Aim Transition? What causes the spine to bend when looking up and down in third person?

[fraxanofnexus]

I have some custom 3rd person animations which are severely effected by what I believe might be called Aim Transition. This seems to cause the spine to bend up or down or whatever when rotating in 3rd person with the mouse. I want to stop this, or perhaps control the settings in an INI file or whatever. Does anybody know how to stop or reduce this? Thank you.

[South8028]

as a guess... Is it because you are using a third party app to create animations? I wasn't interested in weapons, but as far as I understand, in fo4 the animation layers are controlled through the Behavior Graph. There is a mixing of, for example, custom upperbody animation with vanilla lowerbody. Accordingly, your weapon animation is responsible for the upperbody. People don't have any problems when using 3ds.There is no difference between 1st person and 3rd person animations in 3ds. Whether your animation will work as a 1st person or 3rd person animation is determined only by the list of bones in rig.txt when exporting. Unfortunately, I can't tell you more. I animate characters, but had no interest in weapons. I don’t know all the nuances of creating weapon animation.

[fraxanofnexus]

Thank you for responding. It seems to be an area not much explored from what I can find. I have successfully created many standalone idle animations without issue in 3ds max, as you have by what you've said. The difference with 3rd and 1st person seem to be the idle animations and walking animations and turning animations. The 1st person ones don't seem to have any kind of effect on other bones because they aren't visible. In 3rd person they are, and they bend and twist the spine in weird ways, whichever bones I move, and whether I do it in 3ds max or HKX Poser. I rotate bones to my needs in HKX Poser because it works for the most part because it is much easier, and for other animations it works. I can with some effort bend the spine more than looks natural in HKX Poser so that it looks normal in game to minimise effects, but then the jumping, walking, running, turning animations all require their own tricky adjustments to stop everything becoming distractingly janky. I just don't think anybody has done any animations that have a projectile component, that alter the WPNIdleReady.hkx file. All the mods I've seen work on the hands being in the same position as holding a pistol or a rifle in 3rd person, hidden in front of the body in any case, which is not what I want to do. Anyway apologies for the length of this, it is just quite complicated describing something that isn't really done seemingly. The movement of the spine further when looking up and down with the mouse makes matters even more noticeable, and I suspected the behavior graph was behind it, but other than opening it up in XML format, I can't understand how it relates to blending etc. I appreciate your time and insight however. I'll just have to continue fussing around with my janky workaround solutions meanwhile. 

Edited February 25 by fraxanofnexus