Editing Oblivion Skeletons

[coronerra]

I was wondering if anyone knew how to edit the oblivion skeleton to add and move bones?

[coronerra]

Okay, so I have chopped the bones from three different skeletons found on this site, and chopped out the addition components to add into the original skeleton. merged the armatures into one skeleton. but now I'm left a little lost as all I have left is to join the new bones with the old. any ideas?

[Vagrant0]

Before going further, it would probably help to explain exactly what your goal is in doing this. Just adding new nodes doesn't necessarily allow for most of the things people might be looking for. The only reason why you would want to make a new skeleton is if you were also planning to make an entirely new animation set for whatever that skeleton is for, and then create a new body mesh which is weighted to that skeleton. For all practical purposes, stuff like this is only applicable to creatures.

[coronerra]

The plan is simple, a merging of 3 skeletons.

 

Skeleton 1: Chingari and Ismelda Demon Race The skeleton that comes with this mod seems to be the only one whose wings alighn properly. All other skeletons with wings cause wings to sit high.

 

Skeleton 2: UFF FF00 Moving Breast and Animations, without it's specific breast bones it's animations do not work at all.

 

Skeleton 3: Animated Clothes SKELETON modders resource without it, the animated outfits I'm trying to work with will not work.

 

By merging all three with entails the wings from the first, the breasts from the second, and the tenticle clothing bones from the third, into a single skeleton, you can run the animation from all three and hopefully later merge or at least create new animations that can incorporate all of them.

[Gethesmain]

I'm so confused, are we talking about the Skeleton as in "Argh, I am an animated corpse who exists as bones bent on killing" or "I am the skeleton to be used in a character with flesh on me"?

 

My mental image of a winged skeleton, with breasts hovering over a rib cage... and moving... Really creepy.

[coronerra]

LOL!!! Seriously first time I am using this term and meaning it!

 

All 3 dimentional games us skeletons. As in a string of points that animators use to dictate a charectors movement. There are four skeletons in oblivion. 1 for the movement of standard charectors and NPC. Every NPC and the charector you play with use the same skeleton file located in the _male folder. The second is exclusive to Shalgorath. The third is exclusive to the player when they are in first person mode. And the last one is for beasts and charectors with wings, tails, ect.

 

The mesh then goes over it and is weighted to the skeleton. This means where ever the skeleton bone moves to, the mesh that is weighted to it will follow. This means the charector you see is simply a shell that is following and mimicing the stick figure know as the skeleton. The game itself then uses an animation file (.kf) to move the stick figure which in turn moves the mesh and we see the charectors move in the game.

 

The mods mentioned above use special "Custome" skeletons which have aditional bones, or nodes. The aditional nodes controle things such as the wings in chins demons, the breast movement in the UFF body mod and the dress in the dress mod.

 

But these skeletons have unique bones or nodes to themselves so a peron with one can not properly use the other two mods.

Should all three skeletons be combined, then all three mods will be usable simotaniously.

[Megatarius]

You seem to be doing the same sort of thing I want to do.

 

 

I want to have clothes that move, like dresses and capes, and I'll admit I also thought about tackling the moving breasts as well.

 

(I haven't seen a single moving breast mod that looks real ever ever. Makes me wonder about some of the mod authors... Or maybe myself if I wasn't installing the mods right.)

 

 

Anyway, I have never used the CS or Blender, but I do have a degree in animation and I could make all that stuff happen easily in Maya. I don't anticipate too many problems learning these new programs if I actually exercise some patience.

 

If I were you, I'd actually make a new skeleton with what you want on it.

 

 

Let me ask you something:

 

How does the skin weighting know which bones to follow? Is it by the bone's name being associated with those vertices? Is it really as easy as naming the joints the same as the joints in the regular skeleton and then the normal weighted meshes will automatically follow it?

 

I'm dreading that you'd have to re-weight everything if you introduce a new skeleton.