, in which the parent to some bones appears after the child bones. This will not work in many 3D editors, including MilkShape.

So at this time, I am not guaranteeing that either the mesh exporter or the animation exporter will give good results on Pets, but you are welcome to prove me wrong, as I have not confirmed that by testing. But it would not be a beginning, or even intermediate level project.

<* Wes *>

[Kodiak]

Forwardmotionis, if you're still interested in this, I think there might be a chance for it to become a reality!

Let's choose between which pet skeleton to use for a Jaguar first. I believe using the cat skeleton would be a wiser choice as our Jaguar would act more cat than dog as we'll be using all the animations for cats.

Next would be making a skeleton base for cats. I can help you with that as I was successful with dogs. Once you've got the base done, you can then bring your Jaguar mesh in and assign each part to the appropriate bone. I don't know how far this works but at this point you can try either enlarging both the skeleton and mesh or just the mesh alone.

Then what's left is to create the new GMDC for a Jaguar and link it correctly to a custom made cat that will show up in the Create-A-Pet screen. I'm sure Wes can easily help you with that but I don't know how far this will work.

[aldehydebends]

Kodiak,

Im sorry its been so long since ive addressed your proposal, ive had some things in like i needed to straighten out.

Everything sounds great and dandy and im really eager to help because i really really want my jaguar the question is can wes help us with what you said ( its been a few months maybe even a year or more since ive touched the sims2 soooo im thinking i might be a little rusty) and also if you still think we can so this!