Custom Animation not available in Play List

[redredbobert]

I'm trying to learn to animate in the Sims 4 and it is not going well. (I have a little previous experience in just about everything 3D game related both coding and art.)

 

I've basically been trying to follow the tutorial here:

 

https://turbodriver.itch.io/wickedwhims/devlog/139574/creating-basic-animations-in-blender-1

 

And for whatever reason, it's just not working for me. I could go over several problems I've had trying to find a tutorial on this, not the least of which is finding an armature to animate (in this case I went with the one generated as suggested in the tutorial but I'm going to have to figure out and setup IK and constraints at some point or use Melodine). Note this armature is not setup for Wicked Whims but just what S4S generates, still I think it should work and it's what is called for in the tutorial. But at this point I think the problem is the XML file.

 

I believe I have a solid 4 second Blender animation. It looks good for a quick throw together test animation. Now I just want to see it show up in the Sims 4.

 

The problem manifests as the package not showing up in Wicked Whims add animation to play list. I have mods from others working just fine here; the game and WW are working exactly as expected other than my package is not showing up to be available to add to a play list. Other moders animations show up to allow you to add their animations to the play list. Just mine doesn't. I verified that the game is recognizing my package as being loaded as a mod. My package is clearly there in the mods loaded for the game. I just can't get any indication of it being installed other than that and most importantly WW doesn't seem to recognize it.

 

I thought maybe the problem was I was being too carefree about my clip name and not religiously using the same name everywhere. So, I went back and copy pasted the same name that was generated by S4S. I also used the hashkey in S4S rather than downloading the app the tutorial suggested; perhaps I should try downloading it. I just hate cluttering up my computer with unneeded apps. But the tutorial says generating the key from S4S should work just as well.

 

I also tried reverse engineering other peoples' packages to see if my XML file had the wrong info. Their packages have a lot more than 1 animation, but I did notice their headers had different values and so I tried copying that as well to no avail.

 

Any help would be appreciated, even just pointing me to another tutorial.

 

 

 

[redredbobert]

Wow. It looks like I'm not the first person to have this problem.

 

 

[TURBODRIVER]

At least 1/3 of animators had problems with setting up the XML file and they wrote to me and got it solved. Just send your PACKAGE file that you're trying to use and I will tell you what the problem is.

[redredbobert]

WW_RRBob_Animation_Tests_v1.package

 

 

Awesome! Thanks! The file is attached here.

 

One of the differences might be that I'm attempting to start out simple and make it more complex as I learn what I'm doing better. So, I attempted to do this with just one actor and no props (beds, chairs, etc.) but rather just standing on any floor. I also assumed that the comments in the template would not be a problem and I didn't know whether things that were suggested to be removed had to be removed or could be removed.

 

I changed the header of the XML to match other packages that are working rather than what is in the template as I wasn't sure what some of the attributes in that first "I" tag are used for and somewhat expected WW to use them to identify the XML file as its own.

 

I've been trying to kind of reverse engineer other peoples' animation packages that are actually working to see if I can spot the difference and one thing I've noticed is that theirs are more simple with a lot of the tags not there and no comments, but I started with the suggested template.

 

Another thing I noticed is that my file is tiny compared to others, but that could be that there is not much movement in my animation and I only have 1 clip where all the others have 10 or more clips in theirs. So, I say their xml is "more simple" even though theirs are much longer meaning that the sections that are common between them are more just the tags actually needed and less cluttered than mine.

 

 

[TURBODRIVER]

Okay, it's looking mostly fine. I didn't test it myself but...

 

- The clip name in the package is "RRBob:PosePack_202106091444317849_set_1" but you entered "RRBob:PosePack_202106091414243546_set_1" in the XML file, that prevents the animation from loading.

- Although it shouldn't matter, you can completely remove the "animation_props_list" and "animation_events_list" sections when unused.

[redredbobert]

Sure enough! That did the trick! Thanks a million! I watched my first Sims animation play in game. Still a few problems, like it going into an infinite loop at the end until I told it to stop and I swear it didn't start at the beginning. But it worked! Now I just have to keep playing with it and see what happens, but at least I have a working example to reference now.

 

Seeing the animation play out let me see how much clipping/overlap there is with Sims of different body sizes which was more than I imagined it would be.

 

I spent hours scouring the Internet and other peoples' packages trying to find a solution to this. I might have given up before I found the answer. I was pretty confident that those names matched partially because I copy/pasted them. I had earlier problems with the clip name as it came up so many times and I wasn't sure what it was being used for or when it had to match.

 

S4Studio generates that name and so I copy/pasted that name everywhere in order to get it to match and because I didn't know if I could change the generated name. In one of the several iterations of attempting to get it right, I must have crossed those names (forgot to paste somewhere) and not noticed that I had done it. That name is so long and numeric that it's difficult to see that it changed unless you're looking right at the numbers before "_set_". I must have looked at it a dozen times and not noticed they were different.

 

Anyway, thanks again!