Getting strange distortions on certain animations, possible 90degree error but nothing fixes it

[dreamCloud]

So I bought some creature models online and am using them for an Oblivion mod I am making.

I'm ok at animating so figured if I followed the guide saved on the backup of the wiki I could whip up some custom skeletons and make some animations for them lickity split. WRONG!

The first animation I made was just a regular idle. It looks ok. With just it the animation plays but flips the character model 90 degrees from where it is placed in the editor. No big deal I guess as it still properly faces the player and it shows no 90 degree rotation on the bip01 bone in the .kf file. 

I then made a walk loop animation for the Forward motion. This animation was made using empties as bone constraints to get the feet to stick to the 'floor' in Blender during the contact frames as old Blender 2.49b doesn't have the proper animation tools to do that (that I've found anyways). I used the exact same skeleton model and even the idle animation that was working before and cleared out the keyframes. But in-game the model's skinning is all over the place and the animation is moving backwards. When I looked at the .kf file it shows a rotation on bip01 of -180. I switched that to 0 but it remains the same issue.

I tried flipping the entire armature model around in edit mode which plays the animation in the opposite direction, and even rotated and moved the empties around by hand so they could still act as constraints. Re-keyed the entire animation, exported, and... shows up exactly the same and still has a -180 degree rotation.

I'm not sure exactly what I did wrong here and it's driving me insane. Video of the issue located here:

 

[dreamCloud]

Ok so I found out that for some reason the quaternion key values were being rotated 180 degrees as well in bip01. I went back and deleted all rotation/quaternion values from the animation's bip01 and re-exported. It still exports as -180 degrees for some reason but I fix the rotation in the .kf and the animation walks forwards instead of backwards now... but the rest of the model is still all distorted around.

 

I then realized I made a rookie mistake by doing loc/rot/scale keys and keys on all sorts of bones that didn't need them. So I removed all extraneous keys and then removed all location and scale data from all keys (except the loc data from bip01 which is needed to move forward and the loc data from bip01pelvis which is needed to put weight on the legs and make up/down motion as the creature walks).

 

Still shows up as completely distorted :/. Not sure what else to do at this point.

Edited Thursday at 04:56 PM by dreamCloud

[dreamCloud]

I figured it out, but it's not fixable.

What happened was I was using another armature imported as a guide for animation timings. Then I was using Constraints which apparently don't like to be exported. Even though I deleted that second armature and even tried deleting the constraints (all they did was hold the foot bones down so figured I could see if they'd float) prior to export, for some reason its bip01, bip01 nonaccum, and a few other bone rotations data got baked into the save and the feet still try to reach their Constraints which also somehow got twisted. That's why the bones spin around twisting the model with it. I tried fixing it several ways noted above and I even went into the .kf file and hand-edited all the quaternions to remove the extra rotations but that didn't work either.

So I found another save I had made with the same armature (with an animation that had already exported correctly) and made sure all of its bones were in the proper position, keyframes cleared, and now I'm hand-copying all the keyframes' rotation data over from the other file one by one; after I baked its constraints (thankfully found someone who had made an old python script that could do that for me). What a pain in the butt! But at 1/4 done I did an export and it is animating properly in-game so now I just have to finish it.

Edited Friday at 02:44 AM by dreamCloud