The animation looks the same whether exported by milkshape or fragmotion, so I don't think there is a problem there.

EDIT: I think there is a tool in milkshape to reset all joints rotations.

I`ve just looking at your animation in milkshape...loaded the smd file "simsbody.smd" and then your animation (add it to the body mesh). And at first everything looks ok untill you play the animation through once. then on the first frame the right arm and hand is all messed up (all twisted).

I`m not sure if this is the main problem but there certainly seems to be something here.

When I load simbody.smd (that you supplied) the right arm is already twisted. I think that is what you are seeing.

I have supplied the ms3d file that I have been using.

Edit: The bones are twisted, the vertices are in the right place.

I don`t think it`s the problem as it`s the left hand what is more wrong in the game than the right but there certainly is something what happens to the right arm when playing your animation..loading in the simbody.smd and the arm is okay (no twist at all, so I`m not sure what I`m doing different to you) but once the animation is played then it is twisted (and looking closer now it`s twisted in every frame once the animation has been played.)

As I said I don`t think the twisting is the problem (not in it`s self anyway, as the left arm is more wrong than the right in the game).

I need to look closer but what I have a feeling that it could be that I`ve too closely tied the converter to the way the bones are (intially) in simbody.smd.

It might be that different bodies exported from SimPE have different bone settings on them. As I had to play around for ages trying to get the arms right, in the end I had to inverse some of the axis on the right arm's bones because of the starting rotations on those bones.

If you could try a couple of simple animations using the simbody.smd file as a starting point, this would help to see if I`m on the right track.

I am goiing to try some animations based on simbody.smd now.

This is what simbody looks like when I import it.

Have you seen the tutorials on this page ?:
http://www.softimage.com/community/...i/tutorials.htm

Another program I hadn't heard of
Does it export SMD?
I'm going to download it and take a look at it.

I had downloaded the XSI Foundation trial and use it, and the mod tool is apparently based on it. It was pretty easy to animate in XSI-Foundation. If the mod tool is the same basic program with smd support, you shouldn't have any problems. After I dld it, I'll try a test anim, and if I get it to work, I can post basic instructions on how to use it.

I tried to import / replace it in your testanim.package, but it didn't seem to replace it, your somersault was still there. When I replaced the anim in simpe, SimPE says "The resource was changed... should SimPE reload it?'. I wasn't sure whether to answer yes or no at that point. I *thought* it meant that if I answer 'yes' it will revert to the "pre-replaced" version? If that's true, I don't understand why the program would be asking that, it's almost like it's asking you if you want to undo your replace.

Can you explain/ (provide a link to any sites ) how the BHAV function ties into / connects with the animatoin in the testanmim.package? I looked at the BHAV page, and have looked through the few BHAV tutorials that I've found but haven't found a clear explanation of how they are connected.


I *did* try making a test anim, I attached it, it's a very crude golf swing

Mike

Your right , I hadn`t noticed this before and of course I`ve been using that as the first frame so it never showed up in the animations I made (by showing the vertices twisted.)

As far as I know, I never twisted this like this, just used it straight from how SimPE exported it.

Anyway well it`s likely that at the moment the converter is expecting it to be like that as like I said I had to play around a bit to get the right arm to work. Even so it still doesn`t explain why the left arm isn`t working correctly in your animation.

If you could try a couple of animations (using simbody as the reference) effecting the left arm and also the head and neck as it seem like from your animation that these need inversing too.

At the moment I`m with out a program to make animations (as my trails ran out today) and I`m undecided if I`ll buy milkshape or fragmotion or any program.)


but anyway I need to work out what I`m doing wrong in the converter and also lose the bit where it expects the right arm in the rotation of simbody.

thanks for bringing this all to my attention.

Yeah I have the mod tool (its the main reason I started supporting smd file when we were making the mesh tool, as it was a free program which supports them.) but there are two problems with making animations with it...one I don`t know how to, and two the bigger one ...it does some weird things to the sequence smd files when exporting them. In that I`ve not seen any other program do it, it only exports the positions and rotations of bones which have changed in that frame, so if the bone hasn`t changed then it doesn`t appear in that keyframe. Okay this is kind of sensible as it cuts down the file size, but it`s non standard and makes the task of reading them into the converter much harder (and isn`t currently supported by the converter.)

The bit about how the BHAV`s work with regards to animations, I don`t think there is a tutorial and it`ll take me a while to write one, but I wll try to get round to it as soon as I can.

I tried a simple kneeling animation. I used simbody.smd and Animation_template.smd.

In Fragmotion the knees are on the ground at the end of the animation. In the Sims App the whole body is gravitating over the ground. It seems that there is a translation of the root bone, but it is not enough. Perhaps some different scaling between smd and Sims?

I attach the files in this message if you want to have a look.

Best Regards,
Ruhrmetall

Miche.

This is a very simple both arm animation using simbody.smd as the base. I have only manipulated the upperarm and forearm in both arms. The results are very twisted. (Please don't be offended by the anim)

I will do something with the neck later. There may be other problems with manipulating the neck because the game animates it in reactions to other sims, etc.

EDIT: Download deleted

Hmm, I'll report my findings with the mod tool.

As for the BHAV, I don't need a full blown tutorial, there must be some kind of 'magic number' that I can't see that connects the BHAV to the animation. How did you know that when you pressed 'ANIMATE' that your animation was going to run?

Mike

The animate sim operands are

xx 00 00 yy 00 00 zz 00
00 0a 00 00 01 ff 00 00

where:
xx is the item in the text list with the name of the animation
yy is the speed at which the animation plays (Usually 20)
zz is the instance number of the text lists (81=adult,8A=teen,82=child,etc)

The rest refers to callback procedures for events, etc. so should be set as above.

eg

01 00 00 20 00 00 81 00
00 0a 00 00 01 ff 00 00

will run animation number 1 from the adult animation text list.

This is just simple due to that I haven`t used the correct scaling in the translations of the root bone, it`s very easy to fix and I`ll do that later.

What was more worrying about your animation is that some how inside the anim file, the time had only half been updated to the 5000 that you seemed to use. I don`t know how this happened, I`ve tried to recreate the problem but it always gets updated correctly for me.

Could you reconvert the kneel.smd (make sure you delete the kneel.smd.anim first so there is no overwriting) and then post it again.

But all in all, your animation is really the first one (by anyone other than me) to work correctly (the scaling isn`t a error or anything just a difference in scale which can be fixed. )

I think i used the default 2000 ms. I noticed that the anim file after reconverting now are shorter than the one i posted before. Perhaps I mixed them from different tries with different frame numbers etc. I also had sometimes more than one instance of the converter active, perhaps thats a problem? Another thing i noticed is that if i re-import (merge) my smd into fragmotion, it creates more keyframes than i did originally.

Anyway i cannot reproduce a anim file with the size of my first post. :argh:

I reconverted and attached the kneel.smd with 2000 ms and 5000 ms and they seem to be ok.

Best Regards,
Ruhrmetall

Thanks ! That's great !

So the animation is referenced by the *name* ? Seems strange, when everything else seems to be encoded into hex opcodes etc.

If I add/change a text resource with a new anim name it should work ? ... I'm sure there's probably more to it than that.

So, how did you know that ?

Is it documented either in the wiki or simtech ?? .. or somewhere else? (I looked, didn't see anything).
Do you have docs that you could post?

Mike

I added simple arms up and down flapping (Its called trytofly now ) but the shoulder bones really seem to make problems....

The both arms are not moving up and down but different.

Best Regards,
Ruhrmetall

yeah there are some serious problems with the arms.

But I`ve worked out a solution...I`m going to put out a request for some new body meshes with no arms.


Either that or I continue on trying to work out the problem and fixing it, but I`m going to take a break from the problem for a few hours (or maybe till tomorrow) and then hopefully when I come back to it the solution will be clear.

is it possible to have two sims (or more) interact with each other in an animation??

Well first we need to get the conversion right but no a animation only effect one sim, the way the sims interact is...

when they do some social thing a "control" object is created and both sims are told to do a action on this. So if two sims are to kiss, a kiss control object is created and one of the sims is told to perfom "sim a kiss sim b" action on it, while the other sim is told to perfrom a action like "sim b is kissed by sim a". Then this control object coordinates the movements and animations of the two sims (but each sim is playing seperate animations).

(note the names of the control object and the actions that I`ve used are made up, they all have various names in the game).

Also animations can trigger events at various stages during it`s playback (this won`t be supported for custom animations for quite a while yet) , so that they can tell a BHAV that it`s time to do something. (like put the object into the sims hand so it can continue the rest of the animation with the object.)

would your program be able to handle two animations working together, do you need to use SimPe?

Miche, I've a problem with your converter, smd file created by MilkShape 1.7.0 have extra space in each line so can you make the converter able to read a line like that '' 1 "root_trans" 0'' for the moment it works only with line like this ''1 "root_trans" 0''. Sorry for the stupid problem but I don't know how to remove these space automatically (and why MilkShape create these extraspaces).

It`s not anything to do with the animations or Simpe. The control objects just need to be made (the BHAV`s for them). There is nothing different between a animation which is used like that and any other animation. ALl what is different is two animations are being played together which have been designed to make the sims look like they are doing something together.

okay I`ll add this once I have sorted out the problem with the arms.

Quite a few things are referenced by name. The name is used to generate the instance and subtype (High instance) of the animation resource. So if you change the name of the animation resource in SimPE then you have to click the fix TGI button and commit. Then you have to edit the text list with the new name of the animation.

There is a program called disasim2 found here which will disassemble package files, and the source code contains useful information on what to set in the operand for most things (You need to understand C++).

Also there is a number of tutorials on Variousimmers by Dizzy2 (Found here) that are useful for beginners.

I created a kick animation from "simbody.smd" with MilkShape and it works great . But if I recreate the same animation with max then export it in MilkShape the game inverse the rotation's axis though animation looks ok with MilkShape.