Here's my contribution to this project, but the whole idea is Wes's - I only had too much fun making it work

So here's a cute swimsuit... Erm, in fact until now I intended to offer a slightly more dressed-up outfit, but for more than a week I haven't been able to properly export a mesh from Milkshape and I'm afraid it's related to my computer dying a slow nasty death.
Well, these are example files, what matters is to give an idea of the fun things that can be done now



My heartfelt thanks to JohnBrehaut and Echo for their tutorials that finally got me started, and to Wes of course for making this possible and his continued support and patience!

Credits for the wm-dance-loop-tester package go to Squinge for the "Hula dance and more" it was cloned from, and to Wesley Howe for adapting it.


How to use:

The "wm-dance-loop-tester.package" will add a "dance loop" interaction to the selected sim's menu.
The loop will perform until you cancel it and choose another action.
This animation, while functional with any outfit, was designed for use with the "bounce-test" outfit. With any other I'm afraid it will be rather boring, despite all the pains I took in making my first animation


How it works:

The "bounce-test" mesh features assignments to the breathe_trans bone, which is seldom used in the game; in fact, only the afbodynaked mesh has a few vertices assigned to that bone. For this reason,it was tempting to use it for adding a little more 3D realism to the female sims.

If you are curious and take a look at the torso with Milkshape, you'll notice that I decreased the weightings on the usual 3 bones used in this area, in order to set very small weightings on the breathe_trans as the fourth bone; this way, the mesh won't distort during normal animations, and the breathe_trans can still be used for another purpose.
Due to the small weightings used, in order to achieve a visible effect, the bone must make considerable (as much as 10 x) moves; but I noticed this allows for a smoother animation.

Well that's all I can think of for now, but you're welcome to ask any questions and I'll do my best to reply - just be aware that I'm learning as I go!


You are welcome to recolour, dissect, edit, improve the mesh and use it for your own experiments; you can also import your own animations in the wm-dance-loop-tester package, or clone it with credits to Wes, and to Squinge for the original package.

What marvine was 'dancing' around in her post is that her animation has animated boobies. A much more realistic representation of a dance than the way the game comes from EA.

And while I may be able to make software, taking the time and attention to capture the movements so naturally and make such a good animation shows how talented marvine is.

<* Wes *>

Heh heh... I had interpreted that as such. I'll be trying this out as soon as I get home, great work Marvine! :D

I did have a chance to try this already, it looks great!

Very clever, and nicely done Marvine.

There is now a nice little animated gif up there, wait for it to load, and you can get a glimpse of the action

lol, That looks awesome. It would have taken a while to get it so smooth. Great work Marvine.

Oh, we're allowed to say "boobies", cool!

Thank you very much for adding the gif, Tig, it sure is more explanatory

haha nice job guys, feel like i need to hide my game from my mom now...errr

never the less this is a amazing step youve made in Sims creations and i bow to you masters!

Excellent work - thank you!

I wanted to use the dance loop package to test a new animation that I created myself, but I'm having some issues. Are there more steps than just replacing the dance animation file in SimPE with my new animation file exported from Milkshape?

I'm not entirely sure if I'm messing up on the package side of things, or the animation itself. These are the steps I was taking:

1. Open one of Dr. Pixel's base animation meshes in Milkshape.

2. Animate a few keyframes (I've been working off of a couple of the animation tutorials on this site) - I've made sure to include a beginning keyframe before editing anything. I also have the "operate on selected joints only" option on. I've made sure that I'm using "rotate" on a rot joint.

3. Export the file using the AniMesh plugin.

4. Open the dance loop package in SimPE, right click on the ANIM file, select "replace," and choose the new file I just exported - then save.

When I go into the game and try the dance loop interaction, the Sim just kind of freezes for a few seconds and then goes back to a normal idle pose.

One thing I did notice is that in SimPE, for the original file, the plugin view for the ANIM file shows a "SubMesh" of "auskel". After replacing the ANIM file with mine, the SubMesh field becomes blank. Is this somehow related?

Thanks for any help anyone can offer. I've become a pretty experienced mesher, but animation is new territory for me. I'm reading and re-reading all the relevant tutorials, but I'm stuck on this one!

Make sure you do not have your testing mod and the original dance animation in the game at the same time. Using the replace method you will leave the file with the same TGI. If you are going to do that, you need to make sure you do not use 'Fix TGI' on the animation.

The better (but not necessarily only) way to do this is to rename the animation to somthing unique of your own, like shadylady_test1_anim. After making the name change, click on Fix TGI and then commit. Then, in the text list (STR#) for the animation names (Anims - Adult) you will see the old animation name. I am not sure which file I have here is the final version name, but in the text list you do not include the "_anim" part. Replace the old name with your new one.

When you picked export, there was an options dialog. For the body animation, "auskel" is the root name for adults, while "cuskel" would be for children. While I did not find setting the animation type to "Body Animation" and the locomotion type to "none" to have a discernable effect on the game engine, I did not test enough cases to say that it makes no difference.

The one really important element is the Length (ms) parameter. This is the animation time, in 1/1,000 of a second for the whole animation. You will see that in MilkShape, the frames are numbered 1, 2, ... 67, whatever. The exporter uses the highest frame number and the total time you specify to calculate the actual time for each frame to start.

The one thing that maybe you forgot, and matches your symptoms, is that you need to move the timeline slider at the bottom to a new frame number, THEN rotate a leg or whatever, and THEN select the set keyframe menu (or ctrl-k). Remember to do this for each new frame, because MilkShape does not automatically advance it after you set the keyframe. Otherwise, you are just modifying the first frame over and over, and your exported animation will only have one frame in it, so it will look like the sim just froze for however long you specified the animation to last.

<* Wes *>

If all this fails, post your problem child here or in the exporter thread and I will look at it. Certainly, we haven't learned all the common mistakes yet, because we haven't been doing this too long.

Thank you *so* much Wes, your suggestions helped me solve the problem!

I didn't realize I needed to do a 'fix TGI' on my animation, and that did the trick.

I should've mentioned this in my other post, but thank you so very much for these new tools. Ever since I first got into meshing I've wanted to learn more about animation, but I never thought I'd see the day where I could actually do something with it! I'm continually in awe of you and the other talented people here at MTS2 that help make all of these things possible, and take the time to write the tutorials and offer support.

Now I know what I'll be doing all weekend.

omg its super kool
i tried doing breast bounce a few months ago but failed-but this looks sooo koool!

Thanks for posting your results. This helps not only me, but those that are stuck with the same issue.

<* Wes *>

i loved it sooo much that had to do some recolors cos there werent any available-i am poor at recoloring but managed to get something
i have its 5 recolors at my site
owaiz.com

Thank you very much Owaizoo, you recolours are very cute
I didn't see a link to this thread on your site though, so people might miss the wm-dance-loop-tester package that enables the bounce animation. Or maybe I didn't look in the right place?

u r welcome
the link to the dance is on the page where the recolors are available for download
downloads/skins/mixedsets
at the very bottom of the image,its on the bottom of the credits,,,

Wow.

*grabs everything and scurries off to Tower*

* wes_h smiles

Yay, the Tower!! :D

Warlokk, I should have PMd you - I just don't have the time to think these days *slaps self anway*

This is great. The animation works really smooth.

Too bad it is too complex to add new walk or run style because it will be really nice if the bosom can bounce when sim run like real things.

I made recolors at
http://z12.invisionfree.com/simscon...0&#entry2804006







Te

Yes, I agree, that would be the real ultimate accomplishment, is being able to add something like this into existing animations... for now the only way to achieve it would be to replace them completely with re-done animations.

You know, the first body meshes we were able to put in the game had no morphs and one joint assignment. It took a little while to get from there to what we can now do.
Now, I didn't do the basic research on the animation, I just tried to make it a more viable option with this plugin. Replacing all the walk animatons is a daunting looking task. But then, not too long ago, who would have thought someone would not only make a DD size mesh, but make it available in a significant number of waist sizes, too?
Now, if anyone wanted to start working on any new animations that utilized this technique, they would need to have some sort of a Sim mesh that had the proper assignments. So, far, there is just this one.
So, here we have one chicken and one egg. In the same way we went from no custom meshes to the wide variety we have now, we can go from one animation to a whole variety of them. Default replacements, with weightings, for at least the af mesh and a few new default replacement animations would make a whole new look.
There are a whole wealth of possibilities that haven't even been touched on yet, some of which should not be discussed here, and not all of which are confined to "sim wimmen".

<* Wes *>

Very good point, Wes... we gotta start somewhere. I think I will add the weights for this technique to my new meshes, so they'll work for this little tidbit, and also work for anything that comes from it... can't hurt to be prepared... :D

Hey DRPixel! Do u know how 2 animate textures? Im trying to make river and waterfall from animated carpets. Can u please ttell me if u know?