Desperately need help with a nif animation problem

[DMagnus]

Ok, I don't normally do this, but I'm at my wits end and hoping a different set of eyes, or deeper knowledge, can help me with this issue.

 

I've been working on a new laser pistol for the game, and it's very close to completion, but I've run into a pretty solid roadblock that's thwarted every attempt I've made to try and bypass it. I'm trying to make a single component of the pistol spin at a constant rate, at all times, not strictly when the gun's firing. I initially though this would be a breeze, just set an NiTransformController onto an NiNode that contains the mesh parts I want to spin. It spun perfectly fine in Nifskope, and in the Creation Kit preview it also turned merrily around.

 

But, when brought in game, that's when things got hairy. When wielded by the player, or in the hands of an NPC, the component in question didn't move even an inch. But when dropped on the ground, the component would spin without any fuss. I spent weeks trying different things: different flag settings, setting up controller sequences mimicking the Shishkebab and the Ripper, using their relevant behavior graph extra data, changing flag settings on the NiNode containing the mesh components, rigging the components to a bone and controlling the bone...none of it worked. Each and every attempted I made ended with the same result, the damn component would not spin if the gun was being wielded. I know at this point I could just give up and move on, but I'm a bit of a stickler for accuracy and I've based the gun off of one from another game, in which the component in question spun around, and I want that to be reflected in its Fallout 4 rendition.

If anyone can figure out what the heck I'm doing wrong, or can offer an insight on how I can resolve this, it'd be greatly appreciated. I've linked to the models as they currently are, with textures and materials, below so anyone can poke through them and maybe figure something out.

 

EDIT: I finally managed to figure it out. If anyone now or in the future comes across this, struggling to accomplish the same thing, here's what I did:

 

For whatever reason, Fallout 4's gun behavior utterly blocks nif transforms, at least based on my observations. So, to get around that, what I did was I set up the component that's supposed to spin as a Magic Effect hit effect art object, and applied that to a self-delivered enchantment. I used a Fire and Forget enchantment, but Constant Effect should still work. I tied that magic effect to an enchantment, applied the enchantment to the OMOD entry for the component, and voila; once attached in game and readied, the component was visible and merrily spun away. The only drawback is, since it's an art object, it doesn't appear in the inventory or workbench view, but that may be able to be worked around by having a static mesh used by the OMOD that's set up to be disabled with an NiVisController. I haven't tried this yet so I don't know how well it'll work, so I'll make an addendum when I get results.

 

I do realize, though, that this could potentially be easily rectified with custom animations, but I don't have the means yet to do that and really I shouldn't have to make custom animations for something this simple.

Edited November 28, 2020 by DMagnus