As I now understand enough of the animation file formats to make new animations for objects.
( see for details )

I`m now trying to find out what file formats most people use to save their animations in. I expect they just save them in the standard format of whatever program they use. Idealy though I`m hoping to find one or two formats which I can support in a converter.

I know the .smd format supports animations and I think the .X format does too.

So what I`m hoping people will do is help by giving me some formats to look into supporting.

I had thought about making a basic animation editor, but there are lots of 3d animation programs out there which do a better job than I could do in the time I have to work on one. So I think a file converter is the way to go.

The other thing which would be very helpful is if anyone could supply a test animation that I can check that I can convert. In this animation, all I would want is one object to be moved and rotated around using keyframes (no other bones in the object other than a root bone/node.)

I would assume whatever format 3D Studio Max, and MAYA save in...

Yeah the thing is they are more complex formats, and save all the details of the scene etc. I think maya does have a seperate anim file but not sure if many people use it and even then I think at first I`ll try support formats which are less complex and easier to add support for. That`s why I said about .smd and .x formats, it`ll be much quicker for me to get a converter working which supports them rather than have to work out how a different format works, but I want to try to avoid the problems we had with formats with the mesh tool where most people wanted to use different formats to what it supported. So I`m still unsure at the moment.

Think I`ll get a basic converter which supports .smd files working in the next couple of days and then see if anyone else has any suggestions.

.smd would be great! Thanks Miche.

Brasstex

Thanks Miche for working on the animations!!! I love to do animations but I don't own an expensive progie like Studio Max or Maya but if need be I'll get it!!! Again, Thanks.

Slip

Ive got max and Maya and a few others they wont do it by theirselves, we spent 100s of hours trying, we have however learned they are using a maya type special written plug-in to make the animations. Unless you have a program that you have made that you know works the only hope at the moment is to paste new keyframe information over old keyframe animations, we have almost made that work, well at least to make it play a little. Its a tuffie, Marina started the doggie woohoo animations and we never got the bugs out of it and I bet 20 different good coders looked at what she was doing and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work.

Yes I have made a program which allows you to make new animations for the game, at the moment it`s just a basic editor but I plan to add support for converting other animation formats.

You can download a early version of my program from:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=81049

Miche,

Could you post up your notes on the actual file format too? We could then compare it to the stuff coming out of DatGen and SimPE in terms of raw data and maybe move onto figuring out how the bone animation works.

This has gotten me interested in programming again.

Regards,
Delphy

“Animation file formats” are one of the Achilles heels of the game industry. The reality is that there are NO good formats for interchange of modern game animation data, and pretty much every game company ends up writing their own art path tools around intermediate file formats.

As a short list, you want to support skeletal animation with multiple weighted influences per joint, typically up to some “n” like 3 or 4 for modern engines, with a set of n bone Ids and n-1 weights per vertex. You need some way to export the keyframe sets for these animations, even if they were authored using spline curves in the art tools and have to be interpolated before or after export.

You’ll also need a way to “compress” the results, as even a simple animation at a decent keyframe sample rate can contain megabytes of keys that could be interpolated at runtime from surprisingly small numbers of keys, and this tool needs artist driven error metrics to decide when to stop, and this metric needs to understand how errors propagate across a bone hierarchy.

You also need vertex morph animation, storing and managing sets of deltas.

On the art tool side, modern high-end art tools like Max and Maya do not have open file formats, they use complex messes of versioned object serialization. You have to write exporters that plug into their scene graph APIs to get to the data, and that’s still a pain, since the way the art tool manages data may be amazingly different from how you would like to get to it – it can take over a man year to get a decent exporter working for Max, for example, Maya is a little better but still a pain.

So most companies write intermediate file format based tools. Exporters that dump all the data into an easily parsed and processed format, tools that use this format, and a build process that outputs game specific data after all the post-processing is done.

I’ve been working in this field for a while, I’m actually the guy that first cracked .3ds in 1991 while I worked at SSI so we could use it to create 3d data instead of just making animations. I’ve ran the tools groups at 5 major game companies now, and would still be doing this for a living if I wanted to.

Instead I’ve been spending some time over the last year working on an open source high-end art path, using feedback from friends at many game companies to make sure it will do pretty much all things for all people. I’m right at the point where I need to add animation support now, but I do have a huge pile of source code from all the other times I’ve solved this problem. I’m just going to repackage it all in this new easy to use format.

Bottom line, I guess I’m saying that there is no format that does what you want. .smd is close, but carries constraints with it. If you can live with those constraints, then you can get things running quickly and leverage some existing tools that the mod community is familiar with. If you want to do more, then you are back to the traditional problem of “what file format do I move this animation data around in”, and I might be able to help…