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- Baby Skeleton for animating - Neck gap
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I think it's just a matter of getting the right bone assignments (the faces you can extract from SimPE have some issues - the morphed face assigns the head joint to everything except a few random vertices, while the OBJ borks the UVs, and the Arch meshes don't have proper assignments). Remember to untick the "auto normals" button in Milkshape, or you get those sharp lines.
Added a Milkshape and a SimPE/Milkshape-ready file which you can import over the top of a working skeleton (remember the "no" to "additional skeleton" question). The head/face/hair are separate (which I tend to prefer because then I can import other clothes and hide the body but keep the head/face, and the head can be used for other projects).
EDIT: Stupid Milkshape... one of the neck vertices keeps giving the wrong bone assignments (I've had this happen before, but forgot to check for it). Should be fixed in the new file. Also, bonus alien baby face also with assignments (because why not?).
BuBodyNaked-BoneAssignments-fixface-alien.zip (171.4 KB, 21 downloads) - View custom content | ||
258501 2020-03-07 01:37 BuBodyNaked-BoneAssignments-fixface-alien.ms3d 153653 2020-03-07 01:38 BuBodyNaked-BoneAssignments-fixface-alien.simpe --------- ------- 412154 2 files |
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Maybe Milkshape is messing up the assignments when I imported the new GMDCs. I don't know what's wrong, so I'm just going to post the skeleton with the mesh I extracted from SimPE. It still has the neck gap and the sharp edges. I unchecked auto smooth, but I didn't see an "auto normals" box. If anyone notices something wrong with the rig, or wants to tweak it and re-post, let me know, so I can fix it (or download the fixes if someone else makes a change to it).
http://www.simfileshare.net/download/1660405/
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However, I think the problem is that the bones have been switched around in the hierarchy (for instance, the neck is always 06 and the head bone is always joint 07 for all the sim skeletons, directly after the spine joints, and this is also true for the baby. The head should always show up as pink when ticking "draw with vertex colors", but now the head bone is much further down the list and shows up red in the mesh). The body mesh in my file is directly from the game and has all the proper weights, but when importing it attaches itself to the wrong bones (right foot is mostly attached to left thigh, and the toe to "left shorts" for instance - I'm guessing those are the original placements in the joints list or hierarchy). Normally, for the non-hierarchy baby skeleton, there's no issues with importing over meshes.
I think this would be a problem ingame, because the baby meshes will have bone assignments more like the ones in my file. It also explains the head issue.
The baby hierarchy should be pretty much identical to the older ages, except for the actual missing bones.
(I quickly went through the original baby joints - 00 is auskel (buskel in this case), 01 is move and 02 is rotate skeleton, 03-05 are the spine, 06 is neck, 07 is head, ponytail is 08, right clavicle down to the hand/fingers is 09 to 11 + 14/15, left clavicle down to fingers is 18 to 20+ 23/24, breathe is 27, pelvis is 28, 29-3C are right leg, 2D-30 is left leg. The rest are not directly attached to the bone assignments of the naked mesh, but probably part of the hierarchy in other ways)
Picture: Original bone assignments to the left, the ones in your file to the right.
The other ages also have very similar bone assignments to these, so you'll see about the same color placement from toddler and up (with variations around the neck area, and possibly for skirts/shorts). I've learned the hard way that if the colors look any different from this, something has pretty much always gone wrong somewhere.
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ETA - Since I'm still awake,
https://youtu.be/FhKU7gR8_H8
https://youtu.be/Ro5KbFvITpM
Here are some comparisons between a milkshape animation and in the game. I'm using the default diaper, and I cannot say what animations made with custom clothing would look like. I'd suggest trying a little animation, and if it comes out wrong, I'll redo the rig again. And maybe the skinweight issue can be solved too.
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In order to link the bones on the baby rig, I could do it in Milkshape by extracting a copy of the CRES, then going through line by line zeroing out all the rotations so that the Animesh CRES import would be able to handle it. Or I could do the parenting by hand in another meshing program. I didn't want to edit the CRES, so I did part of the work in a different program. I opened two Milkshape windows, both with the baby rig in them. Then I imported the CRES over one copy of the rig. That gave me the bone name order, and I used that to rename the bones in the other milkshape window. Once the bones had the proper names, I exported the rig into another meshing program and created the joint hierarchy using the CRES as a guide (not by importing it, but I could look at the cres and see that Root Trans is the parent of Root Rot, etc). Once finished, I brought the rig back into milkshape. |
Considering the theoretical issues, is it possible some of the parenting didn't quite transfer back in the correct order, or were linked in a somewhat different order? That could explain why Milkshape is having issues with the meshes, and why they're showing up in the wrong order in Milkshape. Clothes seem to be very dependent on having the bones in the correct order to transfer over properly (kinda like morphs). They seem to work on joint numbers/placement rather than joint names. For instance, if you import a somewhat reshaped toddler outfit over the infant skeleton (as I'd do at some point if I was converting), all the bone assignments usually transfers over fine to the baby skeleton, except for most of the fingers (which are completely lacking in the baby skeleton), even if the joint naming is different. I don't know if SimPE or the animation exporter are somehow able to look beyond these issues (they probably work from the cres hierarchy or some such).
Also, does it matter for the exporter that the auskel joint is named buskel for when you export the animation, or does it have to be renamed? I think all the original animation files had been renamed to auskel, but I've occasionally seen cuskel and puskel for child and toddler in a few other settings.
I also remember having some similar issues with animations not working properly for another skeleton (child or toddler, I think? Or perhaps from a faulty try when I was messing about with making some template fixes), and figured out later the joints had been somewhat scrambled (no idea how, but the joints were suddenly not in their usual place in the list in Milkshape).
I'll see if I can do a bit of testing later (need sleep, it's already early morning).
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I decided to redo this so that the bone assignments look better. As for custom animations - I exported my baby animations with buskel (and children with cuskel, toddlers with puskel) and it worked fine. The major thing about this is that it's for animation. If you were to export this mesh as a Unimesh, all the bone information would be lost. You might be able to import another mesh over this file. Or you could export this as a half life 2 mesh to keep the bone information, but you'd lose the bone comments.
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Is it bad that I can take one look at a mesh and say, "yep - that one has the right bone assignments?" I guess I've been staring too much at the infant meshes since I often have to do the assignmennts from scratch... Anyway, it looks great so far, and is moving much better than the first one. I'll probably do more testing tomorrow, because it's getting a bit (*cough*very*cough*) late.
In addition to posing/animating, I do a lot of infant meshes, so it's going to be very handy to have a skeleton to test bone assignments with (because the non-hierarchy baby skeleton is useless for this), but I always use the original baby skeleton for exporting into SimPE to be on the safe side (the other skeletons had some deactivated bones and such, so I've always done the same with the older ages).
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And just a few things I've wondered about (because my brain is in question mode atm)-
The animation exporter seems to be set up with auskel as the default (and like I said, this looks to have been edited in the younger ages in the original animation templates) - I don't know if there's a difference or whether it has to be edited to fit the age or if I can just use the default "auskel" in the exporter for all of them, though.
Another thing I've wondered is why all the tutorials say animations should start with "a-" when this is only done for adults in the game files (animations are named b- for babies, p- for toddlers, c- for kids, etc. in the game files). I don't know if it makes a difference, and I can't remember if I tested it at some point, but it would've been interesting to know. I've extracted animations from ingame, and they do say b- or c- without it being a problem. Another question would be if this prefix is actually needed.
I guess maybe I should just make a testing posebox to figure out all of this...
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I can't see any "hair_trans" bones (or a "ponytail" bone) in the skeletons for the older sims, only the c/f/r/l/b hair joints for animating hair. Maybe those are unique to babies for some reason?
The "Joint 08" (ponytail for babies) seems to be unused in the other skeletons. The "hair_Trans" and "Joint19" correspond to the placement of the "Index 0 + 1" bones (which aren't used in the infant skeleton), so I'm guessing those unused joints are in there to stand in for the missing bones so the bone assignments are roughly the same (Pinky joints and Joints 22+23 also suggests this, and the remaining missing ones are at the end with hair bones, a "joint 58" and a backtarget. Either they have some unknown purpose in the original rig, or the rig was repurposed for the babies with some bones deactivated or removed).
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My stories: Anna's diary - Memories are forever - Little Fire Burning
Posts: 3,004
Thanks: 896 in 4 Posts
Posts: 1,889
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Posts: 3,004
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Posts: 12,937
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I did think something happened to the file, because it suddenly showed up with somewhat borked bone assignments and creased lines instead of a smooth look, but it turned out I'd just opened an older version (TS2-infant-omglo.ms3d). Got a bit worried there for a moment...
The pelvis area can be a little difficult on the babies (barely enough vertices, so there can be a lot of stretch).
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It's the one I had however so yea I guess that's just how the game rig is...
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The mesh in your picture is a version of the baby body where the creases are showing on the legs - the newest version didn't have the creases. It also had an alien face group (looked to be based on the hair/face mesh I fixed for Omglo, and I added the alien face because I had it extracted and thought I might as well fix that one too).
The one in the file I have looks like the picture below with the same pose, with a smooth mesh and some bone assignment blending (green/yellow) with "draw vertex weights" active.
Reupload (just in case the link above is going to a bad file) - https://simfileshare.net/download/1670764/ (file is untouched/unsaved from my side, so in case it is 1.8.4 compatible it should work).
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