Is there a modelling/rigging tutorial for custom skeletons?

[ZeroCore]

I had a thought to try to make several different creatures that currently do not exist in Skyrim. The thing of it is that there are no other creatures like them, and so as a result new skeletons would be required. I know that new skeletons can be made, hence the various custom player skeletons such as the XP32 skeleton, so I wanted to try making new skeletons, meshes, and animations to go along with it.

 

The kind of creatures that I had in mind for this mod would be primarily from Greek mythology (such as the Lamia, the Harpy, the Cyclops, Cerberus, Pegasus, the Gorgon, and so on).

 

If anyone could possibly tell me how to do this, I'd appreciate it.

 

The program that I wish to use for this is Blender 2.49 b, along with NifSkope and its related plugins. The art program I can use for textures is The Gimp.

[Di0nysys]

The XPMS skeletons only add bones to prexisting skeletons. Skyrim does not accept any "new" skeletal rigs. The way the engine interprets the skeleton and it's animations is through behaviours which unfortunately, Bethesda removed the ability to add new ones from their CK due to licensing issues with Havok. You can use FNIS to add IDLE behaviour but that's not what you want.

You can however find an existing creature and copy it's skin weights onto your custom mesh in 3dsmax or Blender.
For eg, the Lamia would fit very well with the Chaurus skeleton, the Cyclops would fit on a Giant skeleton, etc.

[Arocide]

You can include new behaviors, skeletons and races in creation kit. The problem lies in Bethesda using Havok Animation Studio, and how much of the information was exported by their own plugins (looking at you AnimationData, AnimationSetData and SpeedData). We don't have access to HAT (at least anymore you could get a version from the Havok Anarchy project if you so wished, but that projects ended now) and we don't have access to Bethesda's plugins for HAT (or to the applications/plugins that exported the Havok Data) so we can't just export the data, you would have to make it from scratch.

 

Creation Kit does however have everything you need to get custom creatures(races) into the game provided you can give it the files and Data it needs, they did not strip Creation Kits ability to read Havok Behaviors/AnimationData nor are the skeletons/races/'idles' hard coded. We are just missing a key component in their Character Creation pipeline which makes it much more difficult for us to create new ones.

 

I haven't seen a tutorial detailing how to do so though, but I am quite certain it's possible. Probably not the best idea to try it with blender though anyway since without Havok Content Tools (which doesn't have a Blender Plugin) you'll have a really.... terrible time trying to create a Havok skeleton or hell, even Havok animations.

 

So what Di0nysys suggests would probably be your best bet at getting what you would like.

Edited January 30, 2016 by Arocide

[BobbyP92]

Hi :) I'm new to the forums and I am curious on this subject. Would it be possible to use one of the vanilla skeletons and add custom animations via FNIS etc AFTER say altering the bone lengths/angles?

 

Also would it be possible to still add HDT physics to parts which only need to be semi-animated/added bones which would be considered the least like the original skeleton? For example if we had a humanoid creature which had a slightly altered skeleton, with say tentacles like structures hanging from an elbow?

 

Sorry if that's hard to understand, I struggled with phrasing this.

[Di0nysys]

HDT meshes are all over the nexus, which essentially animate added bones to the existing human skeleton, so i don't think it's a stretch to use an HDT-like skeletal rig for creatures. Thou u'd have to ask xp32 on the specifics.

[jboyd4]

Zerocore, my team is in the process of making some of the creatures you have mentioned. In fact, we have successfully made the gorgon, with functioning tail. The version we have released right now, just has the HDT physics tail, but the new one that we will be releasing hopefully in the next month will have an animated tail, with physics(because I don't want to make all the damn animations:P ) our team has plans to make a centaur next. We even have a pretty good idea how to do it. The only issue we are struggling with right at the moment, and has been address already in this post, is getting the animations to be exclusive to the races we are making. I'm hoping Arocide's statement about the Havok Anarchy project might help me better understand how to create a new havok project for the races.