Fixing the Lich Animations

[jamochawoke]

So I wanted to try my hand at fixing the lich on player and other NPC animations.

 

They "seem" to work fine in game but I noticed a bug every now and then where the caster's neck would stretch out to the horizon!

 

So I loaded up the animations in TES CS and wrote down the errors.

 

The biggest thing is they seem to be referencing three bones that are not in the _male\ skeleton.nif. These bones are Bip01 LPouldron, Bip01 RPouldron, and Bip01 Shoulder. I believe these have to do with the lich.nif as these bones are present as nodes on the mesh.

 

What would be the easiest way of going about fixing these animations?

 

Copying the nodes from the lich.nif to the _male\skeleton.nif or going into the animations and removing the references to the bones (I'm not good at animating so I'd probably screw this up)?

Edited April 4, 2011 by jamochawoke

[fore]

.....What would be the easiest way of going about fixing these animations?

 

Copying the nodes from the lich.nif to the _male\skeleton.nif or going into the animations and removing the references to the bones (I'm not good at animating so I'd probably screw this up)?

 

I would say it's removing bones from animations. Though I always added, never removed....

 

Look at the end of my Wiki article (in the signature). There is a pictured example of how to add bones with NifSkope. I think you can figure out the opposite way. Just make sure, before you reduce the "Num Controlled Blocks" at the end, fill out the <empty> bone links with the record numbers from the end of the list (instead of cutting them of by simply reducing "Num Controlled Blocks"). And if you don't reduce "Num CB" you will definitely get CTDs.

[jamochawoke]

Well after further research...

 

The Lich does not have a shoulder rotation for its animations. That's why they clip so strangely. Instead Bethesda chose to simply rotate the entire shoulder (and there's only one they use for the animation) and the pauldrons to move the mesh around during animation.

 

I don't know if it can be fixed by adding bones without redoing the entire animation.

 

I think I'll just stick with the casting animations and leave all the floating stuff, which are the ones causing the problems, out of it. I tried editing them by taking out the point of time where they have that neck issue appear but no dice, the anims just look really bizarre at that point.

[fore]

Jamochawoke, I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. And I don't understand what you do. :confused:

 

Shoulder and pauldron bones don't exist for the human skeleton. But they don't have any effect on the lich's overall movement (no further bones attached to them). So their only purpose is to shift body or outfit mesh around. If you don't have these body/outfit parts on your NPC you can safely remove their animation. If theses parts still exist, you can't.

 

"Editing"? How do you edit? NifSkope, Blender, ...? Because with Blender you can't edit the lich's casttarget.kf (contains splines, which which are badly handled by Blender import and result in "bizarre" effects. And with NifSkope you can't remove it either (said bones in said .kf)

 

"take out the point of time": what do you want to achieve with that? The bone will still be moving, interpolating from the frame before and after. And NEVER remove the end frame key. This can result in "bizarre" look (or CTD).