Orangemittens, I think Wes means it will overwrite the original animation in the ChaosMageX's painting.
Appending animations is like making your girl make two high kicks in one animation.
You can do something like cut and paste little pieces of different animations/clips into a new animation/clip file.
The start position for the second piece of animation to add, must be the same as the end position of the first piece of animation. Or/and you can make a transition animation yourself and have to move the joints into the same position, before the start of the next piece of animation.

Thanks Cocomama. I was confused because that little segment came from the Fullbuild0.package but I think I'm getting the whole concept now. We're just borrowing it to work with and not intending to do alter the original source.

Your explanation of appending is helpful. We append while we're making the animation and before saving it into the game not using it to add things to something we've already imported which is what I mistakenly thought Wes was saying. I appreciate your help

Edited to add: And perhaps you have the patience for one more stupid question? WesHowe said, "We did some basic animation tutorials for Sims 2," but I have looked through the Sims 2 tutorial section and am having a hard time locating them. There is nothing there that seems on-topic and I was hoping you could tell me what the tutorials were named. If not, that's ok...I can struggle through this with just the MS thing probably...but any information is good information. Thanks for any help.

OM

I sincerely apologize for the double post (and I'm counting it as that since I moved my other post elsewhere.)

But I am wondering what this means:



I got this trying to convert a clip I got from the fullbuild from clip to smd.

Does this mean there are some of these things that cannot be converted? If so, is there any way of telling which ones those are? When I hit ok for that message it just reiterated the error message in the dialogue box which looks, comfortingly enough, very much like the one the ObjectTool has. I like the cosmic coincidence there.

Thanks as always for any help anyone can give and I truly am sorry if this is a stupid question.

OM

It means that the source animation is longer than what I allowed for in the converter. Perhaps a future version will be more tolerant... the main reason those limits are in there is to reduce the likelihood of a crash by testing values in the source file for sanity.

And yes, aren't coincidences wonderful?

I always hope for tolerance

And yes...coincidences are wonderful...

OM

but I forgot to add my question again since you didn't answer it. I am compelled to add that I am not trying to be argumentative.

In regards to the clips we can export: is there any way of telling which ones those are? That is...those within the tolerance?

Your instruction on this is appreciated if you will post it.


OM

While the error text is terse, it is saying that your animation has 121 frames, and the buffer has only 120 slots. All animations with more than 120 frames are going to be rejected.

The frame count shows in one of the boxes on the right on the animation time scale thingamabob.

Thank you for the information.

It sounds like you're saying S3PE cannot tell us...only MS can...right?

And would it be correct to think that this rule works in the other direction?...that is...from smd-->clip? Not an issue at this point but good to know nontheless.

"on the animation time scale thingamabob"

hmm...I thought the technical term for that was thingymajingy...and here I've been using the wrong word all along...now I feel silly.

OM

Edited to add: Also, I am having this happen when I try to rotate (not move) the right hand...and it does not happen when I rotate the left. I'm not sure if it's me, MS, or something else since I am still trying to learn to move the model without making her look awkward. But this right hand is difficult to control. Do I have some setting set incorrectly?

The precise action which seems to be occurring is that, even though I have the rotate button clicked in the Model tab, when I go to rotate the right hand it's moving and rotating both at the same time. I only bring it up because I don't get this same action with the left.

OM, that long alieny (yes, another technical term there ) hand doesn't make her look awkward? Heehee Are you hoping to smack someone upside the head with that alien paw?

I'm so happy you decided to test-drive this, so that when I finally get around to animation , you'll be there to hold my hand..

I've got a looong way to go before I can help anyone that's for sure...but if I ever get there I'll be happy to Lol...she was striving for an elegant yet casual gesture but, me bad, I made her look icky.

And to clarify, the only hand-holding you would need would be the actual learning to animate part...although the MS tutorial isn't half bad. The export/conversion/conversion/import part is very simple though...and the tutorial (although initially I was imtimidated by a tutorial with no pictures) is blonde-friendly.

OM

I have seen that before on the hands... it is MilkShape getting confused on a long chain of joints.

I usually get it resolved by setting the rotation options to "local" and "origin". While there is no way that any of the rotations of parented joints should be affected by this, it does seem to end the oddities.

I just *knew* it was a settings thing but I could not figure out what. I've been trying for awhile now. Thanks so much for your help Wes.

I would ask why this happens on the right hand but not the left but I know I wouldn't understand the answer.

And this?..."And would it be correct to think that this rule works in the other direction?...that is...from smd-->clip?" Is this right? I apologize for persisting with this question...but these little clips take up quite a few of the frames so it is helpful to know how many there are to play with.

OM

I looked in the source, and in or out is the same right now. Not that they have to be, but I did use the same value, 120, in both source files.

MilkShape itself will handle perhaps thousands of frames, depending on your computer, and those will save just fine in the .ms3d files. But they will not be able to be converted in their entirety unless I revise the code.

And the issue in MilkShape being on one hand and not the other is related to the direction of rotation being inverted on one side versus the other. It is a bug, and has been there some time, because we were having this issue with TS2 animations. Mostly it is just the hands and fingers, because they have a longer "chain" back to the root than the legs do.

Thank you again That single smiley emotie grows tedious but well...that's the only one to choose from.

My computer is pretty good but I think but for now 120 is enough for me. My Sim-girl is a graceless clod and I've got a ways to go to improve her carriage.

I do apologize for asking you how to use MS yet again...I should have worked harder to figure that out.

I had noticed that her legs were easier to deal with...and for once I actually do get the explanation...perhaps I am improving.

OM

I imported an EA clip easily enough. Now I am trying to make my own and the MS tutorial, well...it isn't helping me much after all. So I looked and found one by JohnBrehaut1 but had problems with that one crack off the bat...the way he says to select things causes deformation in my limbs.

My Sim-model is working very gracefully now with the new settings (edited to add: and now that I changed them I notice this affects her foot as well I think) but I can't figure out how to deal with the keyframes and I can't find a decent tutorial that is up to date with the new version. Is there such a thing?

More importantly, should I be starting my own animation with the EA converted clip in place or with just the ms3d model?

I know this is off-topic and I apologize for that. But I wasted so much time trying to figure out the settings issue on my own that I felt like this time it would just be best to ask for help. All I need is a decent tutorial that focuses more on the MS process than arranging the limbs. I can do the limb arranging on my own...I need directions for MS.

OM

sorry...I edited while you were looking....but I didn't know you were there or I just would have added another post.

You are experimenting now, so you are on your way.

Importing animations is useful if you just want to alter something existing, a tweak so to speak. In essence all you do is move the slider or click the ">>" box to move to a specific frame, select the bone(s) you want, and rotate it/them to a new position, and then do a "set keyframe"... this will replace the current frame with the new, altered one.

Repeat as necessary.

However, there is a lot to be said for just making an animation from scratch. For example, if you moved the initial pose to arms at side, legs together, set a frame, move to frame 30 and set a frame with the identical position, move back to frame 15 and move the arms overhead and the legs apart (the move the root down so the feet are back on the ground), you would have a complete animation for a jumping jack, because MilkShape will "interpolate" between these positions across the empty frames between. When you export as SMD, these "interpolated" frames will be included in the export.

Now you may find that interpolating such a wide change in positions is not as smooth as you would like, and you can add intermediate steps to correct this, but it is not necessary to make every single frame for many types of animations.

Thank you for your reply darlin'. Here is my problem...I cannot make MS play my sequence. I need a tutorial to tell me how. I get this weird thing where one of the viewboxes is just repeating the sequence (and the only way I can get that to stop is to close MS) but the model box in the lower right hand corner isn't moving. This doesn't allow me to see what she is up to.

I know I can move this model with halfway decent precision (all deficiencies my own). My issue is getting MS to cooperate, show me my work and save it. I need a tutorial...I've been experimenting for a while now and can't figure this out.

I follow the tutorials as much as the version change allows and still I get nowhere. Should I be creating my own animation with the model + clip or just with the model?

edited to add: Honestly, that MS tutorial is pretty long on cheerful chat about this and that and pretty short on explicit instruction about which button to punch and when. A list of things to do would be much more helpful. I'm venting again...ignore me. But tutorials without "1. do this 2. do that" just annoy me to no end. They're basically useless. The guy who wrote that thing needs to learn how to just instruct people like you do.

I don't need a tutorial in the spatial relationships of walking. I can manage the spatial relationships I think. What is needed is instruction on how the program works.

A tutorial would be helpful...it's just not what I wanted to have to ask for here...more MS information that is.

While in animation mode, select the window you want to see the animation in and click on the play button ">". Click on the same button to stop the animation.

I'm not even going to discuss 1. what I think about the wisdom of making a > button = stop or 2. how absolutely moronic I feel right now because I missed that. Thanks so much Wes...of course, that worked.

Edited to add: Ha...I did it...86 frames of pure poetry in motion into the game with no errors Actually, the whole effect is an unappealling combination of muscle spasm and hiccups that I would show here anyway except I still need to figure out how to do that too.

It is very nice that the clip file overwrites both the single action version and the looped version of the dance. You could have your Sim stand there and do the same thing over and over all day long if you enjoy viewing perseveration.

120 frames is plenty for me (86 about killed me) but my guess is that people who know how to animate Sims would like to have more at some point if that's possible...of course that's just a guess and I don't know much about any of this. People are going to want to get at some of the longer EA clips too probably...although again, that's just my uneducated thought and you know better than I do about it.

Thanks so much for helping me with Milkshape again...I promise I won't make a habit of pestering with questions about it.

Edited to add: ...but could I ask just one more? (I apologize)...if it is annoying you just say so and I'll stop interrupting the thread topic. When I move the keyframe slider to the next frame my model goes to the animation pose of the original EA clip instead of staying in the pose I have put her in. Is there any way around this or do I have to copy/paste the pose from the previous frame?

Hey,
It's the first time I'm working with milkshape, and when I try to load afbody4anim.ms3d it gives me these errors:

"Unknown subversion for vertex extra 3"
"Unknown subversion for joint extra 1610612485"
"Unknown subversion for model extra 1404895237"

And after I click OK, here's what I see:


Any ideas why it happens?

EDIT: Fixed! I've installed the latest version of MilkShape..

That is because you didn't set a keyframe. I used to forget to do that myself often, and it aggravated me, but I have since decided since that it is a feature, because when you make a mess (easy enough) you can go back and then start over.

Doing a "set keyframe" is logically like saving your work.

Well if you say it's a good feature I'm sure at some point I'll learn to appreciate it...right now I'll work on not letting it aggravate me...heh. Thank you for answering what was a silly question considering that if I hadn't forgotten to set a keyframe I wouldn't have had to ask it.

I tried another clip in the game after removing the first. This one came out a little weird in that, although I had not animated the model's head, in the game she kept pivoting it around. At least it didn't go all the way around...lol. I'm not sure what I did differently on the second one that caused this to happen but s'ok...I'm still learning.

Edited to add: I'm wondering about all the other dance options in the painting...can those be overwritten like the one from your tutorial?

Edited to add: I'm also wondering about the MS playing of clips like Check Self Out Bottom. In MS the model sort of skates around but if you take the smd and make it into a clip/package without changes it plays just right in the game. Is this another MS settings issue that needs fixed?

Sorry if too many questions.

While I haven't tested them all, animations other than those I show should work as replacements. You just have to be careful you get the right file TGI figured out... some of the names are not always obvious and for very many, there is a child version and an adult that vary just by two characters in the TGI.

Rigging is the issue in your other question. I made a generic rigging file that should work for most animations. However, some animations have additional joints or different rotation values which, when not included make the entire animation play improperly. The joints listing in the info button is there to help me identify the presence of the extra joints, but there is no tutorial written on how to add a joint into the rigging file, nor is there one showing how to remove joints to create an overlay animation. I made the rigging file format into a text file separate from the program itself so that it could be worked on without knowing a lick of C++ code, but it is still not something that can be tackled without a lot of understanding of how a skeletal hierarchy is designed and how animations operate on them.

But for now, we have just started working within the range of what we can do, using the basic rigging, although I admit that being able to build a package of non-replacement animations and being able to trigger those would be better. But we started meshing body meshes for TS3 with just replacement methods, and that evolved. It is likely this will, also. But it will evolve slowly if I am the only developer that is working on it, because I am more like the tortoise than the hare.

"because I am more like the tortoise than the hare"...well attention to detail takes time and it's better to be right than be sorry.

Besides which...this game has been out 5 months and you have two game-tools out and working well. I'm not tryin' to be contradictory...but the speed with which tools have come out for this game has surpassed any other Sim game IMO.

I'll probably end up editing another 50 million times because I posted before my brain absorbed everything. I suppose I should follow my own little statement up there.

Thank you as always for answering.

Yep...editing: So some of the animations may not be replaceable because they require rigging different than what the others generally use and I think there may be others which won't be because they have more than 120 frames. But the painting has at least a few I've seen in Fullbuild0 that might work within these parameters...with trial and error it shouldn't be hard to sort them out.

When you say correct file TGI do you mean selecting the correct CLIP from the list in the Fullbuild00? Or is there something else? Also, why are some of the animation sequences listed in the painting not in the Fullbuild0 list?

Lastly, I'm hoping I can squeeze in just one more little question about something you said earlier..."there is a lot to be said for just making an animation from scratch." How do we do that? The only way I've been able to get anywhere is by importing the EA clip-->smd and using that.

But when I do that it means that when I move forward a frame the EA pose is there and my model slides out of the pose I have her in and into the EA pose. So I have to copy and paste the keyframe from the previous frame each time. I tried just deleting all Keyframes but then all I have is the model and, for some reason, I can't get her to do anything...her limbs snap back into her start pose after I move them.
---> Ignore this last question...I figured it out...ha, I am improving

And what exactly is a Pose Box and what is it for? You posted about it earlier I think and someone else posted about it in your other thread. I'm not getting the concept...is it just a series of static positions triggered by an object? If so, I think the combination of your Animation Tool and the ChaosMageX painting would do the job. I've been browsing this thread and the Sims 2 section and this term just keeps coming up so I'm wondering.

I apologize again for asking so many questions.

Anyone else getting Milkshape crashing when importing the .smd file?..

***UPDATE***

Nevermind, need the newest version of Milkshape!