Wearable, Independantly Animated Equipment - WIP, need help

[TallgeeseIV]

So I've been working on a set of angel wings that I pulled from another game. I couldn't get the animations but that's no problem, it's easy to animate. The model already has a rigged skeleton including the skin modifier in 3ds Max. Here's my problem:

 

With or without a simple animation, the model works in Skyrim but WILL NOT attach to the spinal bone of the skeleton. The model sits at my players feet once the object is equipped, as if it's aligned to the world xyz instead of relative to the player. Its x and y rotation do not change. The animation isn't the problem. I figured that out and it does work.

 

The problem is, with a static mesh version without the bone structure, i can skin it to use the spinal bone and it works great... but then i can't get the animation.

 

If it's skinned with the bone structure, I can't make the game draw it relative to that spinal bone. The spinal bone can be added to the skin modifier with no vertices in its envelope, which causes the game to ignore it anyway. I also tried linking the spinal bone to the first bone in the wing structure, same result, no effect.

 

Is it possible to have an animated armor/clothing piece attached to the player that also has multiple bones (independent of those within the player skeleton)?

 

Please let me know if there's any additional information, screenshots, files, etc. that i can provide to help figure this out. I've tried everything i can think of over the past 2 days and i figured it's time to get help.

 

Thank you for reading.

[TallgeeseIV]

I know bumping is a bad habit, but I have zero views and was already pushed to page 3. Does ANYONE know how to attach an independently animated mesh (not using hkx files) to the player skeleton?

[TallgeeseIV]

So, I've learned about the "NiStringExtraData" block in NifSkope, which when applied with "Prn" as the first string and "NPC Spine2 [spn2]" as the second string, did not help.

 

Then after a myriad of other failed attempt I tried just adding the bones of my custom object directly to the character skeleton. That did the trick for putting the wings in the correct place on my back, however animations won't play, most likely due to the skeleton having no hkx animations for those bones and overuling the .nif's animation, which if this is the only way, totally kills this project as I do not have the time or commitment to make a new version of EVERY SINGLE ANIMATION FILE....

 

So far, it seems that animated equipment with each individual mesh linked to a separate node works, but having one mesh skinned to many nodes just doesn't work.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated....