Skyrim Animation in 2021 - A Quick Tutorial

[JamesHalliday]

This post is intended to give aspiring Skyrim animators a few quick tips on how and where to start. This is by no means a comprehensive technical tutorial, but hopefully a way to get people pointed in the right direction.

 

I've been tinkering with Skyrim modding for the past year and half, and earlier this year, I decided to try my hand at animating, mostly because there were several animations that I really wanted in my game that don't exist online. I had a very hard time getting started. Unlike editing meshes and textures, there is very little information to be found online about animating. Skyrim mod animators are few and far between, and those offering tutorials or assistance are even more sparse. Animating isn't that difficult, but the door to entry is. If one doesn't know how or where to start, it can seem almost impossible. Taking your first steps into animating can seem like looking at an impenetrable wall with no way in. That's why I wanted to offer a little help. It's my small way of giving back to the Skyrim mod community that gives so much. I don't have the time to make a robust, fancy tutorial with PDFs and videos and stuff, but I want to do what I can, so here I am. I am by no means an expert, but I think I know enough to be of a little assistance.

 

My aim is to briefly describe what tools you'll need, and the basic order of operations you'll need to follow.

 

I animate with Blender on Linux, which is about as far from Bethesda's method as one can get. I am given to understand that Bethesda used 3DS Max with Havok Content Tools, the former being a pay-for software, and the latter not being available at all to individuals anymore, as far as I'm aware. Luckily, it can all be done with free software, but it can be very hard to know where to start.

 

First, you'll need Blender with the Niftools plugin. Niftools should be easy to find by googling. I'm going to assume that anyone reading this is reasonably comfortable using Blender. If not, tutorials for that are endless, so there's no need for me to go over it here.

 

Next you'll need HKX CMD. I use the GUI version found here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/17109

 

This is the tool that converts animations between the format read by the game, and the format usable in Blender. The animation converter can be slightly tricky to use, and there's not much in the way of instructions included, but once set up correctly, I've found it to be 100% reliable and easy. Here's what to do:

• Extract the ConvertUI.exe into a new folder.
• In the same folder that the exe is in, create two new folders named "infolder", and "outfolder".
• Locate skeleton.hkx and skeleton_female.hkx within the Skyrim game assets. Copy them into infolder.
• Locate skeleton.nif and skeleton_female.nif and copy them into outfolder.
• Drop whatever animations you want to convert into the infolder. Run the exe and convert and it will spit out the new files into the outfolder.

It's important to note that you'll need to type in the appropriate hkx skeleton in the skeleton fields. When converting from hkx to kf, the converter will automatically convert everything in the infolder. When converting from kf to hkx, you'll need to enter the input and output file names for each animation and convert one at a time.

 

Those are the only tools you actually need, although you'll probably want to pick up Nifskope while you're at it. It's not needed for animating, but if you're tinkering with this stuff, you'll likely end up wanted to edit a nif at some point.

 

If you're on Linux like me, then you'll need to run the Converter with Wine and PlayOnLinux. You'll need to create a 32-bit drive with PlayOnLinux for the Converter to work. Running the exe in a 64-bit drive will cause Wine to crash. Woulda saved me a lot of time and headache if someone had told me that.

 

Blender of course has a Linux native because, well, it's Blender. Nifskope works under Wine, but I had crashing problems when using regular Wine with PlayOnLinux. I run Nifskope through Proton 6 on Steam and it works beautifully with no issues. Just add the exe as a non-Steam product and force use Proton. It's that easy.

 

Once you have all that working, you're ready to rock and roll. Sometimes you might want to start from scratch, and other times you'll want a sample animation as a starting point. Pick the animation file you want to start with. This will be an hkx file. This is what Skyrim reads. Convert it to kf (keyframe file). Open Blender and import whatever mesh (nif) you're animating for. Now, I'm just going to assume that you're no stranger to Blender. Doing an in-depth Blender tutorial is not the purpose of this post. If you need help with Blender, check out tutorials for that and/or buy a book. (Andrew Price from Blenderguru is probably the best Blender teacher out there).

 

Import all the nifs you'll need: hands, feet, head, body. Then import skeleton.nif. If you're reading this, then I'm assuming you're using some variety of XP32 Maximum Skeleton Extended, or something comparable. If not, then WTF ARE YOU DOING, YOU MANIAC??!! So, one thing that confused the heck out of me is the skeleton.nif vs the skeleton_female.nif. The female skeleton, when imported into Blender, is not useful at all. In fact, it's a bunch of empty objects that I can't make heads or tails of. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but there was no actual armature to be found in that file. The skeleton.nif, however, has an actual armature that can used in Blender. Use that one. There's no difference between the skeletons except for the amount of articulation in the tail, which doesn't matter if you're not touching that, and the fact that the game scales down the hand bones for the female skeleton. Amazingly, you can make an animation with the regular skeleton.nif, and it works perfectly fine for either sex in game.

 

After importing skeleton.nif, select the actual armature, then invert selection and delete everything else. Trust me. You don't want all those wacky capsule collider things. You only want the armature. Set all your meshes to deform with that armature. If you made a kf file to import, then select the armature in object mode and import the kf. Now the animation from the game will be usable in Blender. Now you can begin to animate. This is the part I'm going to skip over. If you don't know how to animate in Blender, it should be ridiculously easy to find unlimited tutorials on that.

 

One tidbit I do want to cover is the hand scale thing. I could have avoided a lot of headache if I've known this. So, Skyrim scales the hand bones for females down. I'm not exactly sure how the game does this, but I reckon it's in the behavior files somewhere. If you animate with the skeleton.nif armature as is for a female character, then the hands will be bigger in Blender than in-game. This won't be an issue for something like a walk animation, but it will be a big issue if the hands need to be touching anything. You'll end up with clipping and won't know why. Here's what you need to do: When you're ready to animate, scale each hand bone down by exactly 0.85186. This is the value Skyrim uses. Use the operator to do this precisely. Use the graph editor to remove the scale channels from the hand bones entirely, if present. Then, never key scale as you're animating. This ensures that the hands will stay at 0.85186 scale, and the scale won't be affected by any keyframes.

 

Once you have your animation done, you'll need to bake it. Skyrim doesn't auto interpolate between keyframes, so every single frame needs a key on every single bone. This is what baking does. First, make sure to clear the scale from the hand bones (which will screw up the animation in Blender, but it will look right in-game when Skyrim scales them down again), then bake the action, choose pose, and make sure it's set to all bones. Select the armature in object mode and select export kf. Make sure that the scale correction in the export options is set to 1. This is crucial. Once you have your kf, pass it back through the converter to make it an hkx and then drop it where it should go in the game. Run FNIS/Nemesis if it's not a replacer, and if you did everything right, it should work in-game.

 

It's worth noting that the niftools plugin for Blender 2.79b and earlier does not support exporting kf. Only importing. The current Blender does everything. This was an issue for me because I loathe and despise the new Blender UI with a fiery passion. My solution? I have two parallel installs of Blender. I edit everything in 2.79b, then I save it, open it in Blender 2.9 and export. If you're not stupid like me, then you can just use new Blender. Just thought I'd mention it because it caused me some grief.

 

I guess that's about it. I'm sure I left a lot out, but hopefully that will get you started. I apologize for not being able to do a more professional tutorial, but this was all I could manage. It would have saved me a couple of months of headache if someone had told me this stuff when I started. If I could help just one person get pointed in the right direction, then it was worth it. Cheerio.

[Skybroom]

Looks like I will need three installs of Blender, because, oh boy! I am using Blender 2.49b