SSE Animations: scaling actor in 3DS to make them smaller in game?

[Hoamaii]

Hey guys,

 

I'm fairly new to creating custom animations.

 

I've manged to resize female hands properly in 3DS to fit female's hands size in game. I'm now trying to rescale the whole actor (skeleton + mesh) directly in 3DS, so that when I'm animating two actors together, one can be smaller than the other one in game (completely independantly from rescaling them thru scripts).

 

The purpose of that is to be able to polish positions adjustments directly in 3DS before exporting the animation.

 

I've made some tests scaling NPC_COM down to 95%, creating the animation I want, then right before export restoring it all to 100% (like we do when rescaling hands) - it loads ok in game but positioning is messed up - so I must be forgetting something.

 

Anybody has managed to successfully do that who could give me some advices?

 

Many thanks in advance!

[Hoamaii]

Well, I found a way which seems to work in my first tests...

 

In case anybody is interested:

 

- with 2 actors in the same scene in 3DS, 1 male + 1 female (same skeleton), let's say you want the female to be 5% smaller than the male

 

- leave the male skeleton as it is, select the female skeleton's NPC_Root bone and scale it down to 95% (in 'World' view), that should rescale the whole skeleton to 95%.

 

- if you're also using Pornphile's 2 actors controller rig, you will also need to scale down the Root_Controller to 95% so that all transforms will scale accordingly.

 

- assuming you're using the default male skeleton for both actors, now select both female "Hand" bones in world view, and scale them down to 85 % (exact number is 85.186), all fingers will rescale accordingly - the only difference between default skeleton and skeletonFemale is the hands size.

 

- create your animation for both actors, the rescaling will now allow to properly position and align hands and limbs to reflect what it's going to look like in game.

 

- before exporting your animations, you need to rescale everything back to 100% (all in world view) - female hands' bones first, then female NPC_Root bone, and finally Root_Controller if you're using it.

 

- export each animation separately as usual.

 

 

And finally, in your animation script you need to make sure to scale both actors in game to reflect your 3DS scales: once the female actor is rescaled to 95% of the male scale, everything will align exactly as it did in 3DS.

[cumbrianlad]

I've never yet been brave enough to start playing with this sort of thing but it's definitely worth remembering for if and when I do!

Thanks for posting this.

I love it when people post useful tips. :thumbsup: