mindboggles Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 Silly me, I should have thought to look at you skeleton.nif myself. If it's the same you provided earlier then you do have rotations in it, your Bip01 has Y -90 and your Bip01 NonAccum has Y 90 and R -180, they should all be getting exported as zero and I'm afraid correcting that in the skeleton.nif only may just throw out your rigged mesh. Try and work out your bone rotations in Blender so that after you export your skeleton they read zero (without any need for intervention) and only then re-rig your mesh in Blender and re-export it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McPaddington Posted April 10, 2015 Author Share Posted April 10, 2015 Actually, no... Silly ME. I went into Blender and imported a Fallout 3 skeleton, and found that, in fact, all my bones in my skeleton were not set to zero, for some reason they were all at really weird roll angles. I can't believe I missed that... Anyway, I reset the bone rotations (properly this time) in my mesh and skeleton files in Blender, and redid my mtidle animation... and as if by magic, no weird rotations! TARS stands up the right way rather than lays on the ground! I've started work on the rest of the animations, but I'm a bit confused about how you key forward movement into the forward animations, could you please explain that in a bit more depth? But thank you so much for your help, I couldn't have solved all these problems without your help! :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McPaddington Posted April 10, 2015 Author Share Posted April 10, 2015 UPDATE: Nope, the animation problem is back. Basically, I made my mtidle.fk animation in the skeleton Blender file, and exported it, it worked fine. But, since I needed to make more animations, I saved as a new Blender file, and imported my mesh and parented it to the skeleton, as I needed to see my mesh for the more complex animations. After, I made an animation and exported it from this new Blender Animations file, however, the newly created animations are rotated 90 degrees roll. The only reason I could see why this is happening is that parenting my mesh to the skeleton has somehow thrown the rotations off. I reset the transformations on all objects and all bones, but the problem still persists. Even worse is that, in the buggy animation files, setting all the rotations back to zero manually in nifskope does not make any difference. Also, I managed to figure out how forward movement works, but this random rotation error is annoying me, because I don't want to have to restart my animations, or have to make them without being able to see my mesh being animated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindboggles Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 You have a tricky problem with this rotation! I can really only say how I go about getting a new creature working form the workflow that I do and hope that Blender isn't doing something funny to you. I'll start by creating the mesh and make sure it is set to the origin and again zero rotation (3DS uses XForm to reset), I'll then build the skeleton (like I've said before) and from that export both the rigged mesh and the skeleton. I'll clean up both these nifs in Nifskope and then get them into the game just to check that everything is orientated properly and I have no weird skin issues. If everything checks out I will then save a back up of my 3DS (Blender) file and do that little bit I mentioned in the PM about culling the Bip01 NonAccum and re-linking to the Bip01, this file then serves as the base for my animations. If your importing back into Blender then it's possible the Nifscripts might be causing the rotation issues with what is coming back in, I seem to remember (vaguely in the back of my mind) something about skeleton bone rotations when Nifscripts import. So basically I don't trust what gets imported with the scripts and just make sure whatever I create in 3DS (Blender) exports the way I want it. Oh and don't be afraid to throw stuff away if it isn't working, I chucked out 2 skeleton versions of R2 which in the end boiled down to an IK solver issue. Also make sure you get in the habit of reading what the rotations are of those first few bones in all your files in Nifskope, at least until you get something working properly and get some confidence with what is getting exported. Wish I could be of more help, I know the frustration you must be having as I hit this same problem when I first did my Daleks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McPaddington Posted April 10, 2015 Author Share Posted April 10, 2015 It appears the problem was a buggy blender animations file. I had to remake my animation file and remake my animations which was annoying, but at least now it works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindboggles Posted April 10, 2015 Share Posted April 10, 2015 You can look at it this way, the more goes you have at it the faster and easier it becomes, hopefully it will get start to get routine for you. Latest creature I'm making is the Alien from Dark Star and apart from a small gremlin with vertical IK solvers it's becoming very easy. I look forward to seeing your TARS come to life. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McPaddington Posted April 10, 2015 Author Share Posted April 10, 2015 Well, thank you ever so much for your help, you've been a godsend! Good luck to you and your projects, I'd like to see them too. When TARS is finished, I will post an update with a link to the final uploaded mod. See ya round, and thanks again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McPaddington Posted June 6, 2015 Author Share Posted June 6, 2015 Hello again. I haven't been working on my TARS mod for some time as I have been busy with my final exams, but I have finished them now and would like to finish this mod. I have, however, encountered another problem, so close to the mod being finished. When entering combat, TARS' AI acts strange. When I'm fighting certain NPCs, TARS will start running to random locations and do nothing, but other times when I'm fighting other NPCs he will stop moving entirely, and not follow me even after combat has ended. I don't know if this is a problem with his script or his animations. I have given him some attack/aim/holster/reload etc animations, and weapons and ammo in his inventory, but he still won't attack properly. Do I need a weapon bone in the skeleton .nif? The weapon animations I have been making start with "1hp", so "1hpaim" and such. I don't know if this is the right set to be using, I just used those names as I saw them in the Securitron Creature form's animations section, and assumed they were the ones I should use. Does anyone know anything about this or have any suggestions? I can provide the files and ESP if needed. Thanks for any help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mindboggles Posted June 6, 2015 Share Posted June 6, 2015 (edited) If they don't have a weapon then basically sitting or running away is all they can do. Unless you have some special animation (something funky) then you don't really need holster or reload animations. TARS weapon/s should be set as embedded and you need to set the node to have the same name as your weapon bone in your skeleton (so yes you do need one), default is ProjectileNode which playable weapons use but you can call it other names just as long as the skeleton and weapon form use the same name. When you add the weapon node / bone to the skeleton also wise to give it extra string data of "sgoKeep=1" just in case the game decides to chuck that node away. If your using 1hp as your animation attack type then also make sure that the animation type is set right in the weapon and your using the correct Attack Anim which should correspond with the attack name given in the attack animation itself, e.g. if you used the name AttackRight, AttackLoop, etc. You will also need to create your own weapon list, say TARSWeaponList and add your unique weapon to it, then tell TARS the creature to use that weapon list as well as place the actual weapon in the inventory plus ammo. Hope some of that helps. Edited June 6, 2015 by mindboggles Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McPaddington Posted June 10, 2015 Author Share Posted June 10, 2015 (edited) . Edited June 11, 2015 by McPaddington Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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