Animation and Pose Help

@GoddessSims After having a quick trawl through the web I found two videos that cover aspects of this:

How to Use Poses with Props by ElectricBF Sims Go to about 1:40 for the main section on moving items into place in game.

Sims 4 Tutorial Pose making (accessories etc) by Shibui Sims. This goes into far more of the construction side of things within Blender.


As ElectricBF says in her tutorial, holding down Alt whilst moving objects is also really good in game for tweaking object positions beyond the usual "hit boxes", and can allow you to really customise your creations to a much greater extent.

As far as I know there is no way as of yet to completely seamlessly intergrate objects into poses or animations using pose player. Someone would have to try and write an ingame mod that opperates in a simillar way to the interaction tunings you have for pre-existing reading and cooking animations, where "props" are called to be a part of the actions.

Hope this helps

I downloaded a dancing animation for adults and children, and I wanted my teen sim and child sim to dance in sync but one always starts a little earlier than the other. I tried contacting the person who made it but they haven't answered yet

Hi @coregurlz

Sounds like b_ROOT_ bone has been moved accidently during your time in blender. Either that or the rig was first moved as an object in 'object mode' rather than 'pose mode'.

Best way to check for the second issue is to select any bone from either of your rigs in blender then switch to 'object mode' down on the lower toolbar of the 3D view window, then hit the keys alt R and alt G. If either hotkey moved the rig in any way then leave it where it has been moved to, and reposition it back to the location you want in 'pose mode' using the b_ROOT_bind_ bone.

The first problem is a little bit more complicated and requires you to go to the outliner and reveal hidden bones. Try the 'object mode' fix first, if that doesn't work drop me another message and we can go through the other fix.

@Mia_ Oh wait, I think you are right about the 'object mode'. I did remember that I positioned the characters while they are in 'object mode' and not in 'pose mode' because I didn't know it at first but when you mentioned about that, I completely understood my mistake. I will try to follow your suggestion and I will inform you any news. Thank you so much for the quick reply! :blush:

@coregurlz Does your animation feature IK? If so have you already 'mapped' out your empty target points?
If the answer to both is yes I would avoid using propogate.

As a general rule I prefer to manually manipulate the keyframes within the Dope Sheet, it allows me greater control of the timings and movements. Personally I us Shift D whilst having the key frames of the bones I want to remain static in the animation selected in the dope sheet, then I move duplicates along the timeline.

I hope that makes sense.

@coregurlz IK is good for giving an action weight. Like a character stepping forward. or jumping.

Hi Mia_,
I just watched your first video (actually I watched it 3 times..). You have some useful tips there (giving each rig a name and different colors for the dopesheets. But I'm lost in how to do it. The thing is that I cannot clearly see what you are doing and were in the screen I should be. Perhaps you could add some colored arrows or something like that to pinpoint were to look? Just a thought. In the meantime I will give it a try. Trial and error seems to be my way of learning.

@franniewee Hehe yeah... that was my first video... kinda bad all round really.

To assign Rigs colours go to the Armature section in the Properties window (Bottom Right hand side of the screen in most default blender set ups), double tap A with your mouse hovering over the 3D view to select all the bones in the said rig, the go down to bone groups in the armature settings and click the little +. This will create a new bone group for your rig. Now select one of the options from the Color drop down menu just below the little darker grey window that should now have a new Group. Once you've found a colour scheme that you like, or made up your own one, click the assign button. The colour change does not imeadiately show up in the dope sheet or on the rig, but once you select a bone or add a new key frame, or simply hit A again (whilst your mouse is over the 3D view) the change should appear.

To change the rigs name go to the navigator window (above the properties window, top right) and Double click your rig. This should allow you to type in a new name. Make sure you click the pre-exsisting name when you double click, and make sure you hit enter once you've typed in the new name.

Hope that helps

@Mia_ , Yes it helped. When you know were to look it's quite obvious. Thank you!

Oh I love this idea!!! I actually came here to ask a question. Do you know of any tutorials out there that will teach me how to incorporate a sim holding an object that can be added to the poss though buy mode and not CAS?