LE Animating creatures from Vicn's creature pack

[imperator29]

Hi everyone,

 

New modder here! I'm having trouble with Vicn's creature pack. I've used one of his models to make a creature in the Creation Kit, but when I put it into the game, it doesn't move properly. It'll move frontwards, backwards, and side to side, but its limbs don't move. It's like a statue on a trolley, or a unit in Civilization II.

 

The creature in question is a Shambles, and here's what I did to make it:

 

1) I created a Shambles race using the Frost Atronach race as a template (I chose Frost Atronach because the Shambles model uses the Frost Atronach skeleton), and I assigned it the Shambles .nif file. That seemed to do the trick, as it showed up properly in the CK.

 

2) Then, I created a Shambles actor. I did this by duplicating the Frost Atronach Actor and changing the race/name to Shambles. For testing purposes, I've left everything else the same. It looks fine in-game, and I haven't noticed any issues beyond the movement ones.

 

Something is clearly wrong with the animation, and it has me stumped. I would have thought that, since the Shambles uses the Frost Atronach's skeleton, I could simply use the default animations, but that doesn't seem to be working. Have I goofed? Do I need to do something extra? For reference, I've attached screenshots of the Shambles' animation tab.

 

Any help would be most appreciated! Thanks!

[imperator29]

I also asked this question on the Skyrim Mod subreddit, and once of the users was kind enough to give me some advice. I thought I'd share it here in case anyone else is having the same sort of issues.

 

It seems that one has to create an armor addon and an armor in order to get the creature to work properly. In the case of the Shambles, I did this by duplicating the Fost Atronach's armor addon and armor and then pointing them toward the Shambles nif. Then, I simply duplicated the Frost Atronach actor and gave it the Shambles armor. It seems that one shouldn't bother creating a new race--whenever I tried that, I started having animation issues.

 

I've tried this method with several monsters from Vicn's creature pack, and it has worked every time.