I've been playing around with making a new custom animation as a learning experience. I made a neutral starting keyframe and then made several more keyframes with "Operate On Selected Joints Only" checked in Milkshape. I reached the midpoint of my animation and everything seems to work smoothly so far. I then wanted to reverse the original frames order to return to the neutral pose again. However when I copy a keyframe and then try to paste them back in reverse order nothing seems to change in the last half of the animation. The model basically seems stuck in the last pose I made by hand and each new frame basically resembles that midpoint frame and is not like the frame I copied. I've tried copying each pose with the "Selected Joints" checked and unchecked and selecting all of the joints before copying and pasting but nothing seems to work. Any ideas on what I am doing wrong? I could just reverse all of the motions I made by hand and make the new frames manually but this would save time for future projects as well potentially.

I have seen that there are modifiers to animations in the BHAV structure to handle mirroring animations to cover left-handed/right-handed moves (as I understand what I have read/studied.) Is it possible using a modifier to just stop at the midway point and then call the animation again but in reverse which would work as well as that would give additional options I could work off of as well.

Thanks for any advice.

I never have quite figured out the copy keyframes myself. So I wrote a real simple raw keyframe exporter and importer plugin pair, and they are posted in message #1 of the AniMesh thread. They are very simple creatures, operating on MilkShape keyframes (and thus not really sims2 specific), and they append previously exported keyframes on import.

The intermediate file format is ascii text. You could take your three initial frames, export them, and make five (you wouldn't want to repeat the third if it is a smooth motion). So the movement data from frames 1-2-3 become 1-2-3-2-1, clear all the frames and import your new animation keys.

<* Wes *>

Hi Wes and wyzzard,

I'm surprised that you guys didn't know. Then again, it's not stated clearly in the programme I guess, but it just came naturally for me.

Here's the trick, you need to click on "Set Keyframe (Ctrl + K)" right after you paste a keyframe, without moving away from that point in the timeline. Copy only from a previously set keyframe. This works regardless of any options of joints selected from all to none. Just be sure you are in Anim mode.

I actually demand more user-friendly functions. Hopefully in the next upgrade, there'll be a function to shift keyframes with a simple click and drag of the keyframes in the timeline. Does anyone know of a better way to move keyframes around?

That did the trick... I guess I should have realized since you have to "Set Keyframe" before moving on normally (which I have forgotten to do countless times... :-) ) that the "Paste Keyframe" didn't do that automatically as part of the paste. Most of my playing around with the animation in MS3d I wasn't trying to reuse any frames since I was practicing mostly and didn't use the copy/paste function.

Thanks for the help.

Thanks, Kodiak.

Yes, remembering to set a keyframe" and then remembering to increment the frame counter before spending a bunch of time posing my model just so, only to find I didn't increment the frame counter.

If there was a (optional) method to automatically increment the counter after setting a keyframe, it would be a useful thing. Bit I don't know of it, and it is not one of the things accessible from the programming interface.

<* Wes *>