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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 21st Apr 2005 at 7:04 PM
Countdown to Custom Animations...
Okay this is my first post to MTS2 so if it is in the wrong section or if there is a thread like this somewhere else please don't shoot me... (I searched for another thread like this and couldn't find one.)

I am wondering how close we are to being able to import custom animations into the game. What has been done? What still needs to be done? If tools must first be released from Maxis to make it possible, and a general idea of how long you all think it will be until it becomes possible?

What are the stumbling blocks and who are the people working on this....

Okay hope this starts some interesting discusion.
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Test Subject
#2 Old 21st Apr 2005 at 7:22 PM
body shop please take time to answer my question
how do you creat your own cloths on it i can only select ones that are already on it :werd:
Test Subject
#3 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 2:27 AM
Dude I suggest you read tutorial in the tutorial section. -_-
Lab Assistant
#4 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 9:54 AM
Quote: Originally posted by Maniac
Dude I suggest you read tutorial in the tutorial section. -_-
There are tutorials in the tutorial section? Now who'd have thought that? I'm going use this because it is just so good: :werd:

−=≡ conker87 ≡=−
Beautiful Girl from Norway
#5 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 9:57 AM
Quote:If tools must first be released from Maxis to make it possible, and a general idea of how long you all think it will be until it becomes possible?

hehe good luck with that one..
Field Researcher
#6 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 9:59 AM
lol.. never.. why would anyone buy expansion packs if they released tools that let you do everything yourself? That will NEVER happen, unless they decide to do it right before releasing Sims3.. :-o
Instructor
#7 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 10:13 AM
to help answer your original loaded question because i sure can't give your a definitive answer, but custom animation seems possible already, i just don't think it's widely understood. i.e there are no tutorials that i know of. Look around here. and you will see some technical discussions on the topic. Have a look at this thread too.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=42636
Warrior Gryphon
site owner
#8 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 10:51 AM
There are actually multiple ways the game uses animations - one of which is discussed by Miche. The other main one is bone animations which I believe nobody has looked at yet.
Test Subject
#9 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 12:27 PM
Hey Delphy..I need to read more..but I am seriously holding back on posting my mods until I can animate...basically because I won't release at all until i can hit something good....

I am an animator by trade, can we start a section based on purely animation on the site? I'm an animation machine... and fairly clueless as where to start....

As far as bones go I can bone anything in lightwave... maya 3-d studio...

what the heck do I convert my files to to make them readable... I'm a decent programmer..but not that decent..I'm fairly lost but would love to animate... I have Six computers here to render too....

I am about ready to show off an EP sized collection of Adult themed and fantasy themed stuff I made.... but without adding anims... I'm just a hack as I see it...

Has anyone actually added anims..or have some concrete knowledge of formats?
Test Subject
#10 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 1:07 PM
Seriusly, i'm lookin at ya... I want to animate LOL. I'd be happy to moderate any forum on animation.... I was going to do my own site..but why? when you did a fantastic job already..i'd be redundant Delphy Check out www.jessicaleighwebdesign.com it's my wifes now.. we have completed 95 sites to date.. Jess handles all the clients now. Thus the name, but I have like 20 personal sites too... I'd love to animate, worked on twisted metal three with vision scape, architectual projects..TV commercials..movie effects..made a few B movies, I'm down if pointed in the right direction...
Screenshots

" By the year 2020 most of the Humans on Terra had succumbed to the advanced mind control techniques of the Greys.
Fortunately, we were not all Human"
Grey Vampire
Test Subject
#11 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 1:11 PM
P.S. LOL I made that in three minutes... the texture itself wasn't mine... came off some site in France, didn't wanna dig through my portfolio looking for the past...but I can animate anything...no joke... test me
Test Subject
#12 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 1:15 PM
LOL and when i say i'd be happy to bone some sims I don't mean literally dude, I mean bone em..as in 3-d
Instructor
#13 Old 22nd Apr 2005 at 3:49 PM
you worked on twisted metal 3? can i ask what happened to it? lol.... 1 was fun, 2 was even more fun, then three went poop on me. I stopped paying attention to the franchise after that.

btw they talk about formats on the first 2 pages of this thread.
http://modthesims2.com/showthread.p...26&page=1&pp=25
Test Subject
#14 Old 23rd Apr 2005 at 7:08 AM
ROFL I agree hehe, but I just worked for the company that did the animation sequences...LOL Yeah it did kind of bite, but I had no reponsibility for the game itself.... I worked on a few specific cars like the pirateship one and the one with the mouse engine...it's been awhile.

I was actually on a bizarre internship at the time, where I got nailed for hard labor in exchange for animation classes, that were abusively valued in the tens of Thousands of dollars.. so LOL feel free to bash away, my artwork was nice
Instructor
#15 Old 24th Apr 2005 at 6:08 PM
that's understandable bro. I didn't mean to bash your work, i know you didn't program the game.

I was wondering if you could post up some of your 3d works. Since you have designed professionally, this intrigues me. :nod:
Lab Assistant
#16 Old 26th Apr 2005 at 11:33 AM
vecarnex: This might interest you as I stumbled across this on yahoo.

Troy Murphy <[email protected]> wrote:

Just to whet your whistle, i had worked on an animation crack which allows a different "Wohoo" for sims 2...This crack has been worked on with two different animation programs...3dstudiomax and animation shop. Right now, all I can do is make an animation of stand up doggie style using sims 2 pictures (not the game). It looks more like a movie than a program. If i can make the dolls into 3d animation, i can produce a possible object to produce this animation in the game.
The easy part is done, working on one harder part (the 3d animation) and still need to figure out how to incorporate into the game...
may take months of occasionally working on it, but still looking into it.
Troy

Who knows????
Lab Assistant
#17 Old 26th Apr 2005 at 11:51 AM
i'd have been waiting for this form the strat . there where some things that i knewn that the sims 2 tream wouldn't make. (i'm not talking fo adultd content)
i'd love to see a proper bread toaster.

no ears
Lab Assistant
#18 Old 16th Aug 2005 at 3:52 AM
Quote: Originally posted by lordgraf
If tools must first be released from Maxis to make it possible, and a general idea of how long you all think it will be until it becomes possible?



Judging how Maxis didn't release one for The Sims 1, I doubt that they will make one for The Sims 2.
Test Subject
#19 Old 16th Aug 2005 at 4:49 AM
bump :fight:
Test Subject
#20 Old 16th Aug 2005 at 4:53 AM
Quote: Originally posted by puppy45341
Judging how Maxis didn't release one for The Sims 1, I doubt that they will make one for The Sims 2.


Of course not, animation is key to selling new expansion packs
Zombie Coder
#21 Old 17th Aug 2005 at 12:18 AM
Well, the tool may not come from Maxis. My team and I have done quite a bit of work on the ANIM file format in the past, and made a lot of headway. There is a LOT of data related to animations, spread accross several different file formats, not just the ANIM format (files include PSET, BCON, BHAV, CINE, and a couple others). The biggest problem to fully cracking animations isn't really the volume of data, its cracking the floating point format in ANIMs.

All bones in an animation are usually part of a hierarchy. Bones link together at joints, and both joints and bones have attributes. In an animation, keyframes are defined with preset states for each bone and joint (position and rotation of each bone within limits at each joint). All this state information is saved as compressed floating point numbers in ANIM files. The structure of the files, and basic kinds of data they store has been cracked, but how to decompress the floats still hasn't been figured out yet. Until the floats can be decompressed properly, we won't fully be able to figure out what the data in each frame of an animation represents.

Just as an example of the what we do know about the ANIM format...we know the structure of the bone hierarchy, and we can view the data stored in each frame. We also know that ANIM files link events, like the playback of a sound, to certain keyframes in an animation:

Nearly alive
#22 Old 17th Aug 2005 at 12:09 PM Last edited by Miche : 17th Aug 2005 at 12:14 PM.
DarkMatter,

The floats have been cracked. I`m working on a animation converter and editor. I told Kary about this awhile ago. The values in a animation aren`t exactly floating points. They are best treated as shorts. For a rotation 64 (in the short in the anim part 4 block) is 1 degree of rotation. So a 180 degree rotation is 11520.

For translations 1000 (in part 4 block) is related to 1 standard unit in most 3d programs.


Some other details of the files has been added to the wiki as well.

My smd converter now works on most of the bones of the sims body (just have a few more to add)
Zombie Coder
#23 Old 17th Aug 2005 at 6:21 PM
So, the floats arn't actually floats? I managed to expand the shorts stored in part 4 into what seemed like valid floats, but I havn't done further testing to see if they worked. I used the IEEE standard "short float" compression mechanism, and it certainly seems to work.

Anyway, I'll check out your program and the stuff on the wiki.
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