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[Illiad86]

Been messing around in the CS lately and I want to do something....how do you make your partner stop looking at you when you are around them? Have a few animations that I like to use with him but it makes his head spin all the way around because he's looking at me when he does the pose. Is it something in the partner's AI package that I need to change? I saw "cmWanderNPC"...is that so they look at the character or NPC? Or what do I need to do?

 

Thanks in advance :)

[David Brasher]

This issue would be related more to idle animations than to AI packages. I do not think there is a simple fix for this, and simply changing AI packages will not help you. Perhaps some 3-D animator had the same gripe you have and created some idle animations that keep NPCs from staring at you. I don't know much about what animation replacer mods are available, but it might be worth it for you to look around on TES Nexus.

[Illiad86]

hmmm...have to have a looksie.....whenever this trojan/virus stuff stops happening...can't search anything without Firefox warning me that tesnexus is an attack site :(

 

haha, it's been so long since I played the game vanilla, do the NPCs look at you in the vanilla version? :P I don't use any idle animation replacers, I recently got rid of Personality Idles....love the mod...but it has far to many conflicts with poses and animations...but other than that, nothing...hummm....

Edited September 25, 2010 by Illiad86

[David Brasher]

In vanilla Oblivion, everyone always seems to look at you. That is the natural state of affairs. Sometimes NPCs look at each other or look at creatures. It is really quite charming. Very few games are set up so that the actors recognize the presence of other non-hostile actors and look at them.

 

If your virus checker is complaining that TES Nexus is a dangerous site, you might try ignoring it, overriding it, or designating TES Nexus as a safe and trusted site. From what I hear, mods can't contain viruses. The advertising would be more dangerous than anything you are likely to download.

[Illiad86]

Yeah, that is pretty cool :D I always liked that the guards would look at me and say Hero of Kvatch lol

 

Ya...I was reading the thread about the virus/trojan that's about...most people will still get the attack site warning even though it's been fixed or whatever. I'll just wait...I think I might have seen something about where the actors don't stare at you....

[Tefnacht]

If I understand you correctly, the problem you describe indeed has to do with the automatic head tracking Oblivion does. I can think of two solutions for the problem. A fast one with major drawbacks and a more complicated one without.

 

The source of the problem is a “fault” in the animation/pose file itself. A animation file not only holds the information for each bone how to translate, rotate and scale it, in addition it also has a “priority” for each bone (ranging from 1 to 99).

If two animations are playing at the same time, the game looks at each bone and uses only the animation data from the file, where that bone has a higher priority. For example: If you are running and swinging your sword at the same time, the leg bones are animated by the “run forward” animation, while the upper body and arms are animated by the “attack with sword” animation.

“Run forward” has a high priority for the leg bones but a low priority on the arms, while the “swing the sword” animation has a high priority on the arms and low on the legs. That way the game can “mix” multiple animations together with good looking results, as long as the bone priorities are set up correctly when the animations were created.

 

The head tracking is a kind of special animation (there are no files for it) that Oblivion creates “on the fly”. Like any other animation, this one too has a priority. And a pretty high one at that. I think its 75 or 80). This means head tracking will override almost any other animation when it comes to the head.

 

The simple solution is to just globally disable head tracking. In the Oblivion.INI file, find the line that sais “bDisableHeadTracking=0” and set it to 1. The downside is that now all actors (and the player) will always stare straight ahead. They will turn their whole body towards other actors if necessary but not adjust their head and shoulders anymore. For screenshots this might be good enough. But if you want to play the game, this isn't really a good solution.

 

The complex solution requires editing of the pose/animation file in question to adjust the bone priority for “Neck”, “Neck1” and “Head” bones to something very high (higher than automatic head tracking). 99 for example.

This can be done either with Blender or NifSkope. Blender is difficult to setup properly but the editing itself is fast and easy, NifSkope on the other hand is very easy to use, but you have to manually sift through the file, identify the correct bones and adjust their priority one by one. I cannot explain here how to do it with Blender (the post is long enough already) but I can give instructions for NifSkope.

 

-Find the animation (.KF) file in question and open it with NifSkope.

-In the upper left list, click on “NiControllerSequence”. The content of the bottom list will change.

-In the bottom list, extend the “Controlled Blocks” tree by clicking on the + besides it.

-Find the “Controlled Blocks” branch with the value “Bip01 Neck” and extend it.

-Find the key named “Priority” and change its value to 99.

-Do the same for the branches “Bip01 Neck1” and “Bip01 Head”.

-Save the file.

 

Now the edited pose/animation should override the head tracking (and everything else trying to manipulate the head bones) while it is playing.

 

Good luck.

[Illiad86]

Ahhh...interesting ;D Ah...well I don't want to globally disable it but I just got NifSkope here...and I'm going to try that :)

 

Ah, just did what you said there and it worked!!! Thank you so much! :biggrin: Kudos :)

Edited September 25, 2010 by Illiad86