Oh right, I notciced, I assumed that se had problems with the SMD file, (which I had), but after swicthing from Milkshape to Fragmotion, I had no problems.

You have to make the mesh like normal in Milkshape, except with the joint assignments to the "_hair" joints, which are animation points. Maybe Nouk is trying to export it from milkshape as an smd file. It never worked that way for me, but I have gotten my hairs animated. I'm so freaking appreciative.

well
i tried a lot of times exporting to smd and importing back and a lot of times-it didnt work-eveyrhting was fine

then i realized hair was assigned to other bones so now i assigned it to the bones windkeeper mentioned
it worked fine-and look kool
is very finely animated
just include in first post to assign to l_hair f_hair etc bones first

I am not sure if this is right or not but I think it should work.

Replace the GMDC with the one from unimesh.
Export from SimPE as .smd.
Do not even open that file with milkshape.
Import the .smd with SimPE again.

That's my suggestion anyway.

Hi guys!
I never imported the mesh as an .smd from milkshape, but always imported it as a .gmdc file.
After that I replaced the original in gmdc in Simpe.
Following the steps Windkeeper gave us, SimPE does something to the mesh that is unfixable...

So I do follow the instructions, don't worry, lol :P

@ windkeeper: I'll send the files tomorrow, thank you for helping me out! *huggles*

@Chazdesigns: So, I can export the mesh straight from Fragmotion as an .smd file? Or do I need to follow the same steps regarding simpe, like Windkeeper uses?

Nouk, Fragmotion supports smd files, that is correct. You would use it instead of Milkshape. In that case you would deal directly with smd files but you would still have to eventually import them to simpe, using the same importer you are having problem with right now.

I actually did one mesh in Fragmotion and it worked. But I don't want to buy it and since I found a fix for Milkshape I won't have to anymore .

hey PAF
if ur tips are for me-just to tell u my mesh works fine-the problem i discovered for hair not animating was they r assigned to other bones,as doctor pixel said for real head rotation-then i found for animaiton i gotta assign e like l_hair,r_hair etc

PAF, maybe my first post is not clear but that is exactly what I meant: export into smd format and import right back in smd format, all done in SimPE .

Sorry I just read too fast and tried to answer questions without reading eveything I guess.I need to slow down.

@ windkeeper: Yeah I found a fix too I bought it lol

I tried doing this as WindKeeper said, and it works fine.

There is one more step to do, however - after using the .smd export/import in SimPE, you will have to re-set the opacity of your alpha groups manually just as you did before UniMesh, since this information is lost by the .smd importer.

Hmm, my meshes didn't lose opacity, Dr Pixel. You can check the buttons mesh, I added a bit of animation and reuploaded it. Do you use the latest SimPe?

Check out the before and after... does this happen to any of you?

I don't really understand why, but for some reason, when I try to animate a hair, it works fine, but when I try to animate bangs, it has come out all weird. I used the same assignments as the original mesh did where I had gotten those bangs from, but it didn't come out right. I don't have a picture, but what is happening is that, yes, it does move, but it curled upward and looks like bottom of the bangs is being pulled up to the top. If that makes sense. I don't understand why it does this, but it keps doing it to me.

It does look strange, Nouk. Just like you said, even skeleton is gone. Doesn't happen to me.

DJ, I had somewhat similar problem when I tried to animate bunny ears (accessory). The vertices that I would assign to the bone would be pulled up or to the sides. Never got that to work. Try a different bone (c_hair, b_hair), also maybe try to lessen the weight of the animation bones, like 5% f_hair and 95% head.

I'll try that.

One project I decided to do has failed, with the animations. I converted the female "meg" hair for males, didn't change the joints, didn't export the hair, then reimport it into another; I kept it the same, with the same joint assignments as the original. I then made the mesh, did the thing for the animations, and then applied it to the hair/changed genders, etc etc. When I looked at it in bodyshop though, it looked like a mesh would before, where any hair assigned to those joints jsut didn't appear. Most of the mesh appearred.

I realized that I had not fixed the underweighted assignments, but when I redid everything, it still didn't work.

Any suggestions/advice/explanation perhaps?

I think it'd be really cool to have that mesh and animated and everything.

I haven't made any hair meshes but maybe I can be of some help here from some body mesh experimenting.I think some of the problem some of you are having with the hair "bones" is that each hair mesh has the bones moved and or rotated.

I found this out because I tried to use the hair bones when I made the hero capes and every time I changed the sims hair style the cape would move all wrong in a different direction.

I think from some of the things that I have been told these positions are kept in the CRES which is why they don't get exported and we can't change the skeleton (yes that was another failure).

I tend to agree with what you said, PAF. I've come to the same conclusion as well. Because we cannot edit the skeleton perhaps it would help to select the base hair mesh as close as possible to your new mesh shape to get nice animation. But in any case this is a very experimental area right now.

DJ, is it possible you didn't set NumSkinWgts to 3 in your new mesh?

Yes I have the latest SimPE release. Maybe the difference is in the settings I use when importing the .smd files? I set them to "Replace". Do you use "Update" on yours? I didn't try that because "Update" had caused me problems on earlier SimPE versions.

Anyway, if someone was doing the actual editing of the mesh with the .smd file and FragMotion or XSI they would have to use "Replace" and then reset the Opacity manually, so this is something to be aware of.

I use "replace" at all times. I just tried again, Dr Pixel, and this time lost opacity. But I did upgrade to the latest Skankyboy plugin version from SimPE forum. Maybe thats the reason. It must be changed in that latest release. I will post in his thread about it. Thanks!

i succesfully animated some of my hair
now i have 2 meshes of curly hair
i animated them too
in game they wave but some parts have nothing on them

No one has any idea what is happening to my hairmesh?

Nouk, try to reinstall SimPe. I still think its a problem with smd importer in your SimPe.

Hmm... I tried and went to the very latest... made no difference...

If you move the bones, the new position does get exported.
My thought on the way the game handles the bones/vertices is that each vertice is positioned relative to the bone position as included in the GMDC. Then, the vertices are placed relative to the initial bone position taken from the CRES, and then it changes as the bones move position during animation.
So the vertex value becomes the difference between the absolute position of the assigned bone(s) and the absolute position of the vertex (as edited). Thus every vertex can be repositioned by computing the new bone position from the animation, and adding the new vertex value to that (with some additional computations for multiple assignments).
This fits the observation that PAF made that moving a bone one way made the cape move the other.
So I believe that there is a very limited usefulness for repositioning bones in the GMDC, although it has a very definitive effect. I know from the StretchSkeleton cheat that the bones can be moved in real time, without editing the GMDC. I suspect that these changes are made to the translation values for the skeleton in the CRES, although I never succeeded in doing that manually via a hex editor (long ago) and have not retried now that these values can be changed in SimPE.

<* Wes *>