Pose techniques?

[lb10111]

I'm interested in creating my own poses and perhaps animations for Skyrim. There are a lot of tutorials on the subject related to Bethesda games but none of them cover the actual manipulation of joints on the skeleton, and none of the general animation tutorials I could find seem to be related to the type of animation Bethesda games use.

 

So far I'm able to import the skeleton.nif and the body meshes, and I can move and rotate the joints. The problem is that when I attempt to make a pose the body ends up looking twisted and distorted. For example if I rotate the forearm and hand it just twists the mesh around. I'm trying to learn one step at a time so I have no idea if that behavior translates into the game or not but still I can't help feel like I'm doing something wrong.

 

I'm hoping someone who has experience with this could share the techniques they use to create poses in 3ds Max or can point me to a tutorial that actually applies to Bethesda games.

 

I'm using 3ds Max 9

 

Thank you!

[Ghogiel]

just throwing the skeleton in scene, not rigging it and trying to animate instead is pretty much a complete waste of time. First thing I would do is create new bones and align and rename them to replace all the imported ones. link them up in a standard fashion. Then make a control rig... you're probably not going to like my advice here... just search for character rigging tutorials. :mellow:

[lb10111]

Thanks for your reply. I am a complete newb at this and I will take your advice to heart. Is it enough to learn character rigging and let the nif plugin take care of all translation between formats or is there anything I should keep in mind to make animations compatible with Skyrim?

[Ghogiel]

you either use a slightly older version of Havok content tools or export as a kf with the niftools plugin and use the kf/hkx converter to get a working hkx file. It will take a little while to figure out that side of it, there is a thread on the official Beth for the hxk converter which is essential reading. As well as any tutorials for exporting animations for F3/Ob will be helpful too.

[lb10111]

Hi Ghogiel, if you're still around. Well I took your advice and I'm glad I did. Not only is rigging a lot of fun but it makes animating so simple. I'm still pretty new at this though and I have just one question: why do you suggest to create an entire new skeleton instead of use Skyrim's skeleton? So far I have been practicing on Skyrim's skeleton and it's been working just fine. I even got the export to work so my animations show properly in game.

[Ghogiel]

As you might have noticed the bones import as bones... ok they are just joint points, which is all bones are, but they are goofy imo. where as if you create the bones and just use the align tool to snap them to replace the ones imported, takes a short space of time and I suppose it is just something you as an animator would rather have because of being used to seeing proper bones and not little points and lines. Also they act weird on a couple tools.

[lb10111]

Ah okay, fair enough. Thanks again for responding on what seems like a dead board.