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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#1 Old 6th Oct 2019 at 6:23 PM
Default Animated accessories - can it be done?
So I'm in the process of working on a feline tail accessory to go with my skins, and I have a vague memory of downloading a cat tail for Sims 3 a while back that had the tail animated so it swayed a little, which really added a lot to the effect. The ideal, perfect-world scenario would be something that I could create different animations for to link to in-game ones but I'm pretty sure that's not possible, so I'm mainly just looking to add some kind of subtle movement so it looks less like a stiff costume prop. Searching has turned up nothing, so I mostly want to know if it can even be done (but if someone's got a link to a tutorial or anything like that, it would also be helpful, I'm still figuring out custom mesh accessories in general let alone complicating it). Either way, help/advice would be appreciated!
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Field Researcher
#2 Old 6th Oct 2019 at 9:25 PM
It can be, you'd need to do research on animating in Blender, etc. and you'd be looking for keywords like "physics" when looking up tutorials. I'm unsure if you need to adjust in-game animations as well. We have 2 current physics mods, breasts and hair. If you search for those you can possibly study them and may find associated tutorials, but we have nothing on accessories to my knowledge.

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Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#3 Old 8th Oct 2019 at 12:30 AM
Good to know! I've done some modelling/animating in blender before for other projects, so I'll mostly just need to figure out how to make it work right in-game.
Test Subject
#4 Old 15th May 2023 at 5:35 AM
This is such a great idea. I hate how the game's cat tail doesn't stand up with the little tail curl at the top. That literally means they're happy 🥺
Test Subject
#5 Old 29th Jun 2023 at 10:46 PM
If you want to animate through rigs, you'd need to modify the sim base rig. There's a limit on the amount of bones a rig can have though, so if you wanted to add bones for animated tails, that would mean any mods that add or edit the rig will be incompatible (Wonderful Whims' higher rated version cough cough) and you'd either need to live with the incompatibility or sacrifice some bones added from your mod or the conflicting mod. Then you gotta adjust the animations seen ingame, which can be done with blender but importing and then exporting EA animations can indeed result in some inconsitencies. If you want to make a tail that's technically has motion but with no rig edits, you might want to rig the tail base and most of it to the pelvis, and then assign the smallest weight gradient going towards the tip to a different bone, such as one of the spine bones.
Lab Assistant
Original Poster
#6 Old 30th Jun 2023 at 1:18 AM
Oh dang this thread is old, I forgot I made it lol.

Thanks for the response; I've since done more research on it (and information has become more widely available) and ended up making static tails instead for most of the reasons you mentioned (since I do use WW and have a couple CC in the works that require it, lack of compatibility becomes kind of a problem). Might revisit the idea in the future, but I've also got some kind of issue right now where animations won't export for me properly, so it's pretty much moot for now anyway until I can fix that.
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