Animation Problem

[NeverwinterPinata]

I am currently working on animations for a new race and, although my first two animations work as intended (swimforward & swimfastforward), my swimleft and swimright animations have a slight problem.

 

In Blender, the head is positioned like so:

 

In Oblivion, however, the head is tilted upward:

 

I have experimented with bone priority to fix this problem, setting the Neck1 and Head priorities from 30 to 55, then 66, and lastly 75, but none of those attempts wielded even slightly different results. If anyone can help me fix this problem, I would be very grateful!

 

P.S. I created the animations using Blender 2.49b (Portable) and tweaked them for Oblivion using Nifskope 1.2.0a2.dev11.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Hmm, did you try turning off head tracking already temporarily in the Oblivion.ini and see if it helps? I know of few special pose animations being able to lock your head into a certain pose, but in general head tracking will always interfere.

 

In Oblivion animations are never a single, isolated thing. The resulting pose is always a merge of different animations running at the same time. The type of animation, idle, special idle, fullbody, movement, etc., as well as the priorities of the individual bones determine the final result at any single frame.

 

I encountered several hundreds of idle and/or pose animations which will change the head's pose as soon as I type "TAI" (toggle A.I.) into the console to also switch the idle manager and head tracking's inverse kinematics calculation for the actor off.

 

And if you stopped with the priorities at 75, why didn't you also try going further? The highest priority is 100 after all, and depending on the type of animation many will easily override your's still. But most of all I recall head tracking will always override everything else.

 

 

edit: One thing else though, for what it's worth, but to me looking into the direction you're swimming, if I got your animation's function right, also looks more believable than to the site. Maybe that's a feature of head tracking, too.

[NeverwinterPinata]

Hmm, did you try turning off head tracking already temporarily in the Oblivion.ini and see if it helps? I know of few special pose animations being able to lock your head into a certain pose, but in general head tracking will always interfere.

 

In Oblivion animations are never a single, isolated thing. The resulting pose is always a merge of different animations running at the same time. The type of animation, idle, special idle, fullbody, movement, etc., as well as the priorities of the individual bones determine the final result at any single frame.

 

I encountered several hundreds of idle and/or pose animations which will change the head's pose as soon as I type "TAI" (toggle A.I.) into the console to also switch the idle manager and head tracking's inverse kinematics calculation for the actor off.

 

And if you stopped with the priorities at 75, why didn't you also try going further? The highest priority is 100 after all, and depending on the type of animation many will easily override your's still. But most of all I recall head tracking will always override everything else.

 

 

edit: One thing else though, for what it's worth, but to me looking into the direction you're swimming, if I got your animation's function right, also looks more believable than to the site. Maybe that's a feature of head tracking, too.

Thank you for your reply, DrakeTheDragon!

 

I first set the Head and Neck1 bone priorities to 100 to see if it would work, which it didn't. But what did work is disabling head tracking. That's a shame though, as I don't want my mod to be dependant on disabling a vanilla feature. Anyway, the animation is indeed sideways swimming, and the head's pose was designed with the player's view in mind. But, if head tracking will not allow it, I will need to revise the animation.

 

P.S. To answer your question, I didn't go any further than 75 at first because I wanted to set bone priorities wisely, and afraid that going further may do more harm than good. I am new to animating for Oblivion after all.