You do not need to add bones.

You should look at Marvine's demo of the effects of adding some partial bone assignments to the breathe_trans bone and animating it. Since this is an open forum, all I will say is that it allows some of the mesh that formerly moved statically with the rest of the upper torso to be able to mimic the effects of inertia as the gal dances.

It requires a custom animation (the first is written and available), a controller package (there is one for it included) AND a mesh that has the assignments remade. When done right, the mesh plays in the game just like any other, and the animation works on any mesh with no adverse effects, but when the two are combined, it is, um, interesting.

As the creator of a significant number of gal meshes with varying features that would benefit from this by your merely revising the bone assignments over a portion of the mesh, I think you might like to look at it.

<* Wes *>

I didn't want to spoil all the fun, but at the time I made that post I also had a working animation exporter in testing. It is now released, and posted at MTS2 in the Animation and ANIM files forum. You can now make custom body (and object) mesh animations, and export them into the game.

The animations can be made and retained in .ms3d models. Animations are, in general, only a list of skeleton movements, and so would work essentially the same on a DD mesh or an A one. That is not to say that the runtime appearance would be the same, some arm movements that would be fine for the A mesh might appear humorous on the DD mesh.

<* Wes *>

I think it is pretty cool, too.

You can add a head (hair and face) and animate them at the same time. And you can add textures from the game. MilkShape now supports the "skin and cloth" (transparent clothing arreas show underlying skin) texturing. Just export the textures from SimPE as .PNG files, create a material and add the texture file (or two of them), and then apply the material to the group.

You can string movements into whole animations, and capture them as AVIs. Adding a textured plane behind the Sim would make any backdrop you want.

Props? You can import and texture the mesh for any objects you want (limited by system RAM and MilkShape's 64,000 vertex limit).

<* Wes *>

You can do this only with recent UniMesh body mesh imports (where the joints look like connected lines instead of just circles).

Save your work, of course, as an .ms3d file. Now, on the bottom right corner is a button that says "ANIM" on it. This toggles you in and out of animation mode.

So, press the button in. Now, go to the joints tab and select "show skeleton". Now double-click on the joint labelled r_thigh. You should see the bones for the entire right leg change color. In animation mode, when you select a joint, you select all the "child" joints, too.

Now, click on the "Model" tab and pick "Rotate". Select "origin" and "local" in the place below the buttons.

Make one of your views the right projection (via a mouse right click). Click down in that window (left mouse click) and drag the mouse to the left a little. The entire right leg should bend at the top of the thigh and move out like a straight leg kick.

That is the basic animation. On an item like a knee, you can bend it and zoom in to see if your assignments look good. Remember that the game and MilkShape will animate the body mesh slightly different, but mostly alike.

To make a playful animation you make a set of movements, and then in the animation menu set a keyframe. You would advance the slider at the bottom (if you do not see this, you can select it in the options somewhere). You would set another set of joint positions and set a new keyframe. By creating the movements in a logical, sequential manner you can make the mesh do things like a kick or dance, and save these as a .ms3d file and play them back, even capturing them as an AVI.

Or, you can export them as a half-life .SMD file and use Miche's animation converter (available in a test thread at MTS2) to place them in the game. This is not simple or easy, but it has been done.

There is a tutorial in MilkShape help about the animation. Parts 1 and 2 are largely irrelevant, as the UniMesh importer creates the bones and assignments from the Maxis game file automatically. But Part 3 of teh tutorial will give you a pictorial view of animating a mesh.

<* Wes *>

Indeed, they are.

Morphs exist in the GMDC as a set of additional values associated with each vertex that are to be added when the morph is made active.

While some morphs, like foods, are designed to be used only one at a time, the fatbot and pregbot morphs are not mutually exclusive. All morphs are triggered in the game by an animation.

While I have always believed new morph types could be created (simple enough) and made to operate in the game (not so simple), the tools and research to do so has not been available so far.

<* Wes *>

Nor very long after this tutorial was posted, I made a major update to the MilkShape plugins, which I called the UniMesh plugins. While the operations appear similar, the underlying code is more advanced.

The link to the plugins should be changed... the correct one is:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=122399
This link is in the post you find by following the old link, but people could be confused.

<* Wes *>

Beos:
In regards to your testing complaints (which I, like everyone else, live with, too), Mete is planning on adding a feature in the next MilkShape update (1.7.11) that should help.

Of course, you know you can preview the textured mesh in MilkShape to reduce the number of test cycles you need to get your mesh and texture matched.

And I believe I remember you know about my experimental UniMesh importer that imports the mesh with an animatible bone structure.

What is new is that Mete has added support within MilkShape to view the animation with multiple bone assignments (as opposed to the old single assignment animation). This means you can do a general test on the multiple assignments for different joints before placing the mesh in the game for testing.

You can see a preview of the feature on the MilkShape site forums where Mete shows a cylinder that is bent like a knee would bend. See the text at:
http://www.chumba.ch/chumbalum-soft/forum/showthread.php?t=18854

I plan on making the animatible skeleton changes a permanent part of the UniMesh package, however I am working on something else that may change the way I calculate the joint rotations, and I want to get that wrapped up before making a general release.

As usual, there is not specified date for release. But I do know that many things that are supposed to be in the next MilkShape update are already completed, so I suspect it won't be too far off.

Where else do you get a program for $25 that delivers consistent improvements three or four times a year without a subscription?
(Hint: not from Symantec, McAfee or Microsoft).

<* Wes *>

This is probably late for answering, sorry, but I was busy creating an update for the UniMesh plugins.
Doing Coat Colors does not need a new mesh. As far as Pets meshing goes, I have done some research, and can read the Pets mesh files, but there is some new data used in there that I do not yet know how to manage or manipulate.
The package I talked about making about is posted in Echo's alpha mesh thread in one of my replies. I think to make a NEW non-replacement coat color you need to make a number of different parts as well as ages, so that the game has a full package of textures to place on anything being made.

Pet coats and accessories like the collars are not currently able to be cloned except via tedious hand building of the packages.

Creating replacement coat textures is not very difficult. However, in order to get a look you like, you have to give one you don't up. And you can't buy or change them in the game... whatever you pick is added to the in CAS when you nake your pet.

I have posted a partially completed coat color addition at MTS2. I have also posted a dog collar add-on package. While neither of these two are very exciting objects, I have shown it is possible to place new items like these in the game.

I am busy right now writing and testing an update package for the MilkShape plugins, but anyone that really wants a challenge can start with my demos and make what they want.

<* Wes *>

This can also be done with MilkShape using the UniMesh plugins.

You would duplicate the base mesh, move vertices until it has the desired shape, and give the group the correct name and comments (this is discussed in the ReadMe file for the plugins).

Morphs must have the same number of faces and vertices as the main mesh, since what they really are is a set of numbers the game uses to move the vertices from the original shape to the new one.

While this isn't as easy as just using a MAXIS made morph that has one, you can make the morph exactly like you want. And this method works when the base has had faces/vertices added or removed.

<* Wes *>

The DatGen guys pulled the plug on their project many months ago because they were unable to finish it the way they wanted for TS2.
SimPE 60 for Pets has been available for two weeks now at the SimPE site http://sims.ambertation.de/
<* Wes *>

Nice tutorial.

The issue discussed below:
=====================================
IMPORTANT: some meshes have been exported with SMD Object Exporter by Skankyboy and imported with SMD File Importer by Skankyboy for SimPE and are no longer editable in MilkShape with the Unimesh plugins by Wes_h. For these you will need to edit the final .simpe file made prior to SMD export/import.
=====================================
was resolved with a recent update I made to the importer, labelled V4.06C. This is located in a message in the thread, not in the 4.06 UniMesh package. I will include the fix in the next update.

<* Wes *>

As many of you may know, during the warmer times of the year I spend enough of my time (and energy) working at my other love, my Cattle.
During the colder months, I have free time & ambition to build other things.

I very recently joined this board, and am pleased that some people have taken the time to help my efforts.

Here is the official status of my efforts:

I am communicating directly with Mete Ciragan (Mr. MilkShape himself). He has made changes and provided me an alpha/beta type copy of his upcoming V1.7.7 release that has some extra data space that allows extra bones and skin weights to be stored.

I have totally rewritten the plugins in a fashion that takes advantage of that capability, and it works. Shoulders and elbows look just like in the game. There will no longer be different sets of plugins for objects and body meshes... the plugins use the comment fields to set keywords that allow the many variations of GMDCs to be dealt with.

There are still remaining issues before this is finished, and of course, I can't release the plugins until MilkShape 1.7.7 is available, because they cannot run on older versions than that.

There is still a "shadowing" problem remaining on clothing items that have folds in them. An example is the men's T-shirt and boxer shorts, at the waistband and where the pants legs join to the legs. This is caused by the current export interface removing duplicated vertices, which makes the "folded under" parts of the mesh contiguous with the outer faces, which then changes the normals, making them point midway between (which is now downward, rather than straight out), which changes the way the clothes are rendered. The issue, for Mete, is providing a way to avoid doing this without breaking other plugins for other games (some of which cannot accept the duplicated vertices). He has promised me not to release 1.7.7 until we find a solution, which is under way.

Creating "morphs" will require seperate models and special model naming rules. You will no longer be able to use the tilde '~' character as the first character of your model names. So a model named "~body" will either shut down with an error message or simply be left out of the export completely. I know this will inconvenience someone, somewhere, someday, but something has to be special.

The last remaining problem I am having is making the "tangent normals", which are used for bumpmapping, work. I have not yet hit on the proper combination to satisfy BodyShop to allow Semloh's Bump Map Tester to display the bumpmaps, even though I feel I now have made the correct section in the output model. So I am hunting for logs and other diagnostics that may give me a hint over why BodyShop doesn't like them.

I have no release date available, but I hope to post (over at mts2) very soon after, or simultaneously with, the release of MilkShape 1.7.7. This could be days, or still weeks away.

I appreciate all the support,
<* Wes *>

(my 1st post here!)