Help Needed with Adding Custom Sounds for Custom Companion

[WatersMoon110]

Before making this thread I searched this forum, the Bethesda wiki, and Google. I've read two tutorials from this site about adding sounds to other parts of the game (objects). I plan on still playing around with GECK to figure this out, but I was hoping someone here could maybe give me more of an clue as to where to look and what I'm doing wrong.

 

I made a pretty simple (and mostly working) custom companion puppy. It is based on Zenl's puppy replacement for dogmeat, which uses all of dogmeats default sounds. And so my mod also uses all of the dogmeat sounds. But I wanted to replace the deep barking from dogmeat with a bunch of puppy yips to better fit the character.

 

So I added my sounds to Misc/Sound. But I can't see how to attach them to the character file I've made. Under its Sound tab, it only has the sound effects for walking.

 

So, am I even close to the right track?

 

Thank.

[WatersMoon110]

Yeah, I was afraid that the lack of any tutorials, and even the lack of any other topics about this matter meant that almost nobody has already figured this out. Of course, who but me would even care to? *laughs*

 

Well, if I ever figure it out, I'll try to come back and say what I did. Mostly in case I forget what I did. *wink*

[WatersMoon110]

Well, I've certainly explored the GECK, NifSkope, and Blender, searching for the way sounds and animations work. I'm pretty sure I need either a completely new animation with my sound effects, or have some way of editing the sounds associated with the existing animations.

 

I feel like I am getting close to figuring this out. At least I know what I am looking for...mostly...

[WatersMoon110]

To change the sound of a creature's animation:

 

First copy (or create) a creature. It will need a unique name - to associate with its texture and mesh folder. Make sure the mesh is pointing to the texture in NifSkope. Find your custom sounds (there are many free sound files on the web) and group them into folders that describe which animation they will be played with (in other words: [My Creature]Attacks or Idle or Hit). Save these into a folder under the proper paths to sound files. Open up the creature in the GECK and associate the sound files with it using the Sound Tab. -- I know that all of this works --

 

I think one has to extract the associated .kf files, change the sound string in NifSkope under the Key section (all I've found are in one of the middle keys), then save the .kf into the same folder as the creature's .nif file. The .kf files need to have the same names, even though they will be in a different folder.

 

This is the way I (now) know how to get custom sounds for a custom creature into the game.

[WatersMoon110]

Question answered. All my sounds seem to work. Yay!