How to make Animations Longer? - CWSS

[surg23]

Anyone figured out how to make animations longer for mods like CWSS?

 

I would just like to make it so showering animations last a bit longer for my settlers. Whenever they take a shower/bath it only lasts for about 10-15 seconds. I have noticed that it will automatically loop the animation sequence if I command someone to use these activities, but that's hardly an ideal solution. Had a poke around in fo4edit but could not identify anything relating to am activity timer.

 

Any help appreciated.

[pepperman35]

Not sure but the animations might be built into the models. If so you'll have to edit the actual *.nif files using nfskope and/or 3ds max. You might also reach out to the mod author and see if they have any advice.

[surg23]

Not sure but the animations might be built into the models. If so you'll have to edit the actual *.nif files using nfskope and/or 3ds max. You might also reach out to the mod author and see if they have any advice.

 

Hey Pepperman35,

 

Yeah I'm pretty sure each animation has it's own set time frame, I'm just trying to figure out how to make each NPC interaction cycle through more than a single animation and/or loop the animation a set number of times similar to what happens when you manually task someone onto the object.

 

I thought maybe some flag was added somewhere for automated usage so that it knows only to cycle only one animation or X seconds into an animation sequence. Seems to be what is happening when NPC's use these objects of their own volition.

 

At any rate, I appreciate the help.

[ChuckYufarley]

Is the shower animation unique to that particular mod? I've never used it and I don't really play the game enough to know if there's a vanilla shower animation.

 

At any rate, I've made a handful of custom character animations for furniture objects and one trick I've used to make sure an NPC doesn't dip out before the entire animation plays is have the entire animation play during the EnterFromStand phase. I'm no expert by any means, and I've only been working on character animations for about a year, but it seems to me that a furniture animation has to proceed to the PoseA_Idle phase before the NPC takes control over how long they remain in the furniture. There may be a way to control how long an NPC remains in the idle phase, but I've yet to find it. But, they're basically locked into the enter phase.

[surg23]

Is the shower animation unique to that particular mod? I've never used it and I don't really play the game enough to know if there's a vanilla shower animation.

 

At any rate, I've made a handful of custom character animations for furniture objects and one trick I've used to make sure an NPC doesn't dip out before the entire animation plays is have the entire animation play during the EnterFromStand phase. I'm no expert by any means, and I've only been working on character animations for about a year, but it seems to me that a furniture animation has to proceed to the PoseA_Idle phase before the NPC takes control over how long they remain in the furniture. There may be a way to control how long an NPC remains in the idle phase, but I've yet to find it. But, they're basically locked into the enter phase.

 

Good question and one that I really can't answer. This is the first shower mod I have used. I can say with some confidence that there are unique animations used for some of these props. Looking in the esp reveals spinning soap animations and such.

 

Ahh that's good and relevant info, I had a hunch that all this behaviour somehow just plays off vanilla references to how idles and interaction works, but I'm still miles away from understanding any of it. So, assuming that we are correct on the idle phase being key to the animations, where might I look for those parameters? I've literally found nothing at all in the CWSS esp that hints at timers or sequences or cycle counts, but I am a real neophyte at this so that probably doesn't say much.

 

At any rate, thank you for taking the time to post that. It's guiding me in the right direction I think.

[ChuckYufarley]

My guess is the key lies in the character behavior rather than any behavior file attached to the furniture object itself. Furniture behavior files are a little easier to decipher, although they can still be beasts to understand if you're not familiar with how they work. I have only about a 20% understanding of the simpler ones at this point, I'm afraid. All I really know is what strings to look for in order to get the furniture animations to fire along with the character animations.

 

Character behavior files are another can of worms altogether. A very big can of worms. Like I said before, the idle phase is where the NPC more or less controls how long they remain in the animation. It would help to look for and study vanilla furniture objects that NPCs will interact with for longer periods. There might be priority flags at work with those. I don't know for sure. Even the most basic of workbench animations seem to last for wildly random intervals. I do know that all of the furniture objects I've made seem to keep the NPCs involved for roughly the same length of time, 20-30 seconds, but sometimes they will continue "interacting" for a minute or more. I've made a few with idle flavor animations, which are basically secondary, supplemental animations randomly mixed in with the base PoseA_Idle animation, and NPCs tend to remain involved with those objects a bit longer. It could also depend on what keywords the furniture object has. I use WorkshopRelaxationObject on the stuff I've built and that seems to get the NPCs to use the objects quite regularly.

 

Here's a great in depth Havok guide that I've perused on many occasions looking for clues to figuring this stuff out: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/9329348-fallout-4-havok-guide/

 

Funny thing is, the author gives me credit for helping him out in some way and I am really clueless as to what I did.

 

If you haven't already done so, I would also recommend downloading the Fallout 4 Animation Kit: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/16694

 

It includes a great tool for converting hkx files into xml, so then you can at least begin to study the behavior, animation, skeleton, etc, files associated with Havok animation. The kit also comes with a comprehensive PDF that explains how to make use of the included tools.

 

I hope this helps. Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any other questions. Maybe I can give a little more insight.

Edited May 18, 2022 by ChuckYufarley

[surg23]

My guess is the key lies in the character behavior rather than any behavior file attached to the furniture object itself. Furniture behavior files are a little easier to decipher, although they can still be beasts to understand if you're not familiar with how they work. I have only about a 20% understanding of the simpler ones at this point, I'm afraid. All I really know is what strings to look for in order to get the furniture animations to fire along with the character animations.

 

Character behavior files are another can of worms altogether. A very big can of worms. Like I said before, the idle phase is where the NPC more or less controls how long they remain in the animation. It would help to look for and study vanilla furniture objects that NPCs will interact with for longer periods. There might be priority flags at work with those. I don't know for sure. Even the most basic of workbench animations seem to last for wildly random intervals. I do know that all of the furniture objects I've made seem to keep the NPCs involved for roughly the same length of time, 20-30 seconds, but sometimes they will continue "interacting" for a minute or more. I've made a few with idle flavor animations, which are basically secondary, supplemental animations randomly mixed in with the base PoseA_Idle animation, and NPCs tend to remain involved with those objects a bit longer. It could also depend on what keywords the furniture object has. I use WorkshopRelaxationObject on the stuff I've built and that seems to get the NPCs to use the objects quite regularly.

 

Here's a great in depth Havok guide that I've perused on many occasions looking for clues to figuring this stuff out: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/9329348-fallout-4-havok-guide/

 

Funny thing is, the author gives me credit for helping him out in some way and I am really clueless as to what I did.

 

If you haven't already done so, I would also recommend downloading the Fallout 4 Animation Kit: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/16694

 

It includes a great tool for converting hkx files into xml, so then you can at least begin to study the behavior, animation, skeleton, etc, files associated with Havok animation. The kit also comes with a comprehensive PDF that explains how to make use of the included tools.

 

I hope this helps. Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any other questions. Maybe I can give a little more insight.

 

Hey ChuckYuFarley,

 

Apologies for the late reply and thank you very much for the info. This seems so involved just to change a relatively simple parameter. It's like you have to become an engineer just to know how to change a tyre.

 

To be real honest I have been distracted from my focus on trying to resolve these issues. I think it's more so that I really struggle to learn things at my age and especially with my ADD. Makes sense that I can never really contribute anything beyond insights into in-game workings of other mods. A user once labelled me a "inconsequential dabbler" in relation to my efforts in trying mod Mount & Blade all those years ago- How soul-crushing it is to realise how much truth there really was behind that statement.

 

 

In hindsight, I should not have created this thread as it was really based on the hope of finding what I thought would be a relatively straight forward solution and something accessible even to a pea-brain like myself. So for that I do apologize. Hopefully the information documented here will prove useful to other users. I'm also sorry to all those who contributed here, it was never my intention to waste your time and I do feel guilty about it. I'm just so bad at this modding stuff.

 

Thanks again all, I really appreciate it. - Yeah, that post took me an hour to come with I'm that bad at focusing/concentrating..

[ChuckYufarley]

No problem at all. Don't be hard on yourself. We all struggle with one thing or another. I look at some people's scripting and I might as well be trying to decode the Rosetta stone for all the complexities. My scripts tend to look like Rube Goldberg machines in code form.