Custom animation camera issue

[Heffy]

Hi,

 

I’m working on some custom (1st person) animations and struggling with a seriously unnerving issue. Animation is fine in max and exports OK except that when I test it ingame, the camera sinks to the bottom looking down. Animation seems to be working, as I see some movement while the camera snaps back in place and the sounds from the annotation track do play as well.
I have some custom bones for the weapon that I added to FO4_Human_1st_Rig.txt. The skeleton I’m using was imported from FO4.
Does anyone have any insight on how to fix this issue?

[montky]

hmmm... that does seem odd.

though, I am looking forward to your idea of community resources

of 'an index of different animations' that folks can mix-n-match while composing mods.

I digress

I'm hoping that shavkacagarikia, steve40 or purr4me might be able to assist more on this.

my FO4 Mod-fu is not particularly strong, so hopefully someone with more experience in this is able to assist.

 

in the meantime, I offer some conjecture below;

sight unseen, it makes it a little tricky to narrow it down;

did you have a screen-cap of the "what-the?!" incident or some suspect code interaction/s you think are the culprit?

 

that preface aside, it could be;

 

 

 

the animation is causing a hyperdefinition of the camera ref instance,

causing it to do that, after cycling the animation

or, the camera variable in the encoded animation is set to do that or otherwise undefined etc...

or, there's no end condition else-if or nesting structure to that animation code block.

ie that would be a conditional gameEvent type code, so it only plays when the trigger event happens.

return to the pre-call state of your animation

endEvent

 

does the camera no-clip through the map and reset per animation cycle,

or does it just fall forever to the boundary, or through the bottom and to the top of the worldbox etc?

 

so, I think you have to check how you've pathed the camera-instance in your animation.

my best guess is, it's undefined, it's overwriting the pathing and data on the camera,

so after it finishes playing your animation,

it's breaking the camera's anchor-point on the Protagonist Bone structure.

 

------

while it's probably no doubt frustrating,

you may have inadvertently had some 'discovery by accident'

and come up with a few different ways to solve other stuff.

see, Scott Manley's multi-focal camera code blocks etc

 

fisheye-cameras, different focal lengths, fresnel lenses, all kinds of neat stuff like that.

it'd be neat to have first-person stuff,

or reflections in a pre-batch kinda way.

or, some real-time screencap for 3D or 360 vids for FO4VR...

 

if we let there be a camera at the ceiling height of each cell, and take a screencap from that per interval,

put that image in an AGIXML etc 'read' routine...

that could be interesting stuff.

2D:3D based on that 'topographical map' made that way... that is, if there's no more efficient way to obtain that

variable floatingpoint topology.

 

 

 

thanks again for asking an interesting question,

I hope some of that conjecture was of use for you

and I look forward to hearing some other perspectives on this

as the answers may have implications for a few other tentative projects out there.

[N7R]

When you export the animation is it set on exporting 1st person and not 3rd person? The 1st and 3rd person files have different cameras and can cause issues if wrong one is exported with the wrong txt files for the rig. I've been building all my animations off of the biped CAT files that MaikCG created: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/16691/? those rigs and the 1st and 3rd person txt files work perfectly.

[ablindm4n]

If you are using F4AK, you should see two cameras in the 3ds max Scene. Swap the names of the cameras around and re-export your animation, it should fix your issue.

[Heffy]

Thank you all for your answers. Unfotunately it doesn’t seem to be any of that.
I’m using the correct 1st person Rig txt file (I actually check that every time before exporting).
About the camera issue in F4AK’s Rig, I’m aware about it, but it’s not that either – I’m using a standard human skeleton imported from FO4 and the camera is correctly positioned. Strange thing however is that it produces the same issue…
Actually it did work at some point, but I renamed some of the weapon’s bones and the issue resurfaced, even though I hadn’t touched the camera at all…
Anyway, I have F4AK’s Rig too - if I can’t fix it, I’ll try merging the anim onto his rig and see if that helps.

[Heffy]

Fixed it.

The reason it didn’t work was that some of the magazinechild bones had been unlinked from their parent bone, thus it wasn’t raising any alarms while exporting, but the hierarchy wasn’t the same as in the vanilla skeleton.hkx so the anim wasn’t working properly ingame. Same thing with the renamed bones – had renamed the weapon bones like I did in FONV, except in FO4 these are included in the character skeleton, so you need to have the exact same bones (and all of them) + hierarchy as in skeleton.hkx. Seems it didn’t mind as long as there wasn’t any anim running on the custom bones.
On a side note, it seems technically possible to add your own custom bones to the vanilla skeleton, but decided not to bother as I currently don’t need more than what’s already included.

[montky]

awesome news Heffy,

I suspected it might have been a pathing/rig issue hehe.

 

though, I'd caution,

try not to add rootbones or complex bones to the PlayerProtagonist skeleton...

it can get ugly hehe. (hyperdefinition overconstraint overflows etc).

 

that said, indeed, rigging enemies and the suchlike could be fun.

imagine, "sludge monsters"

aquatic adversaries, rad-squid/rad-octopods and rad-platysharks etc.

and "rad-ghosts" or holograms etc...