New Bones and Race Modding

[SickleYield]

Just throwing this out there to see if anyone's got any advice on it or has run into or around the issue. If nobody comes up with anything I'll send Breeze a PM; he's just not around much, so I don't want to contribute to his inbox clutter unless I have to.

 

I've succeeded in adding bones to an FO3 skeleton, and even rigging a mesh to them for playtest. Specifically, I added eight tail bones to Breeze's anatomically correct superskelly, then snipped and resized and rerigged the tail off a radscorpion to give my PC a hybrid look.

 

The tail worked just fine when playtested as part of a garment. The problem now is that I can't figure out how to get it in as a racial attribute. I can of course just add it to a body mesh, but it would disappear whenever clothes were equipped. Setting up the rigged tail in the upper teeth, lower teeth, tongue, or merged into a head slot causes crashes on load in game, and I don't know enough about scripting to set it up to autoequip as a clothing item in, say, add-on slot 3 (not to mention the hassle scripted races tend to create anyway).

 

If I can get this going, I'd like to create a "master skeleton" with bones for tail, wings, and and antennae(as an add-on to Breeze's, if he turns out to be okay with that). This leaves those bones without animation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't be done; if I can create a streamlined workflow for copying the add-on anims into existing kfs, I'm quite willing to create them and start the process. I'd probably want help to get all the anims done, since there are quite a few of them, but enough people want critter folk with non-stiff tails badly enough that I can probably recruit the help I'd need.

 

So I guess my question is, does anybody know of a mod that's succeeded in getting additional meshes onto a race? If so, drop me a linky? It's okay if it's scripted; maybe I can learn from what they did in order to do my own.

[Tony the Wookie]

have you seen how the eyelash mod works?

 

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6483

[Ghogiel]

Thet mod I recomend. tk rules. however, as SY mentioned, she's getting crashing if its set up in a face slot.

 

if you didn't make any, I think that maybe to do with the egm and tri files, and all the rest of the relevent facegen files. if the tail thing doesn't have them I'd guess it'll crash. did you make them when you tried? update facegen model as well to accept them.

If its not that, then I think there is a snag with it not accepting rigging down there, , or a dismemberment conflict. or just rigging at all. Try with a static Prn attached mesh first

 

best I got right now

[Zenl]

Does the new skeleton/animation not override everything for existing pc/npc races? I've tried adding things to the face slot(atleast the tongue slot anyway) in the past for experimentation---rig and unrig nif. I tried guns and different head race(the animation seems to work for the head in the tongue slot even), ect and it runs just fine. Perhaps you can figure out why it crash; it seems like the most sensible way for addon for custom races.

[SickleYield]

I tried generating an .egm for it, but I'm suspecting that's incompatible with the rigging. Anyway, it still did crash. Blender can't do tris yet even with the new NIF scripts, and for some reason I get a crash when I try to do it with the Conformulator (even though it's supposed to be able to do FO3 nifs) or if I tried using a default FO3 head tri with the merged head version.

 

I will check out the eyelashes and see if I can backconvert the method, but I am nowhere near the rigger that TK is. :D I may just have to bug him about it.

 

I like your suggestion, Zenl. I'll try rerigging to pelvis only (without new anims there's no difference anyway at the moment) and see if that does anything for me in the tongue slot.

[Ghogiel]

I can confirm tri's are makeable, not tested them yet to see if they work, but I can get one. Seems you have a bug there.

 

Blender can't do tris yet even with the new NIF scripts,

whats this about blender doing tris? is there development in that area? max niftools can't even export morphs yet, nor particles systems. would be mad cool to be able to export morphs into a working tri.

[SickleYield]

Could be a version issue. I have 64 bit Vista Ultimate and it's about the only 32 bit app I haven't been able to use (all my stuff for Oblivion modding works fine otherwise).

 

And yep, Blender NIF scripts 2.5.0 can import and export .egm files and supposedly (haven't tested it yet) has full export of morph animation for things like Oblivion bows. I haven't figured out how to actually create a custom .egm yet, but it's supposed to be doable. They're saying they'll have tris in the next version.

 

I'm no coder, but I gather from the dev threads that they lifted some of the code out of the Conformulator and then tweaked it.

[Ghogiel]

damn! sick.

I take it, its not making new custom tri, but just copying the morphs from an existing one, onto a new mesh, ala the conformulator. So if you want a new custom one, you still need to use facegen or hack one together from objs?

 

I'm interested how it handles, setup, exports them at least.

 

hahah. Can it import morph controllers as well then? controller animation data is ignored in max import. Only kfs have import support afiak. never really looked to far, but since tranform controllers aren't importable, I just assume.

..I suppose I'm O/t and asking the wrong person :) . I'll just pop over to the dev board.... amorilla still deving it then I guess. ftw.

[SickleYield]

I'm not sure if controller import is happening, but I doubt it - I have yet to get ANY regular .kf import to succeed with Fallout 3 versions. At the moment, I can export working anims from Blender but not import them (it will demand they be packed with a mesh, then import the mesh without the anim even when "import animation" is checked). If you'd like more technical info have a look over at the Niftools Forum. You can find out about the Max NIF script project there, too. (EDIT: Sorry, from another post of yours I gather you're already there.)

 

Update to my original issue, in case anyone ends up needing to know: Thanks again, Zenl! Kudos for you. It turns out that I can get a tail into the tongue slot just fine as long as there's an .egm and .tri generated from the gender-relevant head mesh's .tri. I was able to use Conformulator for this as long as I did it with an exported .obj; using a Fallout 3 .nif still throws an exception. For some reason my attempts to create merged mouth/tongue or upper teeth/lower teeth meshes still cause a crash, I've no idea why.

 

Not only that, it is quite possible to copy skeletal bones exported from Blender into an existing FO3 skeleton and rig to them in game. My playtest is set up for wings, tail, antennae (or critter ears), and pedipalps.

 

Not only THAT, but it's also quite possible to export a working animation from Blender, copy it into an existing idle, and have it work in game animating the new bones (NIF scripts 2.5.0 appears not to have the translation problems of previous versions, at least not for FO3). The tricky thing at this point is going to be the timing of the anims, because Blender keeps track only of keyframes but NifSkope settings are in terms of seconds. If anyone with animation export experience in Blender has input into how to get Blender to export an anim that's 1.2 seconds long, I'd appreciate it, but I'll probably muddle through.

 

At this point it looks like it's gonna be a lot of repetitive copying, but it's very doable.

[Ghogiel]

I'm on niftools.

 

anyway. success! woot

 

there is a combined face parts nifs- resource already exists thanks to TK. combined the mouth/tongue/upper and lower teeth parts. so it freed up some slots for the eyelashes. plus 1 extra which is filled with a blank nif, i think it needs to be set in ther or else crashy, no blank face slots..but thats taken care of for the most part.

 

1.2 seconds is likely 36 frames, just setup your animation so that it plays ntsc 30 frames per/sec in blender, which is what i've always exported mine at. then it should export with a play time of 1.2sec. :) you can probably just change your animation time bar in blender, to actually dispaly time instead of frames. if thats helpfull.

 

Wish you luck!