mindboggles

Is there anyone out there who knows about states / hierarchy of how the Gamebryo animations relate to each other? I can knock up plenty of mt kf files and get them working fairly well together which seem to do a natural self blending depending on the animation bone priorities, but I'm getting issues with the combat animation files which don't seem to want to blend properly with the mt kf files. In game it appears that the game wants to equip and un-equip a custom creatures weapon resulting in a jerky transition of the bones I address in the combat animations each time that it does this change. I'm trying to play with priorities and even call blend in the text keys for particular bones or controlled blocks, but I'm unsure what this achieves and what exactly it is addressing when I do so, e.g. Blend:3 I'm assuming calls a blend on the 3rd controlled block of the kf file? So I posting this in the vain attempt of finding out what the game is doing when it moves from one animation to another.

I feel so stupid, after wasting a whole day on this problem notching up what must be a record number of CTD's I finally twigged to the problem. I didn't make an mtidle without it the game will not make the creature come to life and if you try to kill it before it lives the game will reliably CTD.

So I'm working on my 8th custom creature with all going well, built the skeleton in 3DS rigged the mesh and sorted out the dismemberment then exported both. Built the body part data and it appears in the game without any issues, I can select it in VATS and shows the proper dismemberment sections, problem comes when I kill it and I get CTD. I went over the rigged mesh and everything seems okay (did catch two unweighted vertices). Normally I've used the minimal amount of collision bodies and those parts of the rigged mesh skinned to bones without collision have just gone along for the ride when it dismembers. Then I went full crazy and built collision bodies for most of the skeleton and setup a truck load constraints in case that was the issue, but no change. I don't think it's a mismatch between the dismemberment groups and the collision bodies because usually the game will CTD as soon as it tries to load it if it that's the case. The thing that really bugs me is that I hit this problem when I first did my Dalek's but it was so long ago I can't even begin to remember how I fixed it. I could cheat and use destruction data and substitute in dummy meshes but I'd like to find out what's happening here in case it happens again.

What you need to do is locate Primmslims cowboyhat.nif (creatures protectron) and open it up in Nifskope then what you need to do is launch another instance of Nifskope and locate the armor head gear contructionhat.nif, block copy (the NiTriStrips) then paste it into the Primslim cowboyhat.nif. You will need to transform edit your pasted NiTriStrips block until it roughly matches the cowboy hats orientation and position within the nif, then delete the cowboy hat NiTriStrips block then save your nif under a new name. Your new nif will then need to be placed in data\meshes\creatures\protectron folder and it should then become visible to you in the GECK for your protectron under ModelList where you simply check it and your done.

You can look at it this way, the more goes you have at it the faster and easier it becomes, hopefully it will get start to get routine for you. Latest creature I'm making is the Alien from Dark Star and apart from a small gremlin with vertical IK solvers it's becoming very easy. I look forward to seeing your TARS come to life.

You have a tricky problem with this rotation! I can really only say how I go about getting a new creature working form the workflow that I do and hope that Blender isn't doing something funny to you. I'll start by creating the mesh and make sure it is set to the origin and again zero rotation (3DS uses XForm to reset), I'll then build the skeleton (like I've said before) and from that export both the rigged mesh and the skeleton. I'll clean up both these nifs in Nifskope and then get them into the game just to check that everything is orientated properly and I have no weird skin issues. If everything checks out I will then save a back up of my 3DS (Blender) file and do that little bit I mentioned in the PM about culling the Bip01 NonAccum and re-linking to the Bip01, this file then serves as the base for my animations. If your importing back into Blender then it's possible the Nifscripts might be causing the rotation issues with what is coming back in, I seem to remember (vaguely in the back of my mind) something about skeleton bone rotations when Nifscripts import. So basically I don't trust what gets imported with the scripts and just make sure whatever I create in 3DS (Blender) exports the way I want it. Oh and don't be afraid to throw stuff away if it isn't working, I chucked out 2 skeleton versions of R2 which in the end boiled down to an IK solver issue. Also make sure you get in the habit of reading what the rotations are of those first few bones in all your files in Nifskope, at least until you get something working properly and get some confidence with what is getting exported. Wish I could be of more help, I know the frustration you must be having as I hit this same problem when I first did my Daleks.

Silly me, I should have thought to look at you skeleton.nif myself. If it's the same you provided earlier then you do have rotations in it, your Bip01 has Y -90 and your Bip01 NonAccum has Y 90 and R -180, they should all be getting exported as zero and I'm afraid correcting that in the skeleton.nif only may just throw out your rigged mesh. Try and work out your bone rotations in Blender so that after you export your skeleton they read zero (without any need for intervention) and only then re-rig your mesh in Blender and re-export it.

You could try to open up both the skeleton and mtidle and compare bone rotations, open up the NiTransformInterpolator block details and check the rotations there and then head into NiTrnasformData and check what it's saying about any rotations in it also. The pointing of the bones is their rotation, the bones in the picture have zero rotation on them but if I had them so that they pointed straight out in front of the mesh then they would have a 90 degree rotation set into them which would then carry over into the skeleton.nif when exported. What you see in the 3D programs is just a visual representation and if your unsure what it / Nifskope is doing trust in what the numbers are saying, Blender must have some form of object properties to give you all the details of the bones and similarly Nifskope holds the bone rotation data in the NiNode (bone), except it only represents them as dots. As you can see in the picture the (x-axis is the reference for bones) bones are pointed globally in the x-axis so have zero rotation, for me in 3DS I set them this way everytime.

Hopefully this can be of some help. http://i1369.photobucket.com/albums/ag209/Mindboggles/HelpOut_zpsrgzmxenb.jpg The Bip01 (Red) and the Bip01 NonAccum (Green) both at zero with no rotation on them, the rest of the skeleton built then linked afterwards to complete the skeleton. This way I don't get any strange rotations creeping in with the rigged mesh, skeleton, or the animation files (but I do cull the Bip01 NonAccum for the animations and re-introduce with the export settings).

Sounds like you have rotation happening to one or two of the base bones like the Bip01 or the Bip01 NonAccum, this might be caused by how the bones are rotated in Blender to begin with and possibly even got set in there with the rigged mesh. When I had this happen to me in the past I made sure the very first thing I did was to have no rotation on either one of those bones in 3DS (like I mentioned in the PM). But this might be different for Blender! It's possible to pull it out by making adjustments to the bone rotations of the skeleton in Nifskope but you will then always have to go through and make sure they aren't rotated back by any animation file which also stores that info, and basically they trump all when it comes to the final position and rotation of all the bones.

My .kf files? I feel like I must have missed an obvious step then... I don't really have any .kf files made. I only made one test animation. Do .kf files control root movement then, or am I confused? Yeah you will need a host of them for any custom creature. Best if you have a look at a vanilla creature / robot like the eyebot or even R2D2 and you will get a sense for the bare minimum of animation kf files needed. The very first animation file you should create is the mtidle.kf file, this is like the base animation file that creatures /npc's use and once you have it working the game will grab a hold of your creation bringing it to life with AI and functioning collision. The names of the various animations are relatively self explanatory, so if you want your creature to be able to move forward you will need to create an mtforward.kf animation file and it is in this one you key it's forward movement on the Bip01 bone.

Good you've got that bit sorted, I might have to have a look at a couple of your .kf files to see what's causing those issues.

I've had a look at both your nifs and for the most of it they appear okay. There are a few things that need fixing, in your skeleton mesh the scene root node [0] is an NiNode which needs to be set to BSFadeNode. In the rigged mesh the BSShaderPPLightingProperty needs to have the Shader Flags with SF_Skinned set (that should make a difference), and just something I don't use the NiStencilProperty or the NiSpecularProperty.

It's very difficult to see much from the pictures, I'd really need to see the nifs in detail. But for exporting the rigged mesh Nifscripts need to cull any extra bones that aren't rigged and flatten the hierarchy on export, I don't try flattening in Nifskope. It's proper for all the bones that are left to appear disconnected, the game should already have that info with the exported skeleton because the two work in conjunction. You need to make sure when your exporting your rigged mesh that you don't collapse your skin and dismemberment modifiers, if you don't see a dismemberment skin instance within your NiTriShape block you need to keep playing in Blender with your modifier stack (if Blender has one?) and your export settings until you do. When your exporting your skeleton make sure you don't flatten the hierarchy and don't remove unconnected bones. When I'm testing my animations I only ever test on the skeleton in Nifskope and leave it to the GECK to see what the skinned mesh is doing. You might need to head into your .kf files into the NiTransformInterpolator and it's data and just check that scale data hasn't been set there. Hope some of that helps.

I am currently in the process of doing a major upgrade to my mod (a player home dungeon / city) and my modding partner has provided various adult / vampire / undead paintings, the trouble is that I have no way knowing half of the artists or how to find them for permission if I did. Instead I can make some paintings from some screen shots but I require a little artistic help for more, so if you are either half decent at painting yourself or know someone who is and is willing to allow their work to be used in this mod I would appreciate it if you could PM me. Content I am looking for could be summed up as adult, vampire, undead, even Molag Bal (I have seen some naughty Molag Bal pics). Thanks.

I finished my first mod and I'm pretty happy with how it plays and wish to make it available to Nexus. I was just wondering what is involved in setting up a page and what is needed in terms of making it download and instal into NMM properly? Any help would be appreciated as I would like to get this up and move onto hopefully bigger and better.

Okay so I know it's a bit kinky but how about a weapons pack that includes canes,paddles, and riding crops. Make them with little or no damage and you can have fun with your wife,follower or the torture victims in the Dawnstar Sancturary. :biggrin: