Anyone know the export parameters for creating furniture markers?

[dreamCloud]

I've hit a few snags in animating some creatures I've been making. Unless I'm missing something (and PLEASE correct me if I am) Oblivion doesn't support animations that have a beginning and end and a loop in the middle. Even walk and run cycles I've seen all just go from 0 to end frame full speed without a ramp up or slow down. So I figured I would use furnitures since I can make 3 animations; an entrance animation, a 'sitting' animation (using the furniture) of the animation I actually want to play, and an exit animation in case you hit the NPC's and 'wake them up'. However, I don't know how to make the furniture markers at all and I'm wondering if anyone does?

You can see them in the screenshot here:

Edited March 18 by dreamCloud

[dreamCloud]

Btw forgot to mention that either Blender 2.49b or 3DS 8 Max settings are ok. I have access to both, but way less experience with 3DS Max.

[AndalayBay]

Does this help any?

[dreamCloud]

It does. I was able to make some furniture markers using that NifSkope method. Not sure if they'll work until I get everything animated but we'll see I guess.

I just wish I had something to create my own new ones rather than hacking together bits from the vanilla meshes.

[AndalayBay]

We wound up using marker 5 which is in the game, but not used. I don't think you can create brand new markers.

[dreamCloud]

So what my main reason for wanting to make new ones was because I have a custom creature I've been animating and I wanted to use the enter/idle/exit animations to do a "sleeping" animation for it where it enters a sleep if the player manages to de-aggro it and exits the sleep if they get detected by giving it a 24x7 sleep package in the AI and choosing furniture around a marker. So basically player enters area, sees a bunch of NPCs "sleeping" and can sneak around but if they get detected they all "wake up" and attack but if they use chameleon/invisibility/sneak/illusion magic they can de-aggro them and they'll go back to "sleep" but also I still wanted to have them have their standing idle.

I made the animations and they play (at least by console command) but using the idle manager I can't get the NPC to actually use them as sleep animation replacers for the bedcrawl animation markers (furniture marker 4). I'm not sure if it's because the creature has to be the exact same biped armature as the human NPCs or what (the skeleton I made is very different so that's a no go there) but what happens is the NPC just walks up to any furniture that has the bedcrawl marker (vanilla bedrolls as a test) and then just stands there and does its normal standing idle instead of playing any of the new sleep animations.

 

I was able to use the nifskope method to get some custom furniture for an NPC's home working ok at least but I really want to figure out a way to get my creature's enter/idle/exit anims to play and the sleep system in the idle manager was the best I could think of at the time. I might try a sitting marker or something, but again if it's because of the use of a non-biped skeleton then not sure what I could do. Giving them an animobject or just forcing an idle only plays the idle animation once or looped (however you set it up in nifskope) and Oblivion's animation graph doesn't support animations with loops inside of them like later games do. I could script them to play the enter before playing the idle and then forcing the exit animation to play but I'm REALLY trying to not lean too heavily on scripts. I've already got a few that drag down performance and trying to optimize them.

There's the option of just having their main idle be the sleep, which does work as seen in the undead that spring up at you mods, but I can't enforce any advanced behavior like I can with a sleep schedule. Just not sure what direction to go in now.

Edited Sunday at 04:35 PM by dreamCloud

[AndalayBay]

Ironically we’re looking for someone to fix our custom NPC’s animations.  They are biped, but the skeleton is quite different. We had a couple of people work on the animations and they are close to working, but need some adjustment like rotation and translation. I don’t know if what we’ve got would help you or not.