Animations: How do i get em ingame?

[alendor]

Hey,

 

I've been playing alotta fallout 3 lately, and am looking into replacing animations in game with ones i've created myself. Both to keep my animation skills up, and to make the game a little bit less akward when it comes to animation. (hopping in the tranq lane pod, or the anchorage simulator animation makes me want to throw up.)

 

I use maya primarily for all my 3D animation. I have pleanty of expierience animating characters, and the whole keyframing process and all that, including rigging and what not. What i'm not certain of is the process of how i get the correct rig outta fallout 3, and once animated how to get it back into the game. Do i make the rigs custom and export? do i import a fallout 3 rig from somewhere, animate that, then export it. whats the naming convention for the bones, all that little stuff.

 

I've looked high and low, and so far all i've been able to find out is that it uses a .kf file or .nif or something, and that niftools is what i'm looking for for the import export process when working with Maya. That, and someone mentioning that you need to get your hands on a rig for the proper bone structure and naming which makes sense. I know it can be done as i've seen animations for download, I just can't find any documentation on how to do it, like its a secret or something.

 

Anyways, if someone can help me out, point me to tutorials, explain it a bit for me that would be great, as i would really love to replace some of the crappy fallout animations. particularly the getting up from being knocked down, the running animation when you have a gun out, and many more. The lack of quality animation in the game damn near makes my eyes bleed, and I would love to upgrade em.

 

But ya, any help would be appreciated.

[VerbalEarthworm]

Backsteppo has this pose tutorial that may help you: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=55

 

he/she links to it from this mod, Body mesh and skeleton, that you may also need: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6968

[Geonox]

It's kinda simple, If you are able to follow that tutorial you are also able to make new animations. The hard part is to make nice animations but the technical part is easy. What you have to do is make a start pose first, once your done select the skeleton and press "loctrot" as Backsteppo describes in his tutorial. If you use his blender file [link on top of the tutorial page] you'll see that the upper windows and the lower right one show you the model. However the lower left one shows yellow dots which is the animation track. Once you made your starting pose move the slider in the track window to let's say 100 and make another pose.

 

Important is not to move the slider again untill the pose is finished, otherwise you'll lose the pose, but you'll figure that out by yourself once you make that mistake. When the pose is finished put another locrot on it and you'll see that a new vertical line of yellow dots will appear in the track window. Now when you move the slider back to frame 0, click on for example the perspective/user view window and press alt+a you'll see that you've made your first aniamtion.

 

If you want to learn more about making animations I suggest you find some random tutorials on the net. Animating can be confusing if you've never done it before. Custom animation is HARD...the technical part is peice of cake but making a nice professional looking animation can be quite a challenge...

[alendor]

Thanks for the help guys, my problem isn't creating the actual animation, as i do it professionaly as freelance work, and that whole process is called keyframing btw geonox. the part i'm lost at is the whole technical side, with nf skope, and all that.

 

For me its the custom animation thats easy, the techincal stuff is where i'm lost. Also i'd like to work in maya if possible, because it is the best animating suite out there for the most part, making Max look terrible, and i can only imagine how simple blender is.

 

i was able to narrow don't that i'm supposed to import the skeleton.kif into the 3d program i'm going to use to animate, wich doesn't work with the maya plugins

(may need to get 3dmax or blender for some import export stuff). not sure why they made a plugin that doesn't do its job to be honest. however i did discover that it can import its own exported .kif fine, just not any of the ones packed into the fallout bsa.

 

if i can get the skeleton with the base mesh into maya, similar to what you linked verbal, i can create the animations fine. all the technical stuff getting it out of Maya, into .kfs and all that jazz is where I am completly lost.

[Geonox]

haha sorry I tried to keep it as easy as possible just in case you didn't knew anything about animation at all...I dont know anything about maya, I usually work in max so I can imagine that animating in blender is realy confusing. That's what I thought in the beginning as well...if you are used to software like maya or max it's not that hard to see why you can dl blender for free. It drove me nuts in the beginning...

[alendor]

hah, np prob man, can't knock a guy for trying to help, its appreciated.

 

but ya i started with max when i got into 3D, went to school that taught maya, and the animation between maya and max is night and day. maya is far superior, and character studio is obsolete once you have good maya rigs. between the channels and the graph editor, its so much easier to create and modify your animations in maya.