http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...25#startcomment

Hmmm..that's odd. Go to Sims 3 Creation forum and the Meshing subforum. From there pick the "TSE Animation base" thread. Then go to post 42.

PG I'm not sure what your issue is. The link I've given you and the directions I've given you both will work. I am not going to post Mesher's work...follow the link or the directions. No one is here so that you don't have to bother.

PG, the link for the female rig+mesh is on message #47...
oh, the hell with this links to links...

go here:
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=441722

this file is the one you're looking for, at the end of the first post of the linked thread.
You'll have to scroll down a bit to find it, because it's a looong message.
afAnimRig-WH.rar

you are looking for the female mesh+rig, right?

I'm a little bit confused about the tutorial
What's an "animation rig" ?

I'm trying to make a rigfile for teens, only to end up with errors :/
There are two files in my folder currently :
tm_body_4_anim.ms3d - It's the file I got after following the 7 steps
tm_rigfile.txt - It's the file I got from step 3

When I try to convert a clip file to smd with your animtool and it asked to find the rigfile, I choose the tm_rigfile.txt I got from the steps, but ending up with "ERR: bad parse on rig input line: 121"

So, my real question is : Is the "tm_rigfile.txt" actually an animation rig ? If yes, then why's the error ? :/
Also, do I need different bones for the teen mesh ? Or are they just the same with adult's bones ?

overlordorochi,

there is no specific rig for teens, it are just a scaled adult rig, so you can use the adult rigs to develop your animations.

Orangemittens recently condensed all rigs downloads on his tutorial : http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=438716 - post #1 item 3

Just remember to always use the rigfile provided with the rig that you are using.

So there should be no problem if I use the adult mesh and rigfile to animate teens, right ?

Also, I made a pose I wanted to use on teens using the adult mesh, it worked fine on adults, but not on teens.
I attached a picture to show you what I mean.

Hiya!
I'm interested in making poses using 3ds, is there any way I can convert the rig for making poses in 3ds max?

I ported mesher rig into an 3DS Max scene and I wanted to make IK Chain on the bones as 3DS can do that, and it would be easier to animate in there as well.
Does anyone have experience with rigging? I could use some help from that knowledge, as I am nowhere a professional on that and have absolutely no experience with rigging a skeleton properly.
I saw some tutorials but if anyone could help me that would be great.

I got IKLimb done already on the legs, but there was some distortion which was mainly caused by my skinning.
However I based my skinning while painting the vertex weights just like EA's original vertex weight for each vertex ID.
I want to get some programming done today, once I do I will see if I can make video or pictures showing it.

Also, some question, if I may ask, what is the purpose of the b__ROOT_export__ and the bones connected bones to it in relation to the animation?
Should I being making the same to those bones as well?

And on perhaps a different subject, what does Valve SMD carries?
I know it is the skeleton movements, but how are they identified?
I mean, in BOND resources it is controlled with the skeleton name being a FVN32 hash from the bone name string itself.
Are the same with the SMD?
In the SMD documentation the ID is an integer so would them be calculated by alphabetical order, and children bones and such?

- Just as posted I looked at it, its the bone name as string then.

Thanks in advance!

The Valve SMD file has two flavors, one with mesh data (reference) and one called a sequence that contains only a skeleton and animation frames. That one is what you concentrate on for animation. When building one, the SMD exporter will look at the skeletal hierarchy and build a bone list from it. Each bone will have an index and another integer that follows it which will designate the index of the parent joint, and the value -1 is used for a root (unparented) joint.

So that integer is used in the rest of the file to designate the joint. The rest are frames of skeletal data, denoted as 'time' and an integer. 'time 0' is a complete skeleton and should be the bind pose, each succeeding frame will have a line for the animation data, each line will have the integer for the joint (from the first section) and six floats, which are three postion and three rotation data values, in XYZ order, with Z-up (like in 3DS).

I have not tested 3DS generated SMD files with the AnimTool converter, in theory they should work, however the rig you are animating from needs to be set up with the joints parented and positioned just the way the game has them, or the resulting animation data will be improperly applied in the game. While it (at least usually) won;t make the game crash, I have seen some very funny looking sims during my development work caused by sending bad data to the game. It requires a number of steps to be executed properly, or the chain will break.

SMD files can be opened in any text editor, that might give you a better idea of how they are structured.

<* Wes *>

Thank you for this information, it is very useful.
I have just one question regarding it, it is related to the vertex weights.

On SMD format they are set in the triangles block according to the documentation, set along like:

<int|Parent bone> <float|PosX PosY PosZ> <normal|NormX NormY NormZ> <normal|U V> <int|links> <int|Bone ID> <normal|Weight>


What exactly identifies each vertex? In this case would it be the position, set to match along with the skeleton?

The idea is to try to make a bridge between MAXScript and the SMD format, while I can get my skinning to export to SMD, some vertex weight get crunch and not smooth like the ones present on my original.
Since this would lead to another discussion I will open a different thread, maybe you can look at it, perhaps we could finally go through these tools skinning.

Regarding the CLIP, the one I made on 3DS worked fine in game. No explosions, no crash, nothing.
However I am yet to test a full animation, I tested it quickly but it had only two frames, so it was hard to take a look, but when I paused I could see the joints I changed were actually moved along.
Somehow before exporting I have to remove every IK Chain I add to 3DS scene, is that the standard for converting to .animation?

Thank you once again.

I haven't spent much time examining the weights part of SMD. But here is an example from a SMD reference file exported by MilkShape:

Looking at the last five numbers on that line. '2' indicates there are two joint/weight pairs, the first is joint 39, weights 0.87 and the second is joint 65, weight 0.13.
Note they total 1.00. The joints would be the same as the index from the start of the file. I am not a 3DS programmer, but I believe the weights would be fractional components, as they are in almost all other 3D programs.

Note that you only want to export a 'sequence' SMD file (no triangles section like a reference SMD file) to send to the AnimTool. I assume you are needing the triangles section to transfer a smoothed mesh with multiple weights into or out of 3DS for your own use, but I believe the presence of a triangles section will choke the AnimTool.

Getting the animation into the game depends on a few things being done exactly the same way the game does them. Your bind pose (initial joint positions and rotations) should be the same as the game uses (or the animations will be off). The same joint names with the same parent joints is important, and the parents must be defined before the children. If you export the IK joints without animating them, they will override the animation you are trying to export on the legs and hips, meaning you either have to base your animations on using the IK chains, or delete them to avoid conflicts.

<* Wes *>

I see! In 3DS they are set as float as well. I just wonder though if the vertices are the same indexing using MAXScript from the SMD file.

I wrote a little about a script on development here: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=449404
In case you want to see.

However in order to continue I would need to see how I calculate the bones as their specific integer before I could go any further.

As for the parent bones, they are all connected so moving a root joint moves its children and so on;
Here's a schematic view of the pelvis for example, being the parent bones and their children;


I will try to make a custom animation with more movements and see if this current scene works well with a high amount of frames using your tool.
The good thing in Max is that animations are quite easy to make, specially with the IK, since I can move the leg in an "realistic" way using IK Limber.
In seconds the IK helps to spare the work I would be doing in minutes in Milkshape for example.



If you look at the right leg, there is one vertex that is not getting along with the mesh, because of my skinning, which is something I will be fixing, that just needs perfecting, because it is not present in the game.
The only thing is to provide something to base of and help to make poses and animations, in 3DS being an professional modelling/animation software that just make it easier.
Hope that I get around skinning everything as I want to make the female mesh as well.

I am interested on a different thing on this as well.
Which would be a way to make "couple poses" easier, by duplicating the skeleton;
Of course that would make their instances different, but due to SMD format being actually very simple, can make a tool that will reread the SMD and parse the default values (bone IDs) for that different skeleton by matching the ID with the name string on the nodes block;

As I experienced they export different bone IDs when the bones in the scene got modified by either cloning/instantiating;

Unless your tool doesn't look to the IDs, but the name of the bone itself?
Well, it is an interesting concept to test though.

It uses the joint names. The order needs to be consistent within the file, obviously, and that is used internally, but matching is done by name. The joint name is hashed using the FNV-32 algorithm the game uses and the hash value is passed to the CLIP file as the identifier. All of that works so long as your SMD file spits out the same name as used in the game.

Because SMD uses an indexing scheme, the name of a parent joint would come before any of its children, but how many lines before is irrelevant. The AnimTool converter watches for this condition, and would issue an error message... this restriction exists mainly because the file is parsed a line at a time, so unless a parent has been defined already, the child joint will be unable to be linked to it.

As for second skeletons, that would in theory work if the names were unique except the AnimTool does not accept more than 255 joints. I would suggest that if you want to design a tool that will work with multiple skeletons that you think about making your exporter work just by exporting selected joints and their animation keys. SMD is not an ideal animation format (and is a poor mesh format) but it is sufficient for what we are trying to do here.

<* Wes *>

p.s. Please be sure to post some pictures when you get this working, too.

I had very little time to work on this due to life, but I exported an animation with the IKs baked and it kind-of worked fine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Vz8YqrJzE
The sim feet goes inside the ground, however the issue is that I constrained the position of the foot world joints to the respective foot joints, so they moved together.
I have no idea why I did this, but anyway, at least that means the animation was exported successfully done with the IK.

I still need to finish the IK setup though, this is current one:


On the left foot it has one to control the leg within the pelvis, I still need to make one to the pelvis so can lower it to the root;
Once I finish the IK, I can just import the female body and start skinning, the problems is to match EA skin, so can visualize it on the 3DS before exporting;
It is a lot of work, but I guess it would be worth it.
I am not that interested on machinima or making animations whatsoever, but the development of this is what puts me through this.

The idea on the "couple" anim, would be to clone the skeleton, having two skeletons to work with in the same scene.
While exporting, due to the names being different, they would have different indexes (perhaps not if to export one skeleton each time, or write a simple MAXScript to rename the bones back to their original names).

Once I get more consistent work on this I will let you know, perhaps upload a animation for people who would be willing to test it as well.
However I still need mesher approval for me, whenever I am able to upload some "beta" version, as it is originally his rig setup, I contacted him via PM just waiting for his reply.
Thanks for the invaluable help!

We're developing the same things at the same time. =D I didn't want to post until I had more stuff to show (I'm also experimenting with other stuff regarding animations), but since we're both developing, I wanted to share my experiences.
I'm using Motion Builder, since that has a very robust automated Inverse Kinematics system. I've succesfully transferred FBIK animations from Motion Builder into the game. Feets lock onto the ground, I can lift the pelvis and transform the full position of the Sim (for instance make a Sim float in the air). At least in early tests everything seems to be transferring fine. You can't use the existing IK chains in the CLIP files though, you need to delete them, as Motion Builder bakes the animation down to the bones level. Which is good actually, because that allows for some very complex animations to transfer through the SMD format to the CLIP files.

Here's an example of the setup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u88T40xp8w

And here's a really really rough example in the game. You'll notice his elbow bending incorrectly on the right arm, that's just me that messed up the actual IK animation by assigning bones incorrectly in Motion Builder. I have since fixed that issue. Also, the feet do pop in the floor at the beginning of the clip, I think this is actually due to the interpolation of the game engine itself. The whole body going down and up is animated using FBIK in Motion Builder, then bringing that over to 3Ds Max and exporting to SMD from there.

Here's the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEpaI-Oz44I
The animation is crap because I did it in like 30 seconds just to test the movement. Motion Builder is a very strong animation package. So I think it should be possible now to use Motion Builder and its great animation tools to make the animation process easier. It's a complex professional package though, so it's not really for beginners.

Hi, i know this is a super old thread and I'm not sure if anyone would reply but if someone does see this has anyone figured out how to use the sim rigs in maya? Is there a plugin available somewhere? I've been animating in maya for a while now and it's a struggle to convert the animation I make there to the sim rig in blender.