Making F3 Animations?

[Straighthate]

Anyone have a tut or some tips on how I can animate character movements? It's important. Making a new The Pitt add-on and I am gonna add some anims to it. For now it is gonna be a weapon anim

[Skree000]

well if you havent done animation before you are in over your head. heh

 

fallout3 anims are in .KF format, which can be exported via the Niftools blender or Max plugins i believe. (.kf can also be handled with other utilities and plugins, its not commonplace, but its not extremely rare. Several game studios use it.)

 

to create custom .KF files youll first need a 3d editor like Max or Blender, NifTools plugins for that editor, and Nifskope.

 

If you arent creating your own skeleton from scratch youll need a copy of Fallout3s skeleton (located in the meshes/characters/_male/ folder.

 

Once you import that into your 3d editor program you can start animating that and export as .kf. Its actually pretty complicated process, but a forum user called Cakester has not only done this, but created brand new skeletons and rigs from scratch.

 

Forum user Alendor is probably the most experienced in animating Fallout3 skeletons since he made the mod 'Fallout3 Reanimated'. You could probably download his mod and have a look at his .KF files, but they would be no more use to you than looking at vanilla stuff. Unless you want to talk to him he could shed some light on it, theres likely a ton of special steps you have to take to get .kf files working from max/blender into the game, but i havent tried that yet. Luckily thats all later on for me :)

 

When you say 'weapon anim' do you mean a reload animation? A firing animation? an idle?

 

at present there is no way to add new animations for reloading weapons without Over-writing existing stuff. So if your mod contains special animations, it would likely have conflicts with anyone elses mods that change anims, or conflict with Fo3 Reanimated, which is pretty widely used.

 

Perhaps in the future the makers of the GECk will allow custom reload animations!

[Callighan]

Well Straighthate, you can make custom reload animations and call them by script.

But after a few calls, the script can bug as hell on NPCs.

 

Generally speaking, if you have 3DS Max, you should download nifscripts and niftools in order to be able to import and export .kf files on Max (it's preferable to use something before Max 2010, because Max 2010 and nifscripts don't play nice).

Another route is to use Blender (which is open source and freeware) with nifscripts and niftools. Blender somehow takes a bit more system resources than Max and it's a bit harder to use, but it plays very nicely with nifscripts.

In both cases, you still need nifskope to edit .kf properties in order to play it in game.

 

Once you get things up and running, I suggest you learn how to modify idleanims first. It's easier to learn that way. Don't start by modifying (and overwriting) existing fire or reload anims.

 

Much success! :)

[ecksile]

i think blender is quite simple to use. as for rigs, breezes has also made his own skeleton and rig. its made for use in blender and is made to make animating a lot easier. http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8225 check that out. as for importing animations their isn't anything special needed to be done that i know of. if use breezes rig at least nothing in his tutorial is mentioned i have played around with animations a little and have imported 1 animation so far, and it worked without any extra steps other then exporting as .kf.

[Interfer0]

I was working on animations about six months ago, and couldn't get it working because the tools weren't up to date enough. from what I have seen lately its getting easier to do the animations. I would learn blender, I found it easier to work with animations then in 3dmax. I would find a good Blender tutorial that works from basics all the way up to animation.