[LE] Completely custom creature

[Deathawaits4]

Hi guys, im fiddling around with animations and models and stuff. I created some basic animations that i want to test out BUT i do not want to replace anything in the game. I have a custom skeleton for the "creature" and an animation set. While i know there is something called FNIS creature, i a bit confused on what it does. Is it even possible to export a custom skeleton that is not already in the game to skyrim? I saw some mods replacing the skeleton of the player and humans. But like i said, i dont want to replace the skeleton of something but import my completely own skeleton for a creature.

 

I never saw any mod do that.. and that makes me think that it isnt even possible

[fore]

Making a custom creature race with completely new animations is a highly complicated thing.

 

Only mod I know (because it requires FNIS integration with a patch) is the "Centaur Race Alpha WIP"

[Deathawaits4]

Making a custom creature race with completely new animations is a highly complicated thing.

 

Only mod I know (because it requires FNIS integration with a patch) is the "Centaur Race Alpha WIP"

 

I just looked up The skyblivion project, infact they add completely new behaviour files for creatures. I don't know how they did it, but someone on theire team seems capable of doing so.

[Di0nysys]

Making a custom creature race with completely new animations is a highly complicated thing.

 

Only mod I know (because it requires FNIS integration with a patch) is the "Centaur Race Alpha WIP"

I know UltimateCombat added in new animations for existing creatures, then patched in with your patcher for compat, which ostensibly required a form of behavior tree editing. Any idea how they may have done that Fore?

[fore]

 

Making a custom creature race with completely new animations is a highly complicated thing.

 

Only mod I know (because it requires FNIS integration with a patch) is the "Centaur Race Alpha WIP"

I know UltimateCombat added in new animations for existing creatures, then patched in with your patcher for compat, which ostensibly required a form of behavior tree editing. Any idea how they may have done that Fore?

 

The same way "we" have done it. Create some new behavior files, and modify some vanilla ones. From what I have heard is that they used behavior files from existing creatures, and modified them to their liking. Just like the Centaur Race people.

 

The biggest roadblocks however are not the behavior files themselves. These are the animation*datasinglefile.txt files, which include crc encrypted information for all animation files, both character and creatures. But those are modified by FNIS as well, and documented in the FNIS Modders' doc since 2014. :)

 

And of course there will always be the need for some sort of patchers, since 2 different mods can never modify the same files. Skyblivion doesn't have this problem (yet), since there are only trailers, showing only their own mod (I guess). It will be interesting to see, if they will allow to mod Skyblivion. And how.

[Di0nysys]

 

 

Making a custom creature race with completely new animations is a highly complicated thing.

 

Only mod I know (because it requires FNIS integration with a patch) is the "Centaur Race Alpha WIP"

I know UltimateCombat added in new animations for existing creatures, then patched in with your patcher for compat, which ostensibly required a form of behavior tree editing. Any idea how they may have done that Fore?

 

The same way "we" have done it. Create some new behavior files, and modify some vanilla ones. From what I have heard is that they used behavior files from existing creatures, and modified them to their liking. Just like the Centaur Race people.

 

The biggest roadblocks however are not the behavior files themselves. These are the animation*datasinglefile.txt files, which include crc encrypted information for all animation files, both character and creatures. But those are modified by FNIS as well, and documented in the FNIS Modders' doc since 2014. :smile:

 

And of course there will always be the need for some sort of patchers, since 2 different mods can never modify the same files. Skyblivion doesn't have this problem (yet), since there are only trailers, showing only their own mod (I guess). It will be interesting to see, if they will allow to mod Skyblivion. And how.

Interesting. I would assume they were edited in Havok Content Tools 2010? I've tried multiple times to load the actor project files, but it always crashes the HBT app. Is there something i'm missing?

[fore]

 

Interesting. I would assume they were edited in Havok Content Tools 2010? I've tried multiple times to load the actor project files, but it always crashes the HBT app. Is there something i'm missing?

 

It's a long time that I looked into all of that Havok stuff, so I hope I get the facts right here.

 

What you would need to change behaviors is HBT (Havok Behavior Tool), not HCT. And the required HBT 2010 was never publicly available. The last available HBT version was (I think) 6.6, one or 2 years before they started this year versioning. And they were not available because Intel has willingly published them, but only because Intel was rather careless at that time in their data archives, and someone found the link to these releases.

 

I have experimented with this HBT 6.6(?), only to see that the format of the behavior files created by this version has differed very much from the behavior files released with Skyrim.

 

But most of all: Bethesda has never published Skyrim project file. And with project files I mean the project files with which HBT saves the current status of the developer created GUI. That is the internal data of HBT, and has nothing to do with behavior files, or the files that you probably have mistakenly considered being the "project files".

 

The project files are in meshes\animationsetdata are not the HBT project files. Those files are only a collection of animation related parameters in the behavior files. By no means do they describe the whole information like variables, events, conditions, supporting nodes, and so on, that is needed to reconstruct the whole behaviors.

 

They are intermediate files in a file creation process, which eventually leads to these animation*datasinglefile.txt files I alrady mentioned. And these files are only made to give the engine needed data when it comes to functionality that cannot be solved by Havok behaviors, for example file pre-cache.

 

You have to keep in mind that the Skyrim engine is an old one. It was never built around HBT. In fact Skyrim has a lot of functionality which doesn't fit Havok interfaces. Like the packages, furnitures, idle conditions. And whenever Skyrim needs to to handle these "crooked interfaces", it uses data from the extracted files.

 

For example, before furniture animations can be executed, the engine has to "tie" the actor with the furniture. In some test I have seen something that is usually unnoticeable: the engine is teleporting the actor to the furniture. Which is not part of the behavior functionaliy. And in order to do this, the engine uses data from animation*datasinglefile.txt.

 

So in order to add furniture animation functionality in FNIS I had to find out how to add data to the animation*datasinglefile.txt. Which was quite some task, since most of the data in these files is crc encryped.

[Deathawaits4]

Okay now all of this makes a lot more sense to me. So basically you can create a new monster completely custom bipedal or whatever, create completely new animations, copy the behavior file of the wolf and edit it so it uses the new animations? But adding new behaviors to the new monster is not possible because a project file contains the actual behaviour of the monster? So when the wolf hast 2 attack animations, your monster can only have 2 attack animations? This wouldn't be to big of a problem because there are a lot of monsters in the game that contain a lot of animations at the moment. But this is only if I understand this completely correct.

 

Btw your tool is really nice, this opened up a lot of possibilities

Edited July 3, 2018 by Deathawaits4

[fore]

Okay now all of this makes a lot more sense to me. So basically you can create a new monster completely custom bipedal or whatever, create completely new animations, copy the behavior file of the wolf and edit it so it uses the new animations? But adding new behaviors to the new monster is not possible because a project file contains the actual behaviour of the monster? So when the wolf hast 2 attack animations, your monster can only have 2 attack animations? This wouldn't be to big of a problem because there are a lot of monsters in the game that contain a lot of animations at the moment. But this is only if I understand this completely correct.

 

Btw your tool is really nice, this opened up a lot of possibilities

 

Of course you can add new behavior files. FNIS depending mods do it all the time. Everyone of them has at least one completely new behavior. You just take an existing one because it is much easier to use what is there than creating one from scratch. Creating an attack system, or a movement combination is much more complicated that what FNIS does, adding a lot of different simple idles.

 

So you copy an existing behavior just to save work. Once you have it, it is very simple to replace the animation file names to the new ones, and even not so hard to add an additional third attack.

 

But don't forget, this is just the behavior part. Then there are these animation*datasinglefile.txt files. They are really hard to understand becasue of the encryption. And they have to be patched among ALL custom animation mods or Enderals/Skybivions projects. Characters and creaturea alike.

[Deathawaits4]

 

Okay now all of this makes a lot more sense to me. So basically you can create a new monster completely custom bipedal or whatever, create completely new animations, copy the behavior file of the wolf and edit it so it uses the new animations? But adding new behaviors to the new monster is not possible because a project file contains the actual behaviour of the monster? So when the wolf hast 2 attack animations, your monster can only have 2 attack animations? This wouldn't be to big of a problem because there are a lot of monsters in the game that contain a lot of animations at the moment. But this is only if I understand this completely correct.

 

Btw your tool is really nice, this opened up a lot of possibilities

 

Of course you can add new behavior files. FNIS depending mods do it all the time. Everyone of them has at least one completely new behavior. You just take an existing one because it is much easier to use what is there than creating one from scratch. Creating an attack system, or a movement combination is much more complicated that what FNIS does, adding a lot of different simple idles.

 

So you copy an existing behavior just to save work. Once you have it, it is very simple to replace the animation file names to the new ones, and even not so hard to add an additional third attack.

 

But don't forget, this is just the behavior part. Then there are these animation*datasinglefile.txt files. They are really hard to understand becasue of the encryption. And they have to be patched among ALL custom animation mods or Enderals/Skybivions projects. Characters and creaturea alike.

 

okay then ill propably just wait for skyblivion to release and look how they handle it. But from what i could read out of your previous Post, FNIS can patch the datsingles.txt aswell right?

 

Having a fnis dependency is really no problem, it is really easy to use if you have some understanding on how to correctly add mods to skyrim. ill figure something out, others have done it, so will i.

Edited July 3, 2018 by Deathawaits4