Hey all,

I've noticed that a few people have been wanting to know/learn how to make new sim animations that dont overwrite the maxis ones. So today I present to you all a tutorial exactly for that. It's really easy to follow and has quite a few pictures to show where things are. It's designed for anyone who can read, but I suggest you only try this tutorial when you have previous experience in SimPE (Object Creation mainly and abit about BHAV's) and Milkshape, because you'll most likely get confused alot through it.

Things you'll need: SimPE Milkshape
Miche's Animation Converter

You'll find links to all these programs inside the tutorial.

It goes through preparing your file for your animation, making the animation, making the interactions and setting up the bhav for it. If you have any questions related to the tutorial, feel free to ask them.

If you upload a object/hack with a new animation, in which you used this tutorial to make, all I ask is that you give me credit and link back to this thread.

Hmm,'inertresting' ( i say this word,lol).
This will make for interesting reading.
Hopefully this will be moved to the appropriate forum and given a thank you button ^-^
Thanks


--could you post a picture (animated possibly) of what your new animation looks like,please ^-^?

My goodness, I'd press the thanks button alone not to waste a post for those who really discuss your tute here...

Thanks.. with digitally verbal cups of your like(s)

Callum, umm... I didnt make an actual animation, lol. I only took pics of how to do it, to demonstrate it. But I could make one if you want me to, so you can see it works?

John,thats would be helpful/inspirational,yes please ^-^ Like, a sim doing your made animation
Well,Ive been playing around in Milkshape and its funny to to imagine my sim doing a twirl or pose,lol.

So,I understand that what you said in the Tute,you assign the animation to a scuplture....? :/

What do you mean by assign it to a sculpture?

I mean that you click on a custom scuplture then the selected sim will do the animation Like Shaklins flamingo or JayDees(SP/right name?)animation boxes

Ohh, yeah, just like that. If you have more modding/coding experience you can do the animation however you want.

Yay,people understand me! I find it hard to make sense of explaining things....(does that make sense? ) Im trying to make a Posing Painting with new animation,Ill tell you how it goes ^0^

Ok, great!!

WOOT! I did it! HEHE!
The 1st time I screwed it up,so I started from scratch,and followed the tut EXACTLY! But I needed to add the Adult Anim textfile also,but it worked! ^-^
The animation needs to be edited because it shows the default pose(the 1 that stands with arms out).
So now,my next goal is to add about 20custom moving poses.
I would have to make 2 new BHavs for each animation tho,eh

THANK YOU!
:D:D:D:D

edit-
is there a way I can add the animation (the 1 taken from the HotTub in the tute) to the Sculpture (in my case,painting). Because when I add it to the painting,the sim doesnt do anything when told to do the animation

I add the 'latest' anim (the 1 where i replace the original with the anim from milkshape). I then extract that, then add it to the Painting...
I could add several animations to 1 painting cant i?

Technically it should work when you add it to the painting. I would check to see if the name is the same as the one in the textlist. And yes, you can add as many animations as you want to a painting or any other object.

Woot,Ive managed to make a second anim work, I figured that to add a new anim,open your cloned object (in the tut the hot tub), then fix integrity and put in something that relates to the anim, then do as normal

Ill probably stop spamming up this thread now,lol!

lol, glad to see you are getting the hang of it.

First try worked wonderfully, second try failed miserably. I'll keep at it.

Moving to Tutorials area.

Firstly, thankyou very much for this tutorial - it's really easy to follow and the results seem to be very effective!

However, I'm having difficulties converting the .smd into an .anim file; I've made my animation and tried to convert it - however, I get a debugging message saying "an unhandled exception has occured in your application... Input string was not in a correct format.

I'm working with Milkshape 1.7.0 - could this be causing problems, or could the problem lie in my .smd file?

Thanks in advance for the help

transylvanian, It would most likely be the converter which is messing up. Try make another animation and test to see if it will convert it, if it doesnt, downlooad the converter again. If that doesnt fix it, I have no clue.

Transylvanian, just a guess... Maybe check your regional settings - commas vs dots for the decimals. I'm sure that's the error I got when I fist tried to work with ASCII or smd files, can't remember which right now; I had to change my french separator settings to english ones.

I've checked all those settings and they seem to be fine (. for Decimals, etc.) Still having problems, but it will convert the original simbody.smd file into an animation, even though it isn't animated. =\ Just to confirm, would you be able to make animations that are still poses? That could possibly be the problem...

Depends, if you have the animation use the same pose for a certain amount of time and frames, yeah you can, but have it use a single frame for a prolonged amount of time, no.

I would think if you looped the animation in the BHAV, so they continue animating till you cancel it, that would result in a still pose.

I can't really see myself doing a custom animation. but your tutorial is very easy to follow. which I would probably imagine makes the possibility of [me] making a custom animation more porbable

this tutorial is very helpful..thanks I do plan to try it out

While you cannot readily select the Locomotion Type index parameter, Miche's program passes the parameters of the ANIM file you feed to it on to the output file. And one of those parameters has been identified as being for a pose (others include turn and go, turn and stop, turn in place, step, step in place, and walkstyle).

You could also browse wiki for the writeup that atavera did on ANIM files, and edit yours with a hex editor (masochists only need apply for instructions on this).

<* Wes *>

Hey thanks alot for this. I do have one problem though. When I went to test it whenever I put the object in the lot time stops and it's as if I have the game on pause no matter what speed the game is on. Does anyone have any ideas of what the problem could be?