I don't understand enough to explain it very usefully but TheSweetSimmer did a tutorial about them here that helped me! There was also another tutorial I used that I can't remember the link to, I think it was a video, I'll look for that and add it here too if I can find it again.

Thank you so much! I did a bunch of searching for tutorials before Iearning the term IK chain, but it's so hard to find them when you don't know what you're really looking for!

That's cool! Well the IK targets are animated within the animation though so even if there aren't any assigned in S3PE the game could still be using them (only in the case of locomotion animations, or root transition animations).

@echoweaver IK targets are location and rotational points for the hands, feet and root of the Sim, it's what helps keep Sims from clipping their arms inside their body like if they're chubby, and for when Sims have physical contact with eachother, like holding hands (Sim A's hands are connected with Sim B's hands). In TS3, they're animated within the animation itself using various tools then for them to be used properly, they need to be assigned using s3pe.

Edit: Actually, the IK targets I talked about in my tutorial are completely different from the ones in-game. Those are simple IK targets to use while animating.

Some updates!

After learning IK chains were not what I thought they were, I tried doing them like in that tutorial again, and the animations I've made like that still play in the correct locations! Way easier to make, too. I've also switched from trying to modify existing animations to just doing the whole set fully from scratch, which has been a lot less frustrating. The new animations still aren't much to look at, but the clipping is fixed, which is good enough for me at least for a start.

Also, unlocking Go Here and interactions with toys by replacing their definition singletons with IOverridesAgeTest versions worked! And I've confirmed that toddlers incorporate stairs into their normal routing, so it's not necessary to click directly on the stairs and do "Use Stairs" every time. It doesn't seem like the Go Here replacement is interfering with NRaas GoHere in any obvious way yet (my replacement happens after GoHere's, so I'm hoping when GoHere is installed this mod will just end up unlocking the NRaas version of the interaction instead of the EA one), but I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Exciting updates! Interesting that we always try the hardest way to get things to work when it comes to TS3 modding, lol. Happy to hear almost everything you worked on was easier to do/fix than anticipated! It's a relief to know that we likely won't have to click on "use stairs" every time, though it'd have been bearable after years of one-floor-only restrictions for walking toddlers.

Question: why did you need to "unlock Go Here and interactions with toys" ? I'm not sure I understand this part: which toy interactions would be unlocked?

Normally toddlers can't interact with anything (including the ground) that's on a different level of the lot from them; all I did to the interactions I changed was make them exceptions to that.

Hmm, this might mean babies can try to Go Here now though. I should check that, I didn't put any babies in my test household.

What if we made it so babies could crawl though
(On second thought, they are newborn babies but then again, this is the sims we're talking about xd)

This information will be easy to remember, haha!


We were actually talking about that on Discord the other day, how we wished toddlers were "walking toddlers" age phase, and babies could actually "crawl" and be more like 3-months-old babies who don't walk yet (just like the age phases work in The Sims Freeplay I heard) as opposed to, you know, staring at the ceiling, stuck on their back without doing anything else for sim years...? No wonder they end up Couch Potato, Neurotic and Loners when they age up!

@MissPat @TheSweetSimmer Well it's certainly not crawling but this happened:

Look at her go She just scoots around like she's riding a roomba, this is the funniest thing I've seen all day

This looks like a horror movie type of scene, with a revengeful baby! Hahaha. But seriously imagine this with a brand new baby mesh where the baby would be crawling on their knees, how adorable would that be!

Reminds me of a scene in a haunted house movie I watched once, I think it was Poltergeist.


That would be pretty cool! Is replacing a sim mesh actually possible?

No idea TBH, going to mention @Lyralei since she is working on a face replacement mesh, hoping possibly she can let us know about a baby mesh?

it is possible but it's A PAIN to do :p I guess with a baby however it's easier since they're considered to be more like 'game objects' (like sims, but babies don't have sliders you have to worry about and convert to work with your new mesh)

Here's some work in progress of what I have to deal with  It's coming together though! Just the morphs are currently a pain to work on... if you screw up one tiny thing, you basically get the result of, well... a shiny and weird mess

Lyralei, it looks amazing, really excited for this mod!

Well looks like the baby mesh *is* possible, but until then let's disable the revengeful baby sliding action and... keep their little hands away from knives.

@Lyralei Oh hey, I was actually really curious about that but didn't want to interrupt your thread when I saw it before - what are you doing with your face replacements? Adding more detail to the face mesh?

Also, latest stairs update: first draft ascent and descent animations for walking toddlers are done. Next up are ascent and descent animations for crawling. Man, animating is the worst Exciting once it's working, but all the steps - ughhhh what a pain, I have so much respect for people who do this regularly. (I'm mostly just posting so many updates on this to remind myself I'm making progress, so I don't get tired and wander back to the peaceful familiarity of scripting for another 4 months)

Spam the progress away (said in a non-admin voice), so excited for this mod to be in the making!

Second drafts of the animations are done - I think these are okay enough to use in version 1 of the mod while I improve my animating skills until I can upgrade them, but I'm open to criticism!


My animating strategy so far, in case anyone can offer advice on how to improve it for better results (or make it faster/easier), has been to follow this order (based on how TheSweetSimmer was doing it in one of her tutorials):
- Add IK targets to toes (or whichever part is touching the ground - for the crawling animations I put IK targets on the hands too)
- Set positions of IK targeted parts in main poses of the sequence
- Set positions of IK targeted parts in intermediate poses
- Add side-to-side posture adjustments to keep the sim's center of gravity over/between the point(s) where they're touching the ground
- Add counterbalancing motions by non-weight-bearing body parts

But as you can see the animations I get through that process still don't quite look natural (especially the walking ones, upper body is still kinda stiff - I think the crawling ones actually turned out better, to my surprise). I'm not sure if that means I'm missing a step in that progression of realism-enhancements, or that I just need more practice at applying it.

Look at them go! at this rate we'd need some stair gates for toddlers! :p But it's looking awesome so far!

Thanks! With this and Cherry92's Explore Around interaction they will just be wandering all over the place, the world is their oyster :D

@TheSweetSimmer do you have any feedback for the new progress gifs, above?

@lizcandor just loving how the parent seems to be freaking out to see her children go upstairs, haha. These 2 gifs are amazing to watch <3

I decided to submit this to the queue as is, so this might be it for a while - I'll still be chipping away at it on the weekends but probably won't have any big changes.

(...I did fiddle with the Poltergeist Baby a little more though, and you can assign locomotion animations to babies by just adding a field called "baby" in the right place in the LocomotionConfig XML and following the same format as the other age groups' entries - I got the baby to roll over like that but didn't try anything else. I'm probably not going to do anything with that since I don't have a storytelling need for it, but I figured it's useful information to share!)

Question that came up today: can the toddlers use the elevators now (with this mod)? don't think it's related to the mod but curious.

No, only stairs (and only straight ones, not spiral) use the Stairs class that I changed - elevators have their own class, ElevatorDoors. I never noticed toddlers can't use elevators! Makes sense though.

Thanks! Good to know, will use straight stairs in households with toddlers.