Does anyone have any idea why the game designers decided to have sims always stand with their knees very slightly bent and start bouncing up and down by bending their knees whenever they talk to each other or even perform an activity? It was in TS3 as well - can't remember if it was in TS2. But anyway in real life this just doesn't happen other than a set exercise as part of a workout, it's far too stressful on the joint. We naturally lock our knees back while standing still. I thought the animators used humans with electrodes attached to demonstrate animation so what poor actor did they force to stand with knees bent for the whole session?

Can't think of any other reason than it making the sims a bit less statue-looking when idling. They tend to do a lot of idles people don't generally do in real life.

TS3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDUIOo5jIgY (I see what you mean about the knee bouncing...)

Couldn't find idle videos for TS4 or TS2, but I have seen some previously (Youtube is becoming increasingly more difficult to get good results for)

There is some knee bouncing with all of the games, it seems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYkPzzFEMcg (unrelated to idles, but other animations have plenty)

It *really* bugs me. It's the one thing that makes me want to drown sims more than anything else. I think the reason I can't remember if ts2 sims did it was there was something even more annoying in that - the way sims' faces would massively distort when they used facial expressions.

2 VS 3 VS 4 videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYkPzzFEMcg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuDMxTL6DCw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn6YW96ToIY
(a few, anyway - there's more on Youtube)

The face thing in TS2 doesn't really bother me much (not at all, really - except for toddlers as they don't react at all to face posing) now that I've tried making poses for TS4. As a storyteller I'd much rather have all the varied faces in TS2 than one-face-per-pose in TS4 (not sure if anything can be done with that, but I don't have the patience to figure it out, and I'd rather get straight to the posing because the face is more interesting to do ingame - realizing I had to make two poses for TS4 if I needed the sim to change their face expression was a bit much). I'd also much rather have all the other neat posing tools I've got in TS2... But it's been a fun experiment.