This is not a step-by-step tutorial, and you won't find pretty pictures in there; but since I spent a lot of time testing things for the Animesh plugin, the least I can do is share a few things I figured out the hard way.

I'm quite new to this myself, so please feel free to point out any inaccuracy or share you own tips!

*Update 18-09-2007: found explanations and workarounds for some issues.

You'll also complete find complete instructions for getting quickly started in case you just want to play with the animations, but it still requires a basic knowledge of SimPE; along with the "tutorial" in html (thanks to Beosboxboy), I'm uploading here a test object in which you'll be able to replace animations, it's just a clone of the plane model. I just spend two days trying to set up a controller and only managed to do bad things to my game... Well, at least, unlike other sculptures, that one won't get in the way >_<

While a good knowledge of objects and behaviour editing is necessary in order to build elaborate new interactions, the following should help you to get simple but fun animations in game without great pains – just let your imagination loose!

Tutorials and must read

• the Milkshape help: for your first steps with animations in Milkshape, there's an easy to follow tutorial in the help files, which you can download from the Chumbalum site and just put in your Milkshape program folder. While the chosen example is simple, the explanations are quite complete. You don't need to bother with the part about setting up the skeleton and assigning the vertices since you're going to use Unimesh extracted meshes, so you can just jump to the "create a walk animation" part.

• the Animesh exporter program notes, for details about the use of the plug-in: there's no reason to rewrite here what Wes explains clearly and extensively.

While this is not immediately necessary, my advice is still to try JohnBrehaut1's very well done sim animations tutorial that explains how to make your own test object (and skip the parts related to Miche's animation converter), and from there Echo's perfect BHAVs tutorials HERE and HERE ; you may find that new interactions aren't as daunting as you thought, and this will be an inspiration for more elaborate stuff.

For objects animations, please refer to Echo's tutorial HERE.

Have fun!

Great set of tips! Thanks for this.

I do have a question, or really just want your thoughts on this -

From experimenting with using the Maxis animations as "poses" for BodyShop, I have found that the first frame of the "start" Maxis animations is the, well, I suppose it could be called the neutral position - that is, the Sim is standing facing directly to the front, arms at sides.

When I made my child check-self-out animation, I also used that as both the first frame, and the last frame, of my animation, and it seemed to work well, it blends in nicely with the standard Maxis animations that surround it.

So, the question - I have been thinking of re-doing the Base animation meshes to include an empty animation with them - empty except that the first keyframe, in that neutral pose, would already be included.

Of course, that keyframe could easily be deleted if the animator didn't want to start from the neutral pose for some reason, but in most cases I think people would want to start from there.

Do you think they would be more useful that way?

While I am a technician, not an artist, there are two things to consider here:

Most of the idle animations start and end at the neutral position, so many of the activities you might animate would start there. But a series of animations to do exercises might have a first that starts in neutral, a last that ends in neutral, and all in between with some other neutral position, like lying on the floor.

The last is overlays. If you use a combination of "Operate Only On Selected Joints" and the "NoAnim:" tag, you can make animations that will play on top of others (there is a difference in the BHAVs for this). Starting in neutral will force the sim to that position, even if what you are trying to do is to make someone just make a rude gesture (no, not that one, you need to rework the bone assignments to make that one work).

On the other hand, I and many others appreciate all your efforts, and maybe having both would be useful. At any rate, when you watch the game and see a series of animations, it is evident the animators used some common neutral positions for the standing and the exercise animations. I would have to review some of the game about the sitting ones, although they seem to be broken into seperate down, idle and up animations (beginning and ending with the standing neutral position).

<* Wes *>

Right, there are different "neutral" positions, but maybe not that many, apart from very specific chains of anims?
For standing anims that stand on their own, arms down slightly bent with hands relaxed works very nicely most of the time, thanks to the "blending", and I used such a starting pose in most of my test animations; in the ladder I'm trying to finish, the sim just walks to the ladder and climbs without a pause in the animation (the game mirrors the animation so the sim climbs right or left foot first depending on the way it approaches).
So yes, I'd say that one would be really useful, I think people will naturally start with standing animations anyway. Maybe figuring out a few other neutrals would be interesting too...

Now Wes, you're mentioning overlays; I'm also wondering about the "priority" thing and how it's set (Jasana Bugbreeder mentions it in her "sims 2 differences" article but I didn't find anything else). My test sim caught a cold, and it was rather fun to see it sneeze randomly while performing my test animations! But now, in other cases the effect would not necessarily be welcome...

I have seen that article, but I have not actually tested the priorities.

I spent a lot of time working hard to make a way in the animation exporter to easily set the animation and locomotion type values. But what testing I did seems that those values have no effect on the way the game plays the animation.

The priorities would be encoded in the game engine, as best I can see. But there are some fields in the ANIM file that I do not understand, and this might be one of those.

At any rate, one thing to notice is that the priority is applied on a joint-by-joint basis, which I assume means that some activites would happen simultaneously despite differing priorities is the joints do not conflict.

There is so much to learn yet. In spite of all the work done a while back by Miche and Crammyboy and so many others, we know so little... just the rudiments.

<* Wes *>

I wanted to create a new animation with the first frame being an Adult Male lying on a bed alone ('Rest,' I think the action's called). What would the name of the file be for an idle lying position? I can't find it on the Sims Wiki's list of files. (I'm only collecting information right now, as I suspect I will be getting a faster laptop for Christmas).