Milkshape (Sims)

All things milkshape

Alot of people have asked me how to use milkshape. There are tutorials out there, but not many to do with the sims. So, being the nice guy I am, I have decided to digress from the animation tutorial and show yout he basics of Milkshape. There is a 30 day trial, but if you want to get serious, I suggest you buy, I was right in the middle of making a driving pose, which is quite sophisticated, I put my laptop on sleep overnight and the next day, it was the end of my trial and lost the pose. Damn. Buy it if you can. It’s actually quite cheap for what it is.

*Make sure you have all the tools from the animation tutorial*

Step 1

Open Milkshape, and open Dr Pixels Body Meshes. Now press the ‘Anim’ button at the bottom right corner and click select. Go into ‘Preferences’, ‘Misc’ and in ‘Joint Size’, type in 0.010000. Now go to ‘Animate’ and make sure ‘Operate on selected joints only’ is ticked. You are now ready to animate.

Step 2

Next, click ‘Select’ then ‘Joint’ and select joint from a limb, for example the shoulder. The whole arm should now glow green.

After this, click ‘Rotate’, and click ‘Local’ at the bottom and just move your mouse in the direction you want the limb to move. I is not quite as simple as this, sometimes, different angles can mean different directions, just have a play around with it.

Step 3

It is now time to animate. Just make your pose in the first key-frame, then after completing that,  go to ‘Animate’ then ‘Set Keyframe’ or just press ‘Ctrl K’. Now slide the cursor to the right, to the next frame with your mouse. If it is just a pose, then thats it! However, if you are making a moving animation, depending on the speed of your animation, choose a key frame, say thirty (reasonably normal speed) and move your cursor to it. Now, make the change you want the sims to make. So, here I have my starting postition at key-frame 1:

And here is the finishing pose at frame thirty:

Now press the play button (fourth button in from the left of the Anim button) and it should be nice and smooth! You can use this technique to create more sophisticated animations. Set your key-frame and then go to the next step. Btw, if you want to change the number of available key frames, just change 30 to 60 near the Anim button and the same goes with the other one next it.

Step 4

Click Anim to get out of anim mode, now save your animation and go to File > Export > Sims2 AniMesh ANIM Exporter. Choose where you want to save it, I usually save the name as just ‘anim’ in a folder to keep it organised. Then a window should pop up. Make sure it looks like this for a normal body overlay pose:

Under ‘ANIM Type’, you choose your….er…..anim type and in ‘Length [ms]‘ your choose the length of time you want your animation to run. 1000=1 sec.

And that’s it on the milkshape side of things! Good Luck!

-TH