Reversing Animations in Blender

[jamochawoke]

Ok I found a perfect walkforward animation I want to use for an NPC but there's one problem... it's a walking backwards animation. Even if you edit the animation's string to read Forward instead of Backward in NifSkope the animation will move the character backwards when you press the W key in game.

 

So I found this tutorial on how to easily reverse an animation:

 

 

And I followed the tutorials to get the skeleton and animation imported. But for some reason when I'd go into the action editor window the timeline would only have a big grey space indicating the animation time but no keyframes I could select or manipulate. The skeleton would animate if I'd go to a timeline window and hold down the right key to play next frame in sequence but no keyframes there either :/.

 

So I figure "hey maybe I need to attach this animation to a body"...

 

So I download one of those body with full skeleton attached nifs and import that and attach the animation. But for some reason the body and skeleton nif, only when the animation is imported with it, stretches out into ungodly proportions. It looks like something out of an HR Gieger drawing... wrong, just wrong.

 

http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/8109/unledt.jpg

 

So again I admit that I don't know wtf I am doing regarding animation.

 

Help?

Edited April 14, 2011 by jamochawoke

[fore]

This video tut is INCOMPLETE and the method WILL DEFINITELY CAUSE CTDs in Oblivion, or "exploding bodies" as in your case.

 

In most standard animations, some bones are only animated on the start frame. If you reverse the whole animation, the start key will be the end key, but there will be NO START KEY any more (a must!). So for ALL these bones the (new) end key has to be copied to the start key.