Animated Rifle

[Mitheledh]

I'm not sure the best place for this. I'm trying to animate a rifle I'm working on, without much success. I know aspects of the animation are handled in Nifskope, so I could ask about it there. The only tutorial I can find just says to attach the .kf file, though. It says nothing about creating that .kf file, though. That seems to be am exporter issue, and hence 3ds Max issue.

 

For more specifics, this is the rifle I'm working on. What I'm trying to get it to do is make the pump work. I need the wheel to spin and the piston to move in and out. I have the animation set in up Max already. More or less. I did the modeling and animation in a different program (which doesn't have a nif exporter) and imported into Max, so it may need some minor tweaking. I just need to export it and get it working in Nifskope.

 

I don't know if it's important or not, but I used simple keyframe animation.

 

Any help would be appreciated.

Edited August 9, 2011 by Mitheledh

[Ghogiel]

If this is for fallout, weapon reload animations are stored in the character kf files. The moving nodes in the weapon nif are targeted and controlled from those controlled block arrays in the kf.

 

If you don't want to mess with any sort of character motion animation, then you can probably append a new contolled block from your output kf, when you get one, and just paste the data into the vanilla animation, and the pump might work, assuming you need the character to do anything other than the vanilla reload motions.

 

Anyway I would guess it's down to improper export set up\export settings. Do you have note tracks specifying sequence name and start\end ?

[Mitheledh]

Yes, it's for Fallout. New Vegas specifically.

 

Anyways, I was wanting to set up an animation that ran continuously. Not necessarily at a specific time like reload. The reload animation doesn't take very long, which would make it something that just played quickly, then stopped. Considering what the animation is suppose to be for, that just doesn't feel adequate. You know?

 

As for note tracks, no, I didn't have any. I've looked around and haven't found anything that really says how to set up an animation in Max for export. So I didn't even know they were needed. Do I need them for every transformation or do I can I set up just one note track for the entire thing? Or one for each piece (there's three moving parts)?

[Ghogiel]

If it's a loop then you can embed it into the nif.

 

Yeah just 2 note tracks for the whole thing. "start -name Idle -loop" and "end". You need them or else niftools will not export any sort of kf IIRC.

[Mitheledh]

Thank you. I'll see if I can get it working. Then I'll be back if I have any more questions.