ChuckYufarley

My guess is the key lies in the character behavior rather than any behavior file attached to the furniture object itself. Furniture behavior files are a little easier to decipher, although they can still be beasts to understand if you're not familiar with how they work. I have only about a 20% understanding of the simpler ones at this point, I'm afraid. All I really know is what strings to look for in order to get the furniture animations to fire along with the character animations. Character behavior files are another can of worms altogether. A very big can of worms. Like I said before, the idle phase is where the NPC more or less controls how long they remain in the animation. It would help to look for and study vanilla furniture objects that NPCs will interact with for longer periods. There might be priority flags at work with those. I don't know for sure. Even the most basic of workbench animations seem to last for wildly random intervals. I do know that all of the furniture objects I've made seem to keep the NPCs involved for roughly the same length of time, 20-30 seconds, but sometimes they will continue "interacting" for a minute or more. I've made a few with idle flavor animations, which are basically secondary, supplemental animations randomly mixed in with the base PoseA_Idle animation, and NPCs tend to remain involved with those objects a bit longer. It could also depend on what keywords the furniture object has. I use WorkshopRelaxationObject on the stuff I've built and that seems to get the NPCs to use the objects quite regularly. Here's a great in depth Havok guide that I've perused on many occasions looking for clues to figuring this stuff out: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/9329348-fallout-4-havok-guide/ Funny thing is, the author gives me credit for helping him out in some way and I am really clueless as to what I did. If you haven't already done so, I would also recommend downloading the Fallout 4 Animation Kit: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/16694 It includes a great tool for converting hkx files into xml, so then you can at least begin to study the behavior, animation, skeleton, etc, files associated with Havok animation. The kit also comes with a comprehensive PDF that explains how to make use of the included tools. I hope this helps. Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any other questions. Maybe I can give a little more insight.

I used it for an idle marker in one of my mods. Looked up that marker in FO4Edit and this is the animation used: Actors\Character\Animations\Idle_TrainTrain_Song05.hkx

Is the shower animation unique to that particular mod? I've never used it and I don't really play the game enough to know if there's a vanilla shower animation. At any rate, I've made a handful of custom character animations for furniture objects and one trick I've used to make sure an NPC doesn't dip out before the entire animation plays is have the entire animation play during the EnterFromStand phase. I'm no expert by any means, and I've only been working on character animations for about a year, but it seems to me that a furniture animation has to proceed to the PoseA_Idle phase before the NPC takes control over how long they remain in the furniture. There may be a way to control how long an NPC remains in the idle phase, but I've yet to find it. But, they're basically locked into the enter phase.

Is the drawbridge scripted? if so, perhaps you could use a dummy, invisible bridge, which would be nav meshed, then enable/disable it depending on the state of the actual bridge. Seems to me I did that with a set of retractable stairs or something similar, in one of my many test builds.

Yeah, it's not like I wanted you to name a child after me or anything. I had a file. I modified it. I shared it. :dry:

I have a grilled cheese sandwich I could alter if this is what you're looking for. Edit: I went ahead and made you a couple versions. One with collision, one without. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zenvh3pc5sPrYowU7D8tDfL2dYRhlsll/view?usp=sharing

If you change the stair collision material to one specifically for stairs, I'm certain it would solve your problem. I assigned the wood stairs material to it and it works! Strange that there is no "metal stair" material considering how many metal stairs there are in FO4 ... Right? But there's grass stairs and glass stairs, for all your grass and glass stair needs.

If you change the stair collision material to one specifically for stairs, I'm certain it would solve your problem.

I have the CK open right now and it appears that activators can be nav meshed the same way static objects can. Here's a Kinggath Bethesda Mod School tutorial on nav meshing workshop objects:

Can I assume you're making a custom collision for your stairs? If so, what type of material are you assigning to the stair collision? There are several materials you can assign that are specifically for stairs, StoneStairs and WoodStairs being two of them. If you, as the player, cannot climb the stairs, my guess is you don't have stair specific material assigned to the collision. I've been there before. Also, I've built some pretty steep stairs in the past and haven't had any trouble climbing them. I haven't actually witnessed NPCs using the steep stairs, but I know Dogmeat can climb them, and he is more or less an NPC. Stair helpers are more for NPCs than for the player. Here is a great tutorial for stair helpers as well as nav mesh cuts: BTW, I typically space my stair treads at 16 generic unit intervals, more or less the same as vanilla stairs.

You're welcome. Coincidentally, today I did a YouTube search for news from my hometown, and discovered that two businesses there had burned to the ground in the last 6-8 months. One was across main street from the fire hall. I don't know if this speaks to the kind of information you're looking for or not, but one thing I'd like to add is that all across rural America, small towns like the one I grew up in are slowly but surely turning into ghost towns. Family farms are dwindling in numbers. There's little to no incentive for new business to set up shop. In most cases it's all they can do to maintain basic services for their communities. School enrollments plummet. In my hometown school enrollment is less than a quarter of what it was 30 years ago. To make matters worse, as services and opportunities become fewer and farther between, substance abuse and crime increases.

I grew up in a small farming community in Northwestern Minnesota, and although my family were not farmers, we did live on a farmstead. Keep in mind that no two rural communities are the same, and I can only speak from my own experience. In our case, we did not have garbage collection for many years. We had our own dedicated "garbage truck", which was just an old pickup with a topper. Every couple weeks we'd have to go to the county landfill to empty it, but the frequency often depended on the time of year. Winter time we could get by with waiting until the truck was full, Summer we'd probably go to the dump once a week.. However, there was a time when we did have a privately owned collection service. A local guy owned his own garbage truck, and could be contracted to collect your refuse on a weekly basis. Emergency services varied. We did have a full time sheriff's department and a couple of town police officers. Our fire department was 100% volunteer, which would explain slower response times. In case of fire, the emergency dispatch would sound the town's emergency siren to alert the volunteer firefighters. Mind you, this was many years ago, before cell phones, so I would assume they've updated their procedures since then. When I was 12-13 years old, I managed to start a grass fire with a poorly aimed bottle rocket. From the first sign of smoke it was probably 10 minutes before the alarm sounded, and another 20-30 minutes until the fire truck arrived. I couldn't say whether or not our ambulance service had full time EMTs or not. We did have a small hospital in town. I had one or two experiences when an ambulance was called, and I would estimate the response time was in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes, so I would guess the EMTs were volunteers as well. As for our mayor, his duties were limited and focused mainly on functions within the city limits. Living outside the city limits, I would guess we fell under the jurisdiction of the sheriff's department and/or various county administrators. That being said, with the exception perhaps of major construction, permits and various ordinances are things most rural folks didn't fret over. Our closest neighbor was more than a mile away, so noise was never an issue. In 40 years the old farmstead has seen multiple buildings added or demolished and at least 3-4 major house renovations with nary a permit in hand. When you have a brush pile, you burn it. If you want to run a business out of you garage, there's no zoning ordinance to stop you. Well, there might be an ordinance, but I've never seen it stand in anyone's way.

There are several different types of BSConnectPoint(s) you can add to a nif that aren't necessarily meant for snapping one object to another. Kinggath covers some of these in one of his Sim Settlement tutorial videos, There's one for rotation as well. A lot of door nifs use a rotation BSConnectPoint. That may be another one that affects the pivot point, although I'm not aware if that pertains to placing objects in the CK or just when building workshop objects in game.

I built this a while back for my first mod and recently optimized and retextured it. I'll give it to anyone interested in using it.

I can't recall if it matters or not, because I don't do much in the CK when it comes to placing objects, but does adding an origin snap point to the nif change the pivot in the CK?

I managed to figure it out myself. It's just that Chuck wrote an important point about Addon240 at the very end of the tutorial. The BSX flag had to include Bit4 and Bit3. Chuck also probably dislikes Max, prefers nifskop. Most of the things described about ray animation can be done right away in max. Much more convenient than nifskop. Now I need to make sound annotations, more complex animations and make a powerful, long-range spotlight. Now it's my turn to request a tutorial. I've never explored any of the Bethesda tools in Max, and have no idea how to do any of the things I do in Nifskope with 3ds Max. Can you give me a few pointers? It's not that I don't like using Max, it's just that I never learned what I could do with Bethesda specific applications other that applying materials and exporting animations. In fact, I enjoy working with 3DS Max quite a bit, and prefer the interface to that of Nifskope a lot more.

Very nice. I need that keyboard IRL.

It's taken me a while to complete the tutorial, but here it is. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fNRFO4ylL3DctgtwtDgmAgLIjOxl6-Yu/view?usp=sharing It's rather long. I included as much information as I could. If you have any questions, let me know.

no, I use a autodoor, no problem with that. But this is nonsense. We need to find a way to animate furniture and implement fully automatic animation of objects. There are many objects that run without scripting at all. They are somehow prepared already in max and do not even require any scripts in ck. Built, they start immediately and play a whole bunch of animations. They all contain a node (controller?) BsBehaviorGraphData. It is in plugins, in maxscript, but I donât know what it is and how to use it. I'll explain a bit about the BehaviorGraphExtraData in my tutorial. You are correct, there are BGEDs that allow you to cycle through animations without using scripts, but as it pertains to stuff I've built, the trigger is a power source. I have also made some custom BGEDs that allow for many, many different animation sequences which are really quite easy to then call out in a script.

Yeah, I just tested a scaling animation myself and it worked on my first try. I must have learned a few things since the last time I tried it. Do you mean you've found Havok materials and animations pertaining to animating objects for FO4 and not just characters or creatures? The only tutorials I've ever found for FO4 focused mainly on character animation. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places. Judging by the awesome animations in your video, it seems like you can animate just about anything for FO4. I looked at your other videos as well and your light beams in this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFdhVrzPAXA&t=71s) seem to do everything that the ones on the disco ball do. Are you using point lights or addon nodes because at 1:25 it sure looks like the beams are casting lights. What is it you want to be able to do differently? Do you want information on how to use Nifskope because I'm sure there's nothing I can tell you about what I do in 3Ds Max that you don't already know.? Really, really great work, BTW.

Most of the disco ball animation was done in 3DS Max. Generally speaking, any time parts of the mesh move, those animations were done in Max. If the mesh doesn't actually move, but the texture moves across one or more of it's surfaces, that's a texture animation and I did those in Nifskope. On most of my stuff it's usually a combination of both. I've never fully inspected all the Bethesda tools available in 3DS Max, so I don't know what I might have missed or never learned to use. For example, I've never seen anyone describe the technique for keyframing texture animations as has been shared earlier in the discussion here. I only know what I've learned from the various tutorials I've come across and from my own trial and error. I'm not sure what modifiers you're talking about with regard to the light rays. There are certain animation tools within Max that will not directly translate into a Gamebryo nif animation. For example, you cannot export an animated nif that uses path constraints without first baking all the animation frames. Scaling is another thing I don't believe will export as a nif animation, though I could be wrong. Seems to me I tried doing that in the past and it did not work, but that was a few years ago when I was just learning to do this stuff. There is, however, a way to animate an object's scale in Nifskope. The way you describe creating your light rays tells me you're probably using techniques that nif export does not support. If you can bake all the animation frames first, perhaps then it will export as a nif. Also, keep in mind that there's a difference between Havok and Gamebryo animation and how those are utilized in FO4. The majority of object animations in FO4 are Gamebryo. There are a few objects here and there that use Havok animation, but those involve rigging skeletons and creating behavior files that no modder has really done yet, as far as I know. Getting back to the light rays. I will try to make a brief tutorial that explains how I created the light rays in my projects.

None of those are training videos, simply examples of what the various objects do. I also encourage you to find examples of objects from FO4 that have animations similar to what you'd like to make and thoroughly examine those nif files in nifskope. The PlayerHouse_Sink01.nif found under Meshes/SetDressing/PlayerHouse is a great example of fluid animation. Most of what I've learned about FO4 animation has come from examining vanilla nifs. Also, I did a lot of these types of animations by editing data in nifskope, not with 3DS Max techniques. I have been asked in the past to create some training aids and I think now would be a good time to do just that.

I've done a bit of liquid and light animation in some of my work and I'd be happy to help you figure some of this stuff out if you'd like. Take a look at some of my animation work here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrj36BTYAkH8CIgP2GxrpUA/videos and let me know if you want to try any of those techniques. There are a number of examples of light and light ray animation as well as some other types of texture animation examples. I'm afraid the only example of liquid animation is the NukaMatic 3000 and the video is rather choppy.

I've done a bit of texture animation in some of my projects and I'd be happy to share any information I have if you're ever stumped by anything. Funny thing, I've never considered using Max to keyframe the animations. I just edit all the transform data using nifskope.

I just found out about this plug-in: https://lukascone.wordpress.com/2019/03/21/havok-3ds-max-plugin/ The description says it only works for Max 2010-2019, but if you scroll down to the latest release link, you'll see that it was updated two weeks ago and now supports through Max 2022.