Title: Bigger than the superhero?? Post by: BeosBoxBoy on October 17, 2006, 08:44:29 pm Quote Do u think it possible to make a sim more muscular then the superhero mesh, I mean like something HUGE ??? This is a question I have answered numerous times in the past 15 months. Until Maxis opens up a way for us to edit the animation skeleton, the answer is "no". Unlike in The Sims original, we do not have direct access to the animation skeleton. We only have access to the slave points which have little positive effect when moved. Usually what results is either nothing, or complete horror. To date, all my experiments in this area have been less than satisfactory. When Marvine expended nearly 50 hours of experimentation into properly animating a high heel shoe on a female mesh, this gave me an in-sight into the sort of work-around that might have worked for the shoulders and arms, but -- as noted above -- nothing to date has yielded positive results. In effect, trying to make the Hulk as usually drawn results in disappointing or disgusting animations with hideous collisions of the shape. An example of this is already seen in the superhero meshes when the hands sink into the pelvis and somewhat into the latissimus dorsi and trapezii at the side of the torso; the arm would be lost in the body on any mesh with larger musculature. It is not from my lack of want to make HUGE, it is totally the result of Maxis/EA Games doing the primary animation skeleton in a non-editable state. If we could move the shoulder joints 15% farther apart from one another, this would be a step in the right direction... but we can't. Even if we could do that simple task, we would still have no way to define the outer limit of the mesh surface for animations, because Maxis has made editing animation unattainable without several 100 or 1000 additional hours of research. Yes, some people have been able to edit loops of animations by cutting and pasting existing animation; and some exceptionally brilliant and dedicated sorts have fabricated totally new animations; but in both instances only by using the most tedious means possible. This is not what is needed here. What is needed is the ability to literally add several 1000 new animations or at the very least edit the existing ones. Considering the sort of hateful, laborious misery that would be entailed under the current methods, this is not work I would wish on anyone. Kindest regards, Yakov/beosboxboy |