I'm trying out the tutorials here about animating sims and objects. I've still got a ways to go with the tutorial by JohnBrehaut1, but I want to move into the animation for the spinning wheel I made for the fairytale contest, and that starts with the sim already sitting in a chair. What I can't tell from what is posted here is whether I need to start the animation with a sim base that is already sitting or if Dr. Pixel's standing base meshes should be used as is. Or is it that I move the base mesh into a sitting position for the initial keyframe, and animate the sim from there?

Your 'base' will always be the standing "T" position. That is just the way that all the meshes are standardized.

For your specific needs, you would use rotate (and move only on root_trans) to get the sim into the sitting position, and make that frame 1.

My suggestions for structuring your animation would be:

1. Make a "Sit down" animation. This would start with an arms at side frame, and end in the seated position.

2. Make a "Use Wheel" animation (or several, as needed). This would start and end with the same seated position as the Sit Down animation.

3. Make a stand up animation, which would start with the seated position and end with the arms at sides pose.

If you structure it like that, and are careful with the seated pose you use, it should play smoothly.

For all of the "Use Wheel" type animations, you would be best served by making an overlay animation. To do this, start with your seated position and then make the arms and feet do the proper cycling. Then ADD the comment "NoAnim:" (without quotes, with colon) to a second line in all the joints that you do not move, and especially the _hair bones.

After you load your base mesh, save each animation as a different MS3D file. You should not count on using that file to make any mesh changes fpr export, just for the animation. Now, as long as you do not add any new bones, you can now add extra mesh groups to help in your animation creation work. You could do this by exporting your spinning wheel as an .obj file (which has no joints) and then importing that into the anim file. Now you can see exactly where to place the posterior and arms and so on for your animation.

<* Wes *>

Ok, that sounds plain enough. My only question is regarding making a new "sit down" animation. I'm not understanding why I need to make one, as the sim will come and sit in the chair already. I cloned the wheel from the chessboard, and had no trouble getting the sim to sit in front of it. Do I still need to custom-make an animation to sit?

If it looks right when they are seated, then no.

But making your animation start and end match the seated position is important to making it work without glitches. Here's why:

When the game plays the "sit down" animation, at the end of it your sim is left posed the way the last frame ended. Whenever your animation starts, the game will make a fast move between the way that the sim is posed and your first frame. If these two positions are not close, the sims will appear to jump or jerk into position.

So that is a key item for the quality of your work. As far as making the animation, jerkiness is no problem to the game engine, it should play without a crash or a catch. One of the hardest parts getting started is to get your animation into the package, FixTGI, and get it linked properly to the right BHAVs. For that, just make a simple animation until you have the package playing right, and fill in the action afterwards.

<* Wes *>

Quick side note - there is an alternative way of producing the "while sitting" look that you want, but it depends on what you actually need the animation to do. You can set it up as an overlay, which means that when it plays it will keep the previous position for all the bones except the ones you add keyframes to. Generally they're used if you just want to plan an animation on the top half of the body, so you can run them on both standing and sitting sims without changing the animation at all. They're quite tricky to make and to code in though, so it depends on which modding tasks you're most comfortable with and what specifically you're trying to animate as to whether this is easier or harder.

Thanks both of you for all the help. I suspect that this alternate method won't work if it's only on the top half of the sim, because I need both feet and hands going at the same time. However, I'm willing to try about anything, even though I'm definitely no coder.