Animating a new model

[glowplug]

At best, I've managed to modify a keyframe file, using Blender, having followed this tutorial.

What I now want to do is make my own set of bones for a new creature model then export the bones to a skeleton.nif.

Could somebody please give me a link to a tutorial on how to do that.

The next thing is which version of Blender would be better for creating the animation sequences?
Will the latest version saved to legacy format save any time and effort for exporting to kf?

[DrakeTheDragon]

Somehow it isn't the same Noob To Pro tutorial I was using years ago, but this page in particular does explain how to make your own armature and add your own bones.

There's surely better, especially more GameBryo centric tuts, but right now I can't find any of them anymore.

 

But one important thing I found, when you export a skeleton, always name it "skeleton.nif", nothing else will get the same extra data it will need.

[glowplug]

Thanks DrakeTheDragon, I did the original tutorial years ago.

I've confused it by suggesting that I'm asking how to create the skeleton. I can make a set of bones to suit a model then weight paint the model to move properly with those bones.

 

I am encountering two distinct issues...

1. Creating a skeleton that resembles any of the vanilla ones.

2. Learning how to create a full set of kf files for required animations such as Forward, Backward, RunForward and so on.

...when I looked over the exercise folder I did for the 'Creating character animations' tutorial what I exported did not work. If I remember it simply crashed CS.

 

As far as the first point, as per Noob To Pro, I end up with an armature where I can change view from Octahedron to Stick, for example.

Whatever I import from a vanilla skeleton does not seem to have an armature and I neither have, nor can find information on whatever the objects are. I found one tutorial on youtube that seems to be creating these objects and exporting it to a skeleton but there is no dialogue and I have not been able to 'achieve' anything from it.

[glowplug]

I'm not sure what I was doing wrong but I got through the 'Creating character animations' this time. It also reminded me that 'Import Skeleton Only' has to be selected when importing a skeleton even though there is no parent. I tried import/export vanilla but it crashes the game - I'll go in search of the required settings.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Well, actually, those other NIFs very well do have an armature as well, but it's more a reduced number of bones, for one, and for two, it's usually not in hierarchical order like in a complete skeleton but only all nodes on root level for reference.

 

For what it's worth, when you import a NIF into Blender you usually do it in 2 ways. Either you import the entire thing, geometry AND armature, as a whole (in most use cases not advisable), OR you import a complete armature first, like from a skeleton NIF, using "import skeleton only, parent selected", then the mesh from the NIF later, using "import geometry only, parent to selected armature". This way you get a complete and posable armature with the meshes nicely rigged to so you can do everything you want with them.

 

And when you export them again, there comes the tricky part. If you use "flatten hierarchy", you'll end up with just a flat list of armature bones inside your NIF like in the others. Only when you "not" tick it, your armature will remain in hierarchical order like in a skeleton NIF. It's also important to keep in mind what you do with the import options for "realign", as there's again 2, only one also realigning the "roll". I've used both in mixed order for several years now, and apart from in some cases easier to understand bone structures haven't yet noticed that great a change. But if you mix these up, use different options for skeleton and mesh, trouble will occur.

 

The "flat" list of armature bones you could think of like something used only for reference. You have disconnected single bones just at the proper place where they would be inside the skeleton, so when you rig vertices to them those vertices will know what relative position to keep from the actual bones of the same names later in the game. That's why in every rigged mesh's NIF file you always have a list of NiNodes with the same names as bones and at the same location as in the rigging pose of the skeleton NIF, but not actually in skeleton structure.

 

 

Oh, and there's also another trick to this only rarely seen in use. You can actually very well have the reference bones inside a NIF be at a completely different place as in the skeleton NIF in rigging pose. Once the item gets put onto the armature inside the game it will bend and deform to the correct position where the bones are then.

 

As an example, for my dragons the wings are in their rigging pose, widely spread out left and right, inside their NIF used as the tail mesh for the race. But in my skeleton NIF I pre-posed the wings' bones so they start in a neat fold. In game you will always have the wings neatly folded in behind your back, although in their NIF they're completely spread out.

 

I actually made even more use of this trick by now, for example when you want to model something that's to be worn only in a specific pose, you don't really need to deform it into the skeleton's rigging pose first. Just pose the reference bones in Blender into the target pose, then model it and rig it to them, then export, and once inside the game it will deform to the bones current position, but once in the pose you want the item to be worn in it will have the perfect shape just like you modeled it.

 

 

And yes, I also experience lots of issues when attempting to use a freshly exported skeleton.nif from the get go. Even the usual NifSkope magic sanitization spells cannot always help. So when I want to change or add bones in the actor skeleton NIF, I always open an existing functioning file and just delete and paste/replace the bones I changed. Don't get me wrong, one "can" get a freshly exported skeleton from Blender working completely fine inside the game... it's just too much hassle for me to do this again every time.

 

Oh, and one thing I haven't yet attempted myself so far is new collision bodies to go with the bones (the bubbly pill shaped structures the Vanilla skeletons always have at almost every bone) and restraints, what makes bones not moveable into certain directions or beyond certain limits around an axis when in Havoc mode. That's too advanced for me to attempt myself so far, although I have very well read everything about these as well some years ago.

[glowplug]

Thanks DrakeTheDragon, I appreciate your help but do not understand a lot of what you posted.

I exported upperbody while deselecting 'Flatten Skin.
That did not render in game.
Turning off 'Auto Sanitize before save' I ran Spells>Sanitize>Reorder link arrays and that now renders.
I have no idea what happened, when or why I should use this so I've just turned Auto back on.
NifTools...
Sanitize:Adjust Link arrays > If you've made changes to a number of different arrays in your .nif, you can update all of them at once with this option.
...this has told me nothing more than what the label does - what actually happens, why do we need it?

In the end, what is the benefit of having the redundant bones in each nif?

With the realign import buttons, what is Roll and why would we select it?

I tried editing _male/skeleton.nif...

Import: Restore default settings, Import Skeleton Only + Parent Selected.
Export: Restore default settings, Export Geometry + Animation, Creature to SkeltonEdited.nif

1. Open both SkeltonEdited.nif and skeleton.nif
2. Copy Bip01 L Hand from SkeltonEdited.nif
3. Paste Over Bip01 L Hand in skeleton.nif and save - no errors at this stage.

...this crashes during save game load - Auto Sanitize was on so what gives?
When I ran Check links it raises 'link points to wrong block type'.
I tried this on both vanilla and Growlf's universal.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Yeah, many of the things I wrote about I do not fully understand myself either, no problem. :sweat:

 

The sanitization spells in NifSkope are a godsend many times. I do not really know what happens when you "adjust link arrays" in your NIF myself either, but I learned that NIFs coming out of Blender in most times aren't usable as is inside the game and only post-export sanitization in NifSkope will fix them up. What I did understand about the link array stuff is that you can edit these inside NifSkope but not very safely so. If you add or remove elements to or from those array structures, they will not automatically update the actual arrays inside the file. This needs the "adjust link arrays" function to be used every time, to like re-construct an actual array from the string elements structure you modified.

 

The bones in the items' NIFs are in no way "redundant" but used for reference and relative position to the actual skeleton bones in game, like I said. Without them the models' vertices inside the NIF would not know what position to stay at in game relative to the actual skeleton's bones when they move.

 

"Roll" now in Blender is the rotation of an object around its Z axis, in case of armature bones their rotation around their own tail line, the one rotation you likely will not notice unless you look at their local coordinate system arrows at their tips. In some cases it helps creating cleaner armatures when importing with this option selected, but it can also cause trouble when done haphazardly so.

 

Can't say what exactly went wrong when you copied a bone from one skeleton into another. But I did tell you the Blender NIFTools export will leave out important parts when you export to a file named anything else but "skeleton.nif". By exporting to your "SkeltonEdited.nif" you created a bogus, only half-functional, skeleton with important parts missing from its NIF tree.

 

And as for "Flatten Skin"... When you export skeletons, keep it unchecked by all means, never flatten the hierarchy of a skeleton NIF.

When you export an item, you can leave it ticked or unticked, both should work. At least I've seen both in mods and the Vanilla game by now, and both have worked inside the game. I for myself prefer to check it for items though, a flattened hierarchy here helps keeping things neatly organized and is playing it safe.

 

And yes, Auto-Sanitize on Save is a good idea to keep enabled, unless in certain "special" cases where it actually might mess up part of your work, but those rare special cases aren't part of what we're talking of here either.

For what it's worth, even although I'm pretty sure my export settings in NifSkope are creating perfectly fine NIFs useable straight away inside the game, I still always and without any exception run them all through the usual sanitization steps post-export every time, namely "Update All Tangent Spaces", "Adjust Link Arrays", "Adjust Texture Sources" and "Check Links", I think are the usual ones I always do before putting a NIF into the game.

[glowplug]

I appreciate your help DrakeTheDragon and to save any confusion have documented what I have been trying to do at this stage. There has to be something I am doing wrong and/or failing to do.

I've put the Required Outcome at the start of this document as you may well suggest to either forget it or make certain compromises to simplify it.

When you say "Update All Tangent Spaces", "Adjust Link Arrays", "Adjust Texture Sources" and "Check Links" is the order critical?
I've added the Spells lists in an image for reference as I was unable to solve my test examples this way.

 

Please note that if reviewing this is going to take up too much of your time then it simply puts this part of my project out of scope and I'll find an alternative.

 

 

[glowplug]

Success. Having reinstalled Oblivion, things now work.

I was able to import _male/skeleton.nif, export then copy a bone from export to original and run it in game.
I've edited the swimming kf far enough to believe I can achieve what I want.

The horse/reptile thing is a very quick throw together as a concept.
The serpents but with legs are much closer to what I have planned.
The creature needs to be about 2x the size of a horse.
The reptile uses the horse skeleton.
The baliwog skeleton is closer in shape to the model I'm planning but I've had trouble scaling it up to a horse let alone 2x - it simply does not move properly in game.

This leaves me with 2 questions.
1. Does anybody know of a resource with a skeleton that would be suitable.
2. Am I better off?..
a) adding all wing bones and weighting the whole thing then update all kf.
b) adding a bone at a time and update associated kf.

 

If anyone has any tips I'd greatly appreciate it.

[DrakeTheDragon]

It's been a long day and an even longer night having been occupied with work issues constantly (server farm admins you're working in cooperation with when installing and setting up a new cluster of servers are the best to destroy the work of weeks in a heartbeat when they just accidentally 'reverse' the order of server-syncing and sync the completely coded and ready to go source from the empty target, i.e. delete all your code), so I sadly can't give you the reply now I was intending to do. But I'll get to it eventually, once there's a little more time, maybe tomorrow.

 

I'm glad you got it working, though I see no reason as for why a simple reinstall alone could've been the fix here. But that doesn't mean a thing, if it is working now.