[LE] Help with custom killmoves

[lo0ps]

Hi, pretty new here. I'm trying to get a custom killmove working in-game, and I'm a bit stuck. Right now I'm just replacing one 1h melee killmove with my own to get the animation to play in the game. The problem is, even though the animation plays fine in-game, the camera doesn't follow. I have a cam3rd bone in my 3dsmax scene file that's animated, and I'm pretty sure I'm exporting correctly through Havok, but the game seems to be using the camera from the killmove that I'm replacing instead of the camera from my file. Any idea what the best way to fix this is?

 

I looked into using FNIS, thinking maybe the only way to get control of the camera was to do a custom animation instead of just a replacement, but between trying to make sense of the FNIS documentation and the creation kit I'm a bit lost. If FNIS/creation kit is the best way about it, are there any more beginner level tutorials for understanding how animations work in the creation kit or how to create my first animation using FNIS?

 

Thanks!

 

Also if anyone's curious, this is a super rough pass of what I want the animation to feel like:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wap6x-_6FIWwFJbzguiBJhDKA-y5hLDt/view

[fore]

And I'm trying to make sense what you have done. :smile:

 

First, animations don't "work in the Creation Kit". The creation Kit setup is only necessary to make the animation events and conditions known to the game. The animation and the camera is integrated into the behavior files. And the only available way to do this is FNIS.

 

It sounds like you have replaced an existing killmove with yours. That will almost never work. Each killmove is dependent on specific animation events that have to be raised at animation specific times. And these are different from animation to animation.

 

You have to add your killmove as a custom one. And the FNIS Modders Doc is very specific about that, very much step-by-step. In particular how killmoves are added via CK. To activate the animation camera you need to set a specific FNIS parameter. And that's part of the FNIS Modders Doc as well.

 

If you want to see how a paired animation (which is basically a killmove without kill) works with animated camera, integrated into the game with FNIS, you can look at the new Rigmor mod. That one uses a cinematic kissing animation.

[lo0ps]

Cool, thanks for the reply! I think I'm a little closer to understanding how this works. I've created the mod folder with the animation.hkx file and the FNIS animation list, generated the FNIS behavior files, and integrated them with the FNIS for users executable. I also created a LOOSE idle object for pa_killmoveAnimEvent in the CK. Now where I'm stuck is actually getting the killmove to trigger in game. With the vanilla kill moves, they just automatically trigger in combat when the npc's health is low. Is this behavior something I need to set up myself, or does the game know to treat any (even custom) kill moves this way? I've been poking around the forums and saw you direct a couple people back to this line in your documentation:

 

actor1.PlayIdleWithTarget(<IdleObject>, actor2)

 

So would I have to write something in papyrus that looked like:

 

if target hp is less than current damage output:

player.PlayIdleWithTarget(killmove)

 

If I wanted to get the killmove to actually trigger normally? Apologies if this seems like a really obvious question.

[fore]

Oh my, it's about 5 years that I have analyzed all that, implemented, documented FNIS. Now it's only a shadow in my head. :smile:

 

In order to add killmoves the "vanilla way" you have to find the place where the other killmoves for characters are added in the CK. It is not "loose" any more, but in a little subtree where the killmoves are selected according different conditions. Which weapon actor 1 is using, standing back or front, which percentage, and so on. You have to add your own move appropriately.

 

I didn't describe that because I didn't want to contribute to automatic compatibility problems. You have to modify existing game data, this is not a clean add-on. And whenever another modder publishes another killmove that way, you will destroy one anothers changes depending on load order.

[lo0ps]

Thanks so much for answering all of my questions! I have a couple more for you if you're not tired out yet. So I've got a rough killmove animation working in-game, but I'm having two weird camera issues. In the original animation, the Cam3rd Camera does a little punch-out with some camera shake to give the animation a feeling of impact. When I watch it in-game however it does a slow transition between the normal 3rd person camera and the killcam, and the impact is lost. I notice this doesn't happen with the game's vanilla killmoves so I'm guessing I did something wrong. Any idea what it might be? I tried messing with the "Blend" setting in FNIS (just set it to B0.0) but it looks like that only effects the character animation and not the camera.

 

Also after performing the killmove, the camera seems to get stuck inside the character in this weird pseudo-first-person view. Switching to actual first person and then back to third person resets it, but I can't figure out why it's happening in the first place. Again, any ideas? Here's a video of my killmove in 3ds Max and then in Skyrim to show what I'm talking about:

https://media.giphy.com/media/5sYj3XoaqwbUQnHl1j/source.mp4

[fore]

Oh sorry. I have very little experience with animations, and I never did a paired animation myself.

 

Have you set the Animated Camera option in FNIS, or is this default?

 

What I did once is to modify Cam3rd when I used the vanilla swim animation for flying (FNIS Flyer). There I have an option to look straight down during flight. That's when I noticed the camera (with the -ac) does not follow the angle that I had set in 3ds, and that I would expect from the look there. So I always had to adjust that according to the result in-game.

 

Maybe you look for someone with experience. The only one I know with killmove experience who is active (sometimes) is ZaZ.

 

EDIT: Did you replace the original animation, or did you define anew with FNIS? What is the original? Maybe we have to look into the behavior which animation events are set.