DexesTTP

Of course, if you're motivated you can open up a cloth physics file and try to modify it by hand. However, this is a tedious task and you'll be one of the first to do it, so if you go this route you won't get much support or help.

It shouldn't be different from 1st person animations. 3DsMax crashing seems more like a software setup issue. Check if HCT is installed correctly and maybe check what the crash is caused by (e.g.check in the 3DsMax logs, in "%AppData%\..\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2013 - 64bit\ENU\Network" depending of your version) Also, it appears that you can corrupt meshes pretty easily in 3DsMax. Try deleting any extra stuff and keeping only the skeleton + animation when exporting, maybe it will work. Although I can't help you for animations or anything artistic really (I'm pretty bad at creative stuff) I can point you to a few resources concerning FO4 animations. The all-in-one way to learn any FO4-specific animation stuff is the Fallout 4 Animation Kit, by ShadeAnimator and MaikCG. You can find here here on Nexus. It covers most of - if not all - the specifics of animation creation for Fallout 4 up until the export part. Note that you'll need to get 3DsMax and HCT 2014x64 yourself, as they are both tools that you have to buy. Then, you have the "Adding custom animations to Fallout 4" guide by Vader66, over on LoversLab (NSFW). It explains how to add most animation types in the game without touching a single tool other than the Creation Kit. As in every Bethesda game, the theory is one part then you'll have to deal with some quirks (such as the ones IanRB is going through) so it's not that easy. The FO4 animation and mesh creation is pretty documented though, so you should be able to get the full process fairly quickly nonetheless.

You'll need to add some annotations to your animation when you want the different sounds/actions to happen. From the Fallout 4 Animation Kit guide. The list of annotations is currently unknown, so you'll need to find what the possible values are in the game's animations. Just open them up in XML format and you'll see the annotations in the corresponding section, with their actual values : <array name="annotations" size="1"> <struct> <real name="time">x3f3bbc64 <!-- 0.733343 --></real> <string name="text">weaponSwing</string> </struct> </array> Ctrl-F the name "annotations" and you should find them directly.

What you're trying to do is entirely possible - to the extent of existing animations. You're right about the state machine, it is missing the attack routines and doesn't seem to allow a cat to attack at all. You can try to poke around and add that (you'll basically need to copy the HKX behavior files parts of the Dogmeat attack behavior into the cat behavior) or, alternatively, there's a menu in the Creation Kit that would allow you to do that too (it's under one of the last submenus - I can't check right now as I don't have access to the CK). However, the big problem will be to add the actual animations to the cat model, because even if you add behavior to the cat it would attack but stay stiff, as in the CatMeat mod. The person you might get help from is the creator of the Godzilla mod, who has done somewhat similar work when creating it. Also, about my progress : you might have seen the thread by ShadeAnimator, who has basically solved creating animations for Fallout 4. I also didn't check if there was a thread, but it is possible to edit behavior files from the Creation Kit directly. So, I will finish the tool, but both later and without rush (as it isn't a priority - sorry blender users, you'll have to ask 3DsMax people fro conversions for a while still).

The original author has to prove that it was stolen, usually by proving that the other person didn't have a process to get the exact same result (so he stole it from the original author), or by associating a mark on the work with another of his IP (think like artists putting their names on drawing) and proving that the IPs are independent so the work was likely stolen. This can be impossible for really small things like simple values ("I found them at random" is a valid process), and that's why they usually aren't copyright-able. This option is already unavailable for the OP though, because he straight up told us that he took the mods of other people.

Ok, so let's step back and talk from a purely, no-ethic-involved legal PoV about mod contents and content in general. Ideas This section is based on this stackexchange question An idea can't be copyrighted, trademarked or even have a precedence. You don't really "own" an idea you had. Except in one case : patents. Any idea that is patented can only be reproduced with approbation and/or fee from the original patent beneficiary, and any idea that isn't protected under a patent is available for anyone to take freely without even mentioning the original author. This works due to international laws, and is limited to "non-broad" ideas that implies an actual way to implement something. E.g you can patent the idea of "touchscreen using pressure-detecting crystals that change their resistance when deformed" but you can't patent "touchscreens" or even "pressure-detecting crystals", because both of them aren't implying an implementation. Design The design is an improved form of an idea. It basically comes down to an idea + the work done to make it doable. A design can be patented, but if it is not, well... As of now, it is unclear if design falls under Intellectual Property. You might have heard that Oracle is suing Google over the use of the Java API on Android, because Sun (bought by Oracle) put time to design the API while Google just took it and implemented it. Once this trial is settled, we will have an answer with an official precedent (in the US at least), until then nothing can protect your designs except patents.. Implementation Now, this is the thing that always falls under intellectual property, provided some limits. An implementation is everything "created"... A written story, a drawing, 3D models, lines of code, to a whole mod. It is supposed the author put time to create his implementation. Because it was in the original question, this does include any values or "small" results the author might have created.... might This doesn't always work though. There is some implementations that can't be attributed to someone, much like ideas and patents. I probably can't e.g. write a 3-sentence story and CC-BY-NC-ND it, because I would probably not "own" it per say, but it depends of the story. The "basic idea" behind it is that the author had to provide effort to make the implementation, so that it can be considered intellectual property. So if the author just slapped the value there and called it a day, then it isn't their IP. However if they studied which value is the best to go there before putting their mod out you'd need to ask them for a right to use their IP. Either way, all these things can only be settled by justice in court. Even if you copy a mod and put it somewhere else, the only thing the mod author can legally do is sue you for theft of IP (which is pretty expensive to pay for, so be careful). What usually happens though is that the mod author reports you to the website managers, who will then refuse to host your mod due to the assumption that it is stolen IP. Note that there's no need for them to justify this : they can decide to not host any of your mod if they want to just because they don't like you, after all it is their website. (footnote : discrimination is them not wanting to host mods from a "class" of people like e.g. russian, transgender or black-skinned - not just you, and "free speech" simply doesn't apply on a website.) Now, to go back to the original point : can you "copy values" from lots of mods, bundle them together and call it your IP ? No. And the funny thing is, this isn't your IP because you wanted to copy the mods, not because you used the values. At the same time, if you decided to make a "fix all" bundle and slapped the same values than everyone out there without trying (e.g. by studying the values and finding them yourself or even by pure luck), you could have called this mod your own IP. tl;dr : ask permission for your mod to all authors whose mods you've retro-engineered. Otherwise, yes this will be theft of IP.

tl;dr : what you want to do (create animations) isn't possible yet. Now that you know that, you can read the context below. Judging by your post history, using HKXPack isn't what you want to do. You'll want HKXAnim, which is ANOTHER tool and which isn't working at all yet... so it isn't out. Also, just a reminder : the tool you're trying to use provides raw data, nothing more... like : 47 255 247 127 186 47 255 247 127 233 47 255 247 127 251 63 0 0 0 29 0 1 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 30 30 0 16 170 73 63 124 189 185 64 142Good luck making a new animation from that, because I've been trying for about a month and I'm not yet close to finishing. You'll only need to use the HKXPack tool to analyze HKX files, or maybe edit them roughly. You CAN'T use them to create animations. Now, if you really want to open and/or edit existing HKX files with HKXPack (I can always be mistaken), then you HAVE to know already what a path is, what is a working directory and what the above command does in detail before, and if you don't to learn it by yourself. I mean, it's kind of the ABC of studying computer things and/or reverse engineering on WIndows, and I feel like I'd be doing you a disservice by explaining the solution (even with context) while what you are trying to do is something nobody (you can ask) knows yet. "If any of the above instructions seems too difficult, then you won't need the tool." -The post you just quoted

I mean, if you guys are very motivated you already could edit a skeleton. There's a tool called HKXPack that dumps the names & coordinates of the bone, around other data, and can put them up back to the in-game format. By adding new names and putting the coordinates manually, you could technically edit the skeleton and have it working in game. I'm pretty sure dumping coordinates is the furthest we can do without problems, though. The reason is that we are working on a tool to create FO4 animations from FO4 skeletons. It makes sense to put the limit there because if we have a tool to edit skeletons in 3DsMax AND a tool to create animations from skeletons, we basically would have all of Havok for free, which isn't a good business model for Havok. I believe we can only have one, and I'd prefer if it was the one to create new animations y'see.

Not off the table. I'm working on a thing to do that. However, keep in mind that it takes time. We're making progress though. This tool is the "core" of the animation converter, that takes Fallout 4's binary files and get numbers from them (or the reverse - take numbers and make Fallout 4 files). So, we have to create a tool to read animations from 3DsMax/Blender, move the data around and combine it with stuff (to be readable by the game) then convert it to numbers. Finally, the above tool will put the numbers in a HKX file.

Actually, there is a place I keep a more up-to-date thread about my progress. But, let's say the site isn't endorsed by Nexus so I won't link it here. If you know where it is, you can check the thread out. Otherwise, don't worry :) I have a thread about HKXPack (the project core) already opened here, thread that I will update as soon as I make relevant progress to the HKXAnim tool. We are just still deep in early dev of the tool so I have not much to say yet. Also, you guys are already helping by keeping me motivated to go through with this, and that's more than enough :)

That's actually completely spot on. For those that never heard of me, I'm the main dev of the aforementionned tool. We currently have to work without the things that were done for Skyrim, because it used something that we simply don't have (an official API, there is one for Skyrim but not for Fallout 4). I know people managed to make the Creation Kit exporter for animations work with the official Havok Content tools, but it cost as said earlier a lot of money, so only a select few who already had access to that can pull it off. That's why we are working on an independent exporter created specifically for Fallout 4 files. The idea is to provide some "sample projects" already filled with skeletons, that allows you to animate one of the actors. At the moment, we only have the full human skeleton, but we plan to include 1st person skeleton and probably most creatures once we manage to get the tool working for the full human skeleton. The way we did that is by first writing a tool to read data inside the Havok files and write data to a Havok file, from scratch. This took the most part of January/February/March. Then, we studied the animations and tried to analyze data "by hand", but the export tool and the help of people that had the Havok Content Tools allowed us to make huge progress in understanding the Havok animations. Now, I'm writing a tool to try to generate animation files from a Blender or 3DsMax project, and hoping that it will eventually work. Keep in mind that despite our recent progress, we're still really far from a fully working thing. After the 1st person animation is created, I have no idea how to add them to the game though. I believe there is entries that exist for 3rd person animations in the CK, but 1st person animations may require something like FNIS for Fallout 4 to edit the behavior files or to straight up replace the already existing first person animations. If this is the case, I'll maybe try to work on that after the whole animation creation thing is done. This isn't a promise, just a maybe.

Surprisingly there hasn't been a comment in a bit. My question is with it reading the skeleton now, is it possible to take an animation and edit it and have it back into a HKX format? I'm still working on that The problem is both understanding the structure of the actual data and converting it to another format, be it for animations or for skeletons. To keep it simple, I "handle" skeletons files because I can now read what exactly in in the files, all the "numbers" if you want. But I am not yet able to convert these numbers to another format (maya/max/blender). I'm focused on both animations and cloth data at the moment. I'll need skeletons to do animations, so it will come at one point. I'm not yet sure when, because I've not much time nowadays and the math behind the numbers makes the whole thing a little hard to understand. So, at the moment it's a whole lot of writing stuff down in a .txt file while trying to figure out what is what. Also, sorry for not giving many updates here. I'll try to keep you all up to date with what I do !

New version is out ! get it here It adds handling of Skeleton files, as well as a fix for some data inside BSClothExtraData files. Note that there is some extradata that is still not handled well, associated with Googles and/or belts. I'll release a new version - maybe a definitive one - when I find how to solve this problem.

Ok, I checked and I believe I found the reason. I handled a TYPE_TRANSFORM like a TYPE_VECTOR4. It appears that : 1- a transform is 64 bytes long at least, not 16 (so about 3/4th of the data was lost) 2- it must be handled as a TYPE_MATRIX4 for the thing to work. My bad :P There's a couple other weird things in the file : there's unknown data used as padding (that's not 0 i mean), and there's two extra values at the end of an array. I can't say for sure why, but it is consistent with RAM leftovers. I believe most of the hkx file contents are memory dumps from the Havok tools. Let me know if it keeps happening after I update the tool. I believe it's not the cause of the problem though, as missing data should result in an instant crash while non-written data is more prone to dragged out crashes. The reason I believe the crash was taking its time to happen is because it may have accumulated errors in the calculated movements due to the transform being 0 where it shouldn't have been. This simply stacks the wrong data until it's so blatantly wrong it makes the game crash. Another reason may be because you didn't meet Sturges until the actual crash, therefore it didn't happen until then. But I believe you actually tested that around him, or you put the .hkx file in another nif. I'm currently finishing handling skeleton data, which I finally decoded, and I'd rather not do a build in between when I'm potentially hours away of a new feature release. So, if you want a debugged version now, hit me up on IRC and I'll dump one from the dev branch :)

No, it currently doesn't. The reason is simple : we have no idea how to extract this data from the HKX file. Concerning my method, there isn't even a way to extract the animation data from a file using this tool yet. To explain it more in depth. The animation data is stored as NURBS, which are basically curves defined in several points : one at the beginning, one at the end and the rest to define the transition. We are currently only able to extract the begin/end data from the file, using the Havok library. The algorithm to get the intermediate frames isn't known yet. Several people (including myself) are looking through research papers/code about this and trying to find matches for the algorithm. Worst case scenario, the algorithm would have to be reverse-engineered. In any case, it will take time - we may be talking years - to find it. If we have any updates about ways to solve this, we'll let you know.