More basic how questions.

[obfuscate]

I've spent a couple days analyzing what already exists in the G.E.C.K. and after playing around with the Groovatron in game, I'm trying to figure out a way to make furniture use those animations as well. Is it deeper than we can do using just the G.E.C.K. ?

 

I followed the one person's explanation of how to make a toilet you could sit on, that was changing the mesh and name of a pre-existing chair. What about implementing and entirely new animation to furniture. Specifically, making a bath tub you could actually bathe in. There's a couple house mods that have bath tubs with water in them, but they're just something to look at. Watching my companions wander around the house,using the various idle marker and such, I'd personally love it if the stinky lil minions bathed once in a while :biggrin:

 

Adding some of the standing poses to the wall idle marker would be a nice one too, or chairs you actually relaxed in. Heck, if someone figures out how to make sleeping not fade to black, force the camera to third person, and you actually lay down on the bed while the timer ticks down, more like the wait menu, rig up beds with assorted sleeping poses.

 

My main "testing ground" is the Big Town player house mod. I rigged up the couch in the living room to be a sleeper sofa, by positioning a bunk bed mattress just right, so that the sleeper wasn't sat on, and the people sitting weren't clipping the mattress. This is very makeshift, but made me grin as I sat down on the couch to repair some armors, and when I came out of the pip boy menu, my companion was laying on the couch next to me, sleeping. :rolleyes:

 

The possibilities for expanding furniture with just the two animation/poses packs available are about endless, but first, I need to figure how, if it's even possible. More experienced modder folks wish to chime in here? :thanks:

[Skree000]

very interesting, never though about it before but yes, funiture is an untapped market for modding!

 

Animations are totally customizeable. Sitting and interaction animations rely on properly prepared furniture meshes with bone nodes to interact with. If you were really keen you could open up the furniture actor in nifskope and check out its bone node names etc. Then whenever you make your toilet or custom piece of furniture, you will know what to name your bone nodes, and or just duplicate existing ones in nifskope with 2 copies of the program open.

 

The trick is integrating new animations with furniture, methods of interaction that havent been tried yet. SHouldnt realy be too hard, a simple 'get in the bathtub' animation is essentially no different than a 'sit in the chair' animation. They are simply premade sequences that detect and interact with bone-nodes arranged along the furniture-mesh.

 

depending on how you want them to interact with it, ie. grab the sides of the tub then step in, turn and sit, then relax against the back of the tub, it shouldnt be too much different than implementing a new chair or table to sit at...

it would just take alot longer since its uncharted territory.

 

From there you could take your idea and create an 'undress' script that would precede the bathtub-entry, inwhich they would actually revert to their base skin, nude, then enter.

possibilities are endless.

 

would be funny to burst into a random wasteland homestead and catch someone in the tub lol

[obfuscate]

There's a furniture actor? Is that what the blue "box men" are? Now I know.

 

Now, I wasn't looking at making custom animations for these things, just using the animation packs already out, and slapping them together with existing furniture meshes, or new idle markers. I've purposefully avoided getting into creating animations for years, because of the time it takes, and know time is something I don't have enough of.

 

As for bursting in on somebody taking a bath, yes it would be funny, part of what actually got me thinking, before finding out there was a pose for relaxing in the bath in one of those pack, was finding skeletons occasionally lying in tubs, with some loot item or another laying near where their hand was hung over the side.

 

As I customized the Big Town player house mod, I swapped out the container stove, for a cooking idle marker stove, and stuck the workbench marker on top of a usable workbench(okay slightly inside, so I could still click to use the thing). Having my companions wander around doing purposeful things while I stand in one place staring at my pip boy or do crazy tumbling tricks, trying to arrange books on a shelf, just makes it feel more immersive to me. :whistling:

[junin]

There's a furniture actor? Is that what the blue "box men" are? Now I know.

 

Now, I wasn't looking at making custom animations for these things, just using the animation packs already out, and slapping them together with existing furniture meshes, or new idle markers. I've purposefully avoided getting into creating animations for years, because of the time it takes, and know time is something I don't have enough of.

 

As for bursting in on somebody taking a bath, yes it would be funny, part of what actually got me thinking, before finding out there was a pose for relaxing in the bath in one of those pack, was finding skeletons occasionally lying in tubs, with some loot item or another laying near where their hand was hung over the side.

 

As I customized the Big Town player house mod, I swapped out the container stove, for a cooking idle marker stove, and stuck the workbench marker on top of a usable workbench(okay slightly inside, so I could still click to use the thing). Having my companions wander around doing purposeful things while I stand in one place staring at my pip boy or do crazy tumbling tricks, trying to arrange books on a shelf, just makes it feel more immersive to me. :whistling:

 

 

Pretty much every example you gave has been done before for oblivion. For example, there is a mod called see you sleep which does exactly what you said above. Or the house mod, I think it was called Ilithium or something like that. It lets you bathe in the tub, with full 3rd person animations. There is even little perfume bottles that you can use to smell pretty. If it can be done for Oblivion, It can probably be done for Fallout 3 since the game engines are pretty much the same. I'm not much into the animation part of modding, but what Skree wrote sound about right.