tjakal

Do any one know how to go about disabling the foot IK system in skyrim? I've seen the entry in the lists of console command but I don't know how to access it. Reason I want to disable the foot IK you ask? Reason: I've created a new run cycle in 3dsmax and imported it into skyrim. The animation looks smooth like intended in max and when rendered to video etc, but inside skyrim it just looks bad. I'm seeing some stiffness I do not expect and slight flickering and snapping of the legs which I strongly suspect is related to the foot IK bethesda is using ontop of the walk/run animations. I hence want to disable it in order to confirm/dismiss this hypothesis.

Thanks fore, that post on bethesda forum had a lot of very good information. I've solved the import/export problem for the 1st person animations. I'll follow the good example of some other modders here on the nexus and include a more detailed tutorial on how I made my mod once I have material to release. meanwhile if someone reading this post is struggling with the same issues here's a short description of what I did: The first-person animations uses the skeleton.nif found in 'data/meshes/actor/character/_1stperson'. If you're using the hxk command-line tool (hxkcmd.exe) you therefore need to use 'skeletonfirst.hkx' instead of 'skeleton.hkx' when converting .kf files. (found in /_1stperson/characterassets/) When importing it to max you will need to alter the skeleton in some minor ways. First you need to add a bone for the camera position. This bone is to be named 'Camera1st [Cam1]' and parented to 'NPC Root [Root]' it's default vanilla position is 120.5 units above that node in Z-axis (same as world 0,0,120.5, in this case). There is also a problem with the parenting in imported version. You need to unlink the characters center-of-mass bone 'NPC COM [COM]' from 'NPC Translate [Pos]' while importing vanilla animation onto the skeleton. Otherwise you'll get your character moved upwards from the ground-plane since it adds the height above ground to 'NPC COM [COM]' while it's attached to 'NPC Translate [Pos]' stacking the height. You also need to manually set keys on frame 0 for all bones that have none and need to be keyed in the animation. And that should be about it.

If you are a PS user just run some transform distortion, liquify or wave filters on the selection to get the wave pattern if your hand isn't steady enough to just paint them. Then paint the hair/fibers with fine black and white stripes on another layer and try various blending modes and opacity settings until you're satisfied.

I'm currently looking at replacing the first person animations for skyrim, especially the way you hold your dual weapons. I have run into some problems and would like to hear thoughts from someone who might have some insight on the topic. In order to modify the first-person animations it seems one must first reverse-engineer a new skeleton which will import/export first-person kif files correctly. Here's a Wall-Of-Text that explores the nittygritty of what I've discovered so far: The first-person view of skyrim uses a different skeleton from the third-person, it containing nodes called 'NPC Translate [POS]' and 'NPC Rotate [Rot]'. From my own experience creating rigs, and observing the in-game 1st person model (by just increasing the fov to 180 and using a custom skin that renders the whole body in 1st person) I strongly suspect that these nodes are used as a dummy mid-layer to isolate the rotational axis that drive the vertical and horizontal orientation of the first-person geometry in order to prevent gimbal locks. This set-up seem to co-responds well with the skeleton.nif in the 'data/meshes/actor/character/_1stperson' folder, which makes a lot of sense. But there are discrepancies. Upon inspecting the .kf files in nifskope, it reveals they contain animation nodes for bones that are not present in the '/_1stperson' skeleton.nif. for instance the skirt bones, suggesting that the skeleton used by bethesda to animate the first-person is in fact not the '/_1stperson' skeleton.nif. Upon importing a .kf from the first-person folder onto that skeleton in max things go south: - At random, bones loses their length and moves to the Vector3.zero or 'XYZ 0,0,0' position of the parent. For some reason the left shoulder, in particular, often moves to the left clavicle... Don't know what's up with that, but stacking imports of the same animation onto the skeleton corrects this. - The transforms from the NPC nodes to pelvis chain-react to elevate the skeleton upwards to a position that looks very bugged. Suggesting the parenting of the top hierarchy bones in the '/_1stperson' skeleton.nif haven't imported correctly into 3ds max. - There is a small build-up of float errors in the transforms all up the chain since the default spinner setting of max is three-decimals and the .kf stores 4 decimals. Changing the spinner setting from 3 to 4 corrects for this. -Rotational keys are another matter entirely. There is something profoundly F'd with the way rotations are imported onto the skeleton. The rotations in the .kf's are stored as quaternions which replaces the euler ones in max with 'smoothrotation' (which are quaternion in max language). Now I don't know much about the inner workings of quaternions other than that they made my head hurt when I tried to understand them, once a long time ago. Nifskope lists the data of the quat as a Yaw-Pitch-Roll value, max however just list the euler-angles in the interface. So I can't eyeball how the rotation errors come to be. But looking at the fingers it seems like it randomly builds up the chain. the big limbs and spine looks sort of right, but the fingers reveal randomness. I've been on caffeine fueled manic steak working on this topic exclusively for the last 72 hours. My hope is that this post will provoke some technical artist of superior skill to step in and save me from myself. Thanks for reading. Edit: Face-palmed face when I found that many rotational values imported into max update the skeleton but do not actually get key-frames. Adding in the missing key-frames for those bones by setting them manually solves a lot of the previously really mind-f***ing stuff that happened on export. Might be full solution on track...

I will speculate your problem comes from how the cross section of the arm alters during forearm twist. Just look at the vanilla armors and inspect the skin weights in that area. You will probably have to sacrifice how your armor looks worn without gloves or gauntlets in favor of one that is tight enough in those areas. To accomplish what you describe you would need support for morph targets and some way to control those from a script in the game code, neither is available to modders at this point, and so it shall remain - until 'elder scrolls X', at least that's my prophecy.

Change the load order by reinstalling the mods one at a time installing those that overwrite content from another mod last.

Here I expected a question about skin weights... Weights of objects are arbitrary, base them on whatever you like, sane choices include weight of similar objects already in the game or similar objects in reality. Less sane choices involves complex formulas based on the estimated mass of the observable universe divided by your daily stool multiplied by some constant you derive from the bible and face angles of the great pyramid of Giza.

I'm trying to do exactly this, the way you hold your weapons in 1st person is utterly horrific. I'm a experienced 3D artist so it should be a easy task; problem is I can't figure out what animation files actually contain this stuff. If someone reading this has any information I'd be very interested. So far all my attempts at finding the right files for first person seem to send the hip bone to the characters root node when viewed inside skyrim and show the default animation offset at that position. Edit: Oh well, nevermind - I'm the retard. the fact that you click left to attack right in the game temporary disabled my ability to discriminate between left and right, thus I had put the right hand anims on the left hand :D

I doubt it, There will be a perv to fork the code for sure. "believe - believe - the Dragonperv comes."

I'm interested in this topic in too. From my experiments it seems like a lot, if not most, of the game settings are hardcoded and remain @ default no matter what the editor says, and won't respond to modding, not from within the CK anyways. I would like to rewrite the physics of the world really, introducing momentum and ''real' gravity so that when one runs and jump and releases all controls one does not instantly stop midair. or if jumping to high and get stuck hanging in the sky until WSAD keys are pressed. Perhaps not even being able to scale near vertical walls by rocking back and forth on the strafe keys. OR going into ORBIT when a giant takes a swing at me. not cool, bethesda... hilarious - yes.. but not cool.. *mutter, mutter* I will always have my unity project... I speculate this is far beyond how much they'll allow the community to alter this game for them though. Remember much of what's been modded isn't really thanks to the CK they realease, for example: Somewhere on bethesda there really should have been at least one crafty anarchist that would have leaked their nif-plugin to a public mirror, one might expect - but no, there was none.

The highest quality normal maps are baked by projecting high poly geometry down on low poly surfaces. That way you can build your model using millions of polygons in zbrush/mudbox and bake full blown GI lightning or whatever into your textures. Using things like the N-vidia filter for normal maps essentially just give you a old school 'bump map' effect rather than unlocking the full potential normal maps provide. Skyrims vanilla content vary in what technique was used.

Can't help you with that, but I scoured the forums in search of a different topic and ran across this which should relate to your problem: http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3445

You need to be super careful with nifskope and make sure everything is set up just right. My workflow is that I double check everything, load skyrim: fail to load correctly, go back and triple check everything - load: FAIL - quadruple check - FAIL, re-export fresh from max redo all steps three times, throw some salt over the shoulder - and suddenly for no apparent reason I taste success. That said, getting weapons into the game was pretty straight forward, from what I remember I just replaced the NiTriShape data of a vanilla file with my own and tweaked the shader properties in BSLightingShaderProperties to suit my needs.

I'm currently modding the animations of the game creating run-cycles with a more realistic and energetic stride to sync with a slightly increased speed (a 'setgs fmovespeed' increase - without the overspeeded steps of doing that using vanilla anims). A drawback of getting a more natural tempo into the motions of the game is it really make the complete stiffness of fallout 3 stand out. What I mean is - it's like in those old rainbow six game where you have 100% acceleration - 100% stops providing the experience of being a zero-G caterpillar on a surface with absolute friction, no momentum or resistance to change in direction what so ever. I've given some thought to the issue, but my programing/scripting skills are pretty weak. So I thought maybe there's some talented modder out there who could give this issue some thought? I imagine a dirty hack along the lines of a script that keep holding the general direction of travel while lowering the movespeed multiplier over a short time to give the illusion of the player having some weight. Thanks for reading.

Ghogiel: Thanks for the input, I've managed to work out the export for everything except some types of animation that use NiBspline data for quaterion rotation controlers. They don't export from my version of max ( 2008 64bit )but I've already recived promising information on how to resolve that one ( use max 8 + civ4 tools ). You're absolutely correct about my export settings being messed up when I posted this question. I do however need to use Nifskope for some minor adjustments sorting nodes no matter what settings I use, this may be to me using max 2008 that apparently is ill-supported by the exporter. Using Nifskope isn't all that bad when you get the hang of it though, it's a extra step that's for sure, but compared to the time that goes into modelling/texturing/skinning it's just a few extra minutes spent.