Using Animation Overlays

Ok, I’m a self-admitted hacked object junkie. I have bucket loads of the suckers, but my three favourites are the OFB Reaction Tester, Decorgal’s Sitting Talk/Conversation Hack and Shaklin’s WalkStyle Facial Animation Changer (my link to this is dead, but email me and I will see what I can do to get this to you if you don’t already have it).

Why these three? Well they play so well together, in fact, you can use them all at once to allow three different animations to overlay (run at the same time).


Now I know many of you would already be fairly familiar with overlays using Paul’s Reaction Tester thanks to JD’s tutorial. Those who have not run across that link before, make sure you get over there ASAP. It’s a little awkward to get used to, but once you do, it’s fantastic.

For example, these are two overlays using Paul’s Reaction Tester (PRT) and the OFB Reaction Tester (OFB). On the left is PRT: laugh strong + OFB: hangout/sitcrosslegged and on the right is PRT: watch distressed + OFB: overlay/plead.



Now this in itself expands options enormously, but I stumbled across another way to overlay animations. Again, some of you probably already know this, but I have never seen a tutorial done on this, so I thought I might share here. Now on to the triple overlay.

Essentially, you start with an animation that utilises the lower half of your sims body in a fixed position, like “hangout” or “watch clouds”. Now you all should recognize the following poses as the hangout-layback and the hangout-relax animations, both are from the OFB Reaction Tester.



To do an overlay, pause your game, cancel the first animation and cue up any of the non-seated specific animations from Decorgal’s Sitting Talk/Conversation Hack (Talk), such as reaction neg, action pos, listen neg mild, argue or reaction pos. Now un-pause your game and your sim should now keep its lower body position and start the new animation with the upper half.

This image is, on the left OFB: hangout-layback(cancelled) + Talk: listen neg mild/shy body hold and on the right OFB: hangout-relax(cancelled) + Talk: argue/fists grr.



The final overlay can be added by using Shaklin’s WalkStyle Facial Animation Changer. Just pause your game and select and of the facial animations. Start up again and this will override what facial expression your sim has. The next image shows the same overlay animations as above plus “laugh” on the left and “surprise” on the right.



That’s it. Easy peasy.

Now just as a note, the Shaklin animations have to finish before you can start another one, but you can cue up multiple animations from the Sitting Talk/Conversation Hack and it will continue to run them without your sim popping out of that original position.

I thought I might throw in a few more images from my story 100daysofsorrow and a few random photoshoots I have done just so you can see a bit more range of what you can do with overlays.

PRT: ? + OFB: overlay/plead


PRT: cry mild + OFB: elevator reject-ee


OFB: hangout-relax(cancelled) + Talk: shy fidget


OFB: hangout-crosslegged(cancelled) + Talk: ? = Shaklin: tired


So what are you waiting for? And I want to see results!