Please help an animation newbie (I'm getting there, need a push).

[ancientwillow]

So I really, really, really want to change the first person bow drawing animations, because I hate how the arrow seems to be jutting from the character's chest instead of his cheek. Being that I am a complete animation newbie, I started trawling through tutorials but couldn't find anything truly helpful.

 

What I have done is convert the first person bow drawing animation (using the first person skeleton) to the .kf format, loaded it in studio max, attached it to the first person skeleton .nif, and tried messing about with the keys. However, in-game the results are... odd. Whenever I draw the bow the camera will shift to his feet so I can see out of the game world, and I don't hear any bow sounds. So now I'm kind of stuck, and could really use a little help.

 

Here is a screenshot of what happens when I draw a bow:

 

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/578955258304226030/E380060E24358BA78A25EC2F27DDDF3BF62D76B3/

[ancientwillow]

Update: found a great post explaining the troubles with first person animations. As per the post, I created a cam bone parented to the npc root. The trouble I'm having now is unlinking the center of mass bone from the offset bone (think that's what it's called), because the COM bone is linked to almost all the other bones, and the offset bone is linked to the root, so unlinking them breaks everything. So how am I supposed to unlink them?

 

I'll post a pic of the diagram later as this is my linux box.

[smedennils]

Did you get it to work?

If so it would be very nice if you could describe your workflow and perhaps linking the post where someone explained how to create first person animations :)