[LE] Help needed with armoured skeletons

[cumbrianlad]

Hello good people!

 

I've got a problem that I hope there is an easy solution to.

 

I spent ages making my skeleton race into levelled enemies and equally long working out how to make them wear armour and circlets. They look great in game...right up to the point that you kill them.

 

At this point the mesh for the armour stretches out like long banners between the dismembered bones. Killing a few in one room looks like an explosion in a carpet factory.

 

I tried in vain to find out if the skeleton death animation could be altered so that the corpses stayed in one piece.

 

I really don't want to have to get into anything other than a creation kit fix. I'm hoping I've missed something obvious. If not, then maybe a script to make them explode while dropping the armour from their inventory might look okay but that sort of scripting is way, way beyond me.

 

Can anyone help? It would be a shame to ditch their lovely outfits.

[Di0nysys]

You could disable them when they die, and replace their body with ash, just like the game handles Dragon Priests and Atronachs.

[cumbrianlad]

Dionysys, that sounds good I'll take a look at the dragon priests. It fits the lore that I'm building for the tomb as well. The Boss uses advanced necromancy to reanimate more powerful skeleton warriors...they could easily turn to ash when such an extreme spell was broken. Thanks.

 

Edit: I've just looked at the script and it looks perfect. Cheers.

 

Edit 2: It worked beautifully. I did it in a similar way to the dragon priests, adding in an OnDying event to the DraugrFX script and renaming the script. This script is added into a magic effect which is put into the 'specials' in the race menu for my new armoured skeleton race. The explosion is perfect since the bits of material that fly around are similar shades to the draugr armour that the skeletons wear. I did away with turning the skeletons to ash and simply let the rest of the normal skeleton death animation run. It looks fine.

 

Now I can get to work on a few different outfits, because I want my different warrior classes to wear different circlets. I also need to refine the general stats in the race menu so that my skeletons need at least three hits with my characters broadsword (now doing around 450 damage). I think I'll give them a bit of magic resistance too, or else they'd be relatively easy for mages.

 

I feel a bit daft for not thinking of the dragon priests as a model but I can't thank you enough for pushing me in the right direction Dionysys.