And this may also help...I'm not a modder so I'm just throwing out what others have said that might be on point which may have gone missed by people interested in the subject.

Ive read up to this post so far and wanted to comment that I agree with the sentiments. I havent looked at the tut yet so I dont know if my situation applys, but I want to make animations, specifically a sailor moon transformation "dance", but I use Maya.

Im going to read the tutorial and hope theres info in there I can use, because I know probably 40% of what to expect from past tutorials I tried using and adapting to Maya, (and failing the process).

So I have "some" knowledge but would consider myself a noob anyway, though I can mesh, rig, animate in maya, I have all the tools at school. I plan to use zbrush to get my meshes and import to maya, its my new love and I can get the poly count game playable without losing detail.

My guess is that your main issue is going to be making a rig for Maya that the game will read animations from properly. If you can do that, and Maya can deal with the smd format, the anim tool will convert your smd to a clip that you can package for the game.

I think it shouldn't be like with many of the tutorials for other things which require you to run everything through Milkshape...as long as you can make a rig for your animation tool. That's the part where you're gonna be experimenting.

eta: Also, you might want to check out the tutorial thread on making an avi. There is a brief discussion of animating for Sims 3 using Maya there. It seems like another issue you might have is using the smd format that the animtool requires.

Thank you for the info. After reading all the tutorials I could find on the export/import I suspected I would just have to build the rig in Milkshape but I did want to try it in Maya. In the Infocenter, wiki, tuts forum, Ive searched high and low and for the life of me I cannot find anything definative for naming my bones that the game could recognize. Ive seen posts about a few specific bones but I need to see the whole thing to get an idea of the hierarchy, what to parent to, if anything, ect. The naming convention seems like I could get majorly stuck there if its not perfect. Much respect for any finger pointing to the page.

If you download the animtool there is a rigfile.txt in it that lists out all the joints...is that what you need? There's also an anim program notes txt that might help. See also the thread started by Mesher about the rig he made. The rig that Wes made and the rig that Mesher made are available to download to look at as examples.

awesome, much obliged /runs off to look

I hope you'll post your progress...I'm very interested in what you create for S3 animation.

Sorry this is a huge bump but apparently since the 26th of october animations have been possible, however there has not been a single custom animation released yet. My belief is that if you post this in the S3 downloads section it will get a lot more attention and possibly even some new animations for our game. You could put a link back to this thread for bug reports etc. Just an idea because I think there are a lot of people like me who have no idea any development has even started on animations. This post sounds like it's criticizing your work but I can assure you it's not. I am astounded that animations are being developed on (and pretty fast too) and I am also astounded that i have had no idea about it for 5 months now.

Well, the reason it is posted here is that it is incomplete and testing is needed. It needs someone more than just me to work with it.

Putting it in downloads when it is not finalized is not right. I know it works, but I also know that it has some issues: the legs suffer gimbal lock and do not move right in-game. I suspect this is related to the rigging file setup (because the rotation conversion routine for the legs is the same as all the other joints), but I bet I spent 30 or 40 hours polishing just the rigfile, and I am just too tired of it to move the ball any further on my own.

I am interested in make some of my own poses as well as anyone else here, but I personally hate the layout of both MS and blender, but sense we are working with poses, I was wondering if it's posable to work with them in Poser or Daz? Sense both of them were made for that reason.


I found out that there is a frame limit. Is that for just me?

ERR: frameCount of 221 detected, limit is 120.

I picked the

S3_00000000_EA8C8A3228C83E5B_6B20C4F3_c2c_soc_Neutral_CheerUp_Insulting_Neutral_x

file, it was the 1st Clip from fullbuild0

I also got this erro

ERR: Parent "k" for bone "óÄ" not found.

from file:

a2o_eat_barStoolOut_hand_neat_stop_inturrupted_plateDinner

Then this:

ERR: Unable to open rigging file ""

a2o_eat_barStoolOut_hand_neat_stop_inturrupted_plateDinner

I'm trying to convert Clip -> SMD

taken from this tutorial

OH! thank you very much!

I think the issue with the other clip you tried might be that it requires special rigging that has not yet been made. Wes posted about this in the same tutorial thread Cmo linked to:

"Mostly, you can edit an animation. Not all of them import smoothly, some require special rigging because they depend on extra joints and objects, like getting in a car or on a barstool."

Since the one you tried has the word barstool in the name I'm guessing it might depend on extra joints that aren't in the rigging that comes with the AnimTool. There are several clips that do (and are below the 120 frame count) but you need to try them by trial and error since there is no list of ones that work.

Also, while it's possible to make a sort of rudimentary "pose-painting" with the ChaosMage painting the issue with that is that the Sim has overlay animations that need a hack to be overridden so the Sim will hold still all the way in average game conditions...that hack has yet to be made. One nice thing about the CM painting though is that it can be anywhere on the lot and still work on a Sim that isn't necessarily in close proximity to it

Are you still working on this?

/not-so-subtle bump

I am not currently adding anything new.

So no film at 11:00? Disappointing but I can't say I'm surprised or that I blame you...it seems like a very tiring undertaking. Thank you for all that you've done moving this forward so far.

Hey I was wondering if one can make anything work with this animtool, despite the legs thing? Like for instance modify sofa-kiss animations where the legs stand still or woo-hoo bad animation, before the sims crouch under the blanket?

Did anyone tried? If not I'll try to give it a shot!!

I'm assuming that since this uses SMD that even I, a 3DS Max 9 user, will be able to make new animations for TS3 too?

I've kinda already had my dreams of trying out custom meshes shot down seeing as there's no plugin for 3DS Max to import or export TS3 meshes. :P

I also have max, so if ya make a clone look alike mesh (manually in max!) plz upload it :p

Hi Wes, I know you're not currently adding anything new, but would it be possible to either remove the 120 frame count limit, or make it larger (say 200-300). Because I feel like experimenting with this, but I keep hitting the frame count error :D
Thanks!!

I'm not sure if you saw the other thread on a similar topic by Mesher Nukael, but if you're planning on playing around with this you might find it interesting:

http://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=390523

And I agree with you...raising the frame count to at least 200 would expand the number of EA clips we can get at by quite a bit. The clips available for the child rig Mesher made, in particular, seem fairly limited by the 120 frame count ceiling.

I have been inattentive recently, partly because a while back I had a hardware failure that caused me to have to get an even bigger, faster computer. [Yes, it's my story and I'm sticking to it.]

So I had all the source safe, but I had never set the project back up in the mean time. Not a big deal, really, but more than just clicking on "Build". Nonetheless, I revised the AnimTool for buffers of 1200 frames, and that seems to work well here. I reviewed my reasons, and one was that the program reserves 32 bytes per-frame, per the MAX_JOINTS (256), and that adds up to something like 10 Megabytes.

Nowadays, 10 Megs is not much (I have 8 Gigs here), but I go back to before 1 Meg machines, so maybe my head is more conservative than needed. So instead of issuing a new full package, I just created an updated binary. Those who want, use it in place of the original; if your machine chokes, use the old one until Amazon delivers your new, shiny i7 computer with 8 Gigs (not on my account, though).

<* Wes *>

Wes you're a darlin' Thank you for updating this

Sorry you had comp issues...I hate when that happens.

okay sorry, I think you're tool is great! And I'm used to using Milkshape & SimPE for making my own custom animations. Yet S3PE makes no sense to me at all. How do I extract these clips from game objects and the .animation files? If I could work out how to use S3PE I could get some animations out into the community. Any tutorials would be much appreciated

There is a tutorial for the AnimTool in the tutorials section.

http://www.modthesims.info/showthre...t=377440&page=1