How to save edited skeleton nif with blender.

[RogerRed]

I edited the male character skeleton nif in blender and exported it. A simple edit just raising the knee joints about 6 inches higher for a custom creature. But but the creature was invisible in game. I noticed the file size of the nif was now much smaller than the original, when checked it in nifskope the capsules for collisions that are normally around each bone were missing. I would like to know the proper procedure for importing and exporting a functional skeleton nif with blender or how to do it in nifskope.

 

Any assistance would be very much appreciated, as trail and error sucks.

 

[Elbethien]

As far as I know it is not possible this way. I think you have to change animations and not skeletons, but I might be wrong and there is a way to do it via skeleton.

Edited December 26, 2015 by Elbethien

[RogerRed]

I don't think that would work as the mesh is already weight painted to the skeleton moving the bone just for that animation I think might cause mesh to be deformed during that animation, If it can't be done using blender then does anyone know what programs those high compatibility skeletons were made with,

[Elbethien]

You made me try it. I have some knowledge editing models and animation, but I never tried skeletons.

It does not work. I gave the horse skeleton a very long neck via nifskope, but in game nothing changed. The horse was still the same.

You can give some deformation to models, up to a certain point where it gets to look just funny or bad, and if this was not enough, you have to edit animations.

[DrakeTheDragon]

What you encountered, Elbethien, is most likely caused by what I experienced a couple years back as well when playing around with similar attempts.

 

It appears most, if not all, Vanilla, and mostly also modded, animation files still contain, needlessly and senselessly, not only rotational information, as one would expect, but also "translational" for all the nodes it controls.

 

This makes it almost impossible to make any changes done to the skeleton file by only shifting around some bones to actually stick once it's back in the game. Every single animation and their mother "reverts" everything back to the Vanilla shape of the skeleton as soon as it plays.

 

The same is true for scale information as well, by the way, which is the reason those scaleable/proportionable super-skeletons have extra bones to apply the scale changes to, as the scale of the Vanilla bones is stored inside Vanilla animations just as much and would be reset again as soon as they play as well.

 

 

Ever since I found out about this nonsense I made it a habit of mine to "never" include any unnecessary other information inside my own custom made animations than what really needs to be inside there. If I'm only bending an arm around 1 bone, I seriously need nothing else but the rotation data for that bone, not the position of said bone or its scale and most definitely not any other bones I'm not even touching during the animating process.

 

 

As for how those super-skeletons were made, I don't exactly know either, but I know how to get my own custom bodypart bones into an existing skeleton, just wasn't successful (or trying even, to be true) to also give them havok bodies alongside so far. When I export a skeleton from Blender it usually cannot be used inside the game as is. But when I then copy-branch and paste-branch over only my own custom bones into an existing skeleton NIF, things are usually working out really fine in the end.

 

However, what you were addressing in the OP and what these skeletons do does not match. You will not find any "changes" done to Vanilla bones' positions or rotations inside any of them, only ever new bones added, either at ends or in-between branches, and I think it's exactly for the reason above, animations will undo it anyways.

 

I also don't immediately see why your's should be disappearing only by translating a bone a few units upwards, but the NIF tree structure is so easily messed up and corrupted, chances are you even just picked the wrong "node" mistaking it for the bone instead. There's several strangely inter-connected sub-nodes inside controller-type and similar branches, which can all too easily be mistaken with the actual armature bones any time, especially when all of a sudden you selected one of these instead of the bone you were aiming for just by clicking inside the 3D view window.

 

And then there's also always the difference between "applied" transformation (changed inside the "edit" dialog, then baked into the vertex coordinates by issuing "apply") and "non-applied" (just changed inside the "edit" dialog, but never actually "applied"). Usually only applied will work correctly inside the game, but there's exceptions where non-applied "must" be used instead, for example for the head's position inside a head NIF, as once applied the vertices' coordinates would no longer center around the head bone but the Scene Root, which will lead to morphs no longer functioning correctly. And this is just the beginning of it. I don't dare thinking of what applying or not applying, when one should do the opposite, could do to armature bone nodes!