Is it possible to sync animations to special effect sound files ???

[ToppDog]

I am creating musical group performances where I hope to sync instrument playing & singing animations to songs for solo performances up to orchestra performances of over 60 performers plus a conductor.  Obviously I can't have that many dialogue parts happening at once, which is why I went with sound descriptors.  So far I can have the sound files play when I want, & was able to get the performers to stand/sit completely still, & still have a lot of NPCs in a cell without crashing, for testing purposes.  Now I am getting to the point where I will most likely need to create scenes etc to add in the animations singing, & was wondering what ways would be better for doing this.  This area of modding is new to me & I haven't found a lot of tutorials available on it yet.

[dylbill]

Audio can be baked in to animations. You probably want to do that with paired animations. 

[PeterMartyr]

short version yes

long version before Microsoft bought Havok in 2015, playing Skyrim,  I was a registered Havok Hobbyist, meant I could not sell or make any monetary gain, from my output. Using officials tools, I could link any HKX to any SFX in the game, so they would play  synced, without having to call any SFX

Now I would use HKXCMD:  convert HKX to XML

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1797

open the XML in any text editor and link to SFX, then convert back using HKXCMD to HKX, the appropriate xml tag to use and exactly what to do, sorry too many years ago, plus I used official tools

Yeah I kick myself for not saving/hoarding the behaviour and content tools, but who knew Microsoft  would buy Havok, be a b&@*$ and revoke my License? 

That works for 1 file,  linked to the first animation only. Getting sixty animations to all be in sync, your aware papyrus is  synchronous, but in code that means: means that code is executed sequentially from top to bottom. Each statement is completed before the next one begins, it is never gonna be 100% with 60 animations,  hope your using 3D MAX HKX files, Blender can do this, but it is not 3D Max, its HKX files are bloated and take forever to load, but with 3D Max, it may be a reasonable lag

sorry again, I've not done this in nearly ten years,  (2014) but it can be done)

DISCLAIMER: Blender may have improved in this regard since I lasted used it))

[ToppDog]

Thank you for the replies.  Even though there are over 60 NPCs, they would be broken down into about 13-18 different groups, & each group would be doing the same animation within the group, such as a flute section & horn section of an orchestra, etc.  Does that make it more feasible?

Thanks again!