Here is a doosie: Why does my custom animated static mesh show up in G

[Guest Messenjah]

Ok, I've been trying my best to create an industrial ceiling fan for my Boomtown mod and I can't seem to get it right. Last night, I decided to build a NIF file by hand from the ground up. Everything seems to work fine in the geck, everything animates, all the textures and meshes show up properly... works and looks fantastic! But then I start up Fallout 3 and it doesn't show up in game! Now, I've worked with a lot of meshes that don't show up in game because of shaders but usually they don't show up in Geck at all or the meshes appear all messed up or I get a bunch of weird errors. However, it is FINE in GECK so why doesn't it show up in game?

 

http://rapidshare.com/files/415217668/FanTest.zip

[Ghogiel]

i don't have time right now to pick apart the sequence to see if it's not linked up correctly, but i noticed straight away that the collision is a normal static. this cannot be animated. you need to use anim_static to any movable collision. also the BSX flag does not have animation enabled. Set the textkeys to be "start" and "end". also your nicontrollermanager is not set up to play anything. I'm pretty sure it won't do an animation, when it has no end time, no frequencey. etc

 

just try those out. and I'll take a look at the sequence tomorrow or something

[Guest Messenjah]

I used other working animated meshes to base my NIF on. I didn't tag the BSX flag because it doesn't appear to be necessary, the other models don't use it (I used the animated desktop fan as an example because it has collisions). As far as the collision being static, I'll fix that right away. As far as the keys, I'm not sure how to set up text keys by hand.

[Guest Messenjah]

Just ran a quick test before I leave for work. I marked it as an animated static and that didn't make a difference. Look at the shaders carefully, I believe the problem is there. The animation sequence shouldn't be the problem... the model just simply doesn't show up in-game while it DOES show up in the GECK within the world just fine.

[Ghogiel]

(I used the animated desktop fan as an example because it has collisions).

the one i made did not have animated collision. it was just static collision. I am pretty sure you need to use anim_static for moving collision. i cannot find a beth nif that doesn't use it< and they all have animation enabled in the bsx flag.

 

 

all i did was remove the sf'_shadow_frustum. it did show up in game as an activator, but not a static. the sequence is definitely not correct.

if you open it in the geck viewer you get an error.

[Guest Messenjah]

Yeah, I see what you mean about the sequence being incorrect.... what am I missing? I fixed the BSX flag and set it up as an animated static for the fan blades....

[Guest Messenjah]

Ok, so I did a little more work today, just about to run a test on it but I think I know why the sequence was messed up. When I imported the KF file over, it had two transforminterpolators. The reason for this, is because when I made the mesh in Blender, I created two animations... one for the blades and one for the collision meshes so it saved out one of these for each of those animations. Then I linked the mesh and the collision mesh under the same node for each section so I only had two nodes. When I imported the kf file, it couldn't find the collision meshes because it could only look under the nodes that were named after the original meshes and couldn't recognize the names and thus there was an extra animation in the file that could not play.

 

I also changed the blades to an animated static and flagged animation in the BSX flags.

 

The mesh I was looking at actually wasn't yours. It was released a while back on the Nexus as a modders resource for a fan that you could turn on and off with a switch. It also swiveled at the base and had collisions, so yes, the model I was looking at had animated collisions on it and I was incorrect as I thought they were all static and didn't know why my collision mesh showed up as red instead of purple on the fan blades.

 

Also, what does the stencil property do?

[Ghogiel]

a nistencilproperty draws the texture on both sides of the meshes faces.

 

when i looked at it the nicontrollermanager was missing data. everything was basically zeroed.

[Guest Messenjah]

Here is the new model that I have fixed. One version DOES work. In-fact, it works just fine but there is one problem, the way I set the nodes up, allows the mesh to fall apart in havoc mode. Doesn't seem to effect it unless you place it as an object as apposed to a static mesh though.

 

However, I'd like to see if I could fix it. The broken version I have placed all of the nif nodes under a single node and then imported the .kf file after deleting the old kf file. The "working" version will work fine in-game. And as you may notice, everything is still zeroed out. I'm not sure what all this data means or what the floats stand for. I don't get any errors in GECK or the GECK viewer relating to the sequence.

 

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9PI9DAAZ

[Guest Messenjah]

Ok, tried changing the values in the controlmanager and it did absolutely nothing.

 

If you can, please look at the broken version and see what I've done wrong.... basically, in the broken version, it should show up in-game but the animation isn't working at all, yet it should be the same as the working version....