Animations are tricky things, and a lot of elements have to be just perfect for them to work correctly. Here are the symptoms of a few of the frequently made mistakes, and an explanation about what causes them.

My multi-tile object intermittently says it's not animatable

This problem occurs because multi-tile objects have multiple OBJD files but only one skeleton. That means that only one of the OBJDs can know about the skeleton, and that's the "lead tile". If your interaction is pointing at one of the other tiles, then you will get an error.

You can set the stack object ID to the current object's lead tile using an expression like this:
Stack Object ID 0x00 := Stack Object's lead tile ID
Add that just before you need to run anything on the object and it should work again, assuming everything else is correct!

When my object is turning in a circle, it suddenly spins around in the opposite direction for no reason!

This happens because of a difference between the way Milkshape works and the way The Sims works. In Milkshape, the angles in a circle go from -179 through to +180. If you rotate something 181 degrees in the positive direction, Milkshape will store that as -179, because it wraps around. The Sims doesn't work that way though, if you rotate something 181 degrees in the positive direction, the game sees that to be +181 degrees.

When Milkshape exports its rotation as -179, the game things it has to go 360 degrees in the negative direction to get to the right point. That's why your animation spins.

At the moment there are three options to deal with this issue:
(1) Make sure your animation never rotates more than 180 degrees from its start point,
(2) Disguise the flip somehow (by covering it up or integrating it in your interaction), or
(3) Edit the rotation manually in SimPE.

I can't loop my animation / My interaction finishes before the object animation does / I keep getting "Requesting animation for the third time" errors

For many BHAV coders, this is probably the first non-blocking primitive you've encountered, so you'll need to learn a few tricks to deal with them.

Most commands in BHAVs are 'blocking' commands. That means that you call them, they do what they need to do, then they return. If you tell a sim to "go to relative position", then they will walk to that location and then the command will return either true or false. Animate object and animate overlay are different though. When they get run, the start the animation then return immediately. That is how it is possible to run an object animation and a sim animation at the same time, or run an overlay over a regular sim animation. Unfortunately, it makes them quite difficult to use in loops, because you'll endup starting the next animations before the previous ones finish, potentially causing the irritating "third time" error.

There are numerous ways to work around this, and which one you want to use depends on what you're trying to achieve. I'll leave the investigation up to you, but to point you in the right direction, here are a couple of common techniques:
(1) "Stop animation" primitive
(2) Event threads
(3) Forced idling, and
(4) Synchronized blocking animations (eg, "Animate Sim").

Alright ive made an animation.

I used the BasebodyMale thing, i saved it into an Bodyoverlay,
locomotion: pose.

I did got my animbox setled up. but when i click "start' in the game, the animation apears, but like.. its not really the same as the one ive made in milkshape 3d.

But i recongise that when i start the animation, and then i click for example: "Go here" (walk) the animation looks more alike..

So im there thinking that an animation plugin or something is missing, and that when the sim is doing the animation, as its overlay the sim (walks, talks, all the animation when i have my game in Free will) the animation looks alike in milkshape 3d, BCoZ its missign an animation.. but ive tried so many things!

could you please please help me! i dare you i beg you! i really wanna make animations! thanks.

here is the video of my problem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lF8EjLYNB4

much love! thank you so much~! -Aleex

Hi Aleex,

There are a couple of possibilities. Could you post your package file(s)?

Echo

Alright.. um so here is my 2 packages of the hack and import:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?czhmiezmmmr

(You'll find in the rar the ".5an" and the "Ms3d" files that i created with Milkshape 3d bcoz im sure there is something wrong in them but i just cant get trough.)

thanks!

anoyeness, I'm pretty sure the issue here is simply that you're running Animate Overlay at low priority in your "start - pose1" BHAV, rather than Animate Sim (or even animate overlay with a high priority). Body idle and gesture animations also play at overlay-low, so your animation and the default idle animations are getting mashed together, giving you the odd movements.

When your sim starts walking, they drop out of idle animations (animateOverlay low) and into locomotion animations (animateSim low) which have an even lower priority. At that point, your animation wins out (because it is slightly higher priority), and the sim starts to look more like you expect him to.

Given the look you're going for with that animation (whole body moving) I'm pretty sure you just want a plain old "Animate Sim" with a high priority. There is a wonderful detailed description of it here:
http://www.sims2wiki.info/0x006A

If you want to play secondary animations (like face morphs) over the top of this, you can still make them overlays without any hassle.

If you're dead set on playing it as an overlay, you'll probably need to push it up to at least medium priority, possibly even high.

Oh my gosh you know so much and so talented in these stuff.. but thanks im gonna try putting it as animate sim...

But i can understand that other people got to have their aniamtion / poses working with the help of Jasumi tutorial
http://forums.sim-oasis.com/index.php?topic=597.0

So yeah its weird that i cant have my animations working as animate overlay >=O

OMG I CANT EFFIN BELIEVE MY EYES!
I TRIED TO SET IT INTO HIGH PRORITY AND ITS WORKING GREAT NOW! DONT WORRY WITH MY PREVIOUS REPLY! OMG THANK YOU AO MUCH ULL BE THANKED IN MY FOLLOWING NEW VIDEO! OMG THAN KYOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
yayyyY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IM PARTYING! THANK YOU SO MUCH ECHO <3

Glad to hear you got it working!

By the way is there a way to create facial animations? like how decorgal made her frame talk hack?

There is, but it's not very accessible. I've never done it, but I think there are some alpha tools Wes made a while back which allow facial morph animations. The easiest option is to re-use existing facial animations as overlays. There are already quite a lot of them to combine and re-use.

mkay.. >.< tho its not really important lol i jus askin.

Um i may look like a fool doing this here! xd i mean im not very good at making post and ect.. i cant even find the button to make a new post >.<

Alright as i finaly know how to make new animations/poses i wanted to know what was the solution that could make like for example the hands do a pose ( As overlay) and the sim could walk with this pose that affects only the hands.

Like trendyhendy's walk halk, umm Decorgal Adele prop hack.. i mean u know what i mean xD

Id liek to make new poses like this if you could help me out ill finaly have great and better movies! thank you so much Echo!

anoyeness, they are overlay animations. They are essentially a pose animation, played at a very high priority, with no blend out, so they hang around until an "animation stop" is run on that sim. If you look at the code in those hacks, you should see how it works.

I decided to post on this thread instead of mine. Here are some pics of frame numbers in simpe. I wasn't quite sure what you were talking about when you told me to change the rotation so I put this up. Now I did attempt to change these, but I'm not even sure if this is what you were talking about. I really hope you can help me.

Don't try and use the Raw View, go back to the cAnimResourceConst view. Then select the joint from the list. Each item in the tree below represents one keyframe. If you expand the tree, you'll see the x/y/z rotation values.

I just get the frame number and 0;0 like 2800:0;0 And they're all linear. Is it suppose to be like that? My other animations that work are like that.

Make sure you're selecting the correct joint from the drop down list. What you've described sounds like a joint that doesn't move through the animation.