Jaw armor piece rigging

[WTFF1]

Hi, I'm working on a draugr related mod that includes two pieces of armor that have a moveable jaw piece.
As far as I was working on the draugr, everything went fine and easy, the helmet and mask jaw pieces are rigged to the jaw bone and their "mouths" open when the creature mouth opens.
The problem comes when trying to make them playable. I've not found any jaw bone or equivalent to rig them to. Yet there are things like beards or piercing mods that move with the character jaw, so there must be a way to do this.
I hope someone here knows how, because after countless hours I'm still clueless, and tired of playing around blindly.

PS: Sorry for the lame texture job on the mask. They are meant to work together, so I'll have to get them working before going further, because getting the textures matching will be a challenge.

 

 

[AnonymousDemon]

Now, I'm 99% sure that humanoid races use .tri files to animate their jaws, but I have no idea how you would set that up for a helmet. I've seen people animate cat ears to move with the facial expression and such, but only as a headmorph.

[WTFF1]

Now, I'm 99% sure that humanoid races use .tri files to animate their jaws, but I have no idea how you would set that up for a helmet. I've seen people animate cat ears to move with the facial expression and such, but only as a headmorph.

Damn. That looks like one more complicated thing to learn.

I've already had to learn how to use the CK, some scripting, mesh modelling, rigging and exporting... all in one month. Every single time it looks like it's going to be easy, but then there's bethesda to say "nope, sacrifice all of your precious time".

I'd go warn my past self if I could.

[wishnot4]

Actually, it might not be that hard for you, just import a vanilla beard into whatever 3d software you use and weight the jaw piece to it.  Then you export it out as the same as that beard.  In the ck duplicate that beard in the head parts list and use your new helmet as the file.  It should work then.  Now, making it something that the character can pick up and put on, not sure about that.

[WTFF1]

Actually, it might not be that hard for you, just import a vanilla beard into whatever 3d software you use and weight the jaw piece to it.  Then you export it out as the same as that beard.  In the ck duplicate that beard in the head parts list and use your new helmet as the file.  It should work then.  Now, making it something that the character can pick up and put on, not sure about that.

I tried rigging it to a beard, 3ds max gave missing bone node error on export, so I had to actually include the beard mesh to export. But CK crashed on loading the mesh to preview. I may have done something wrong though, I'm quite unexperienced.

Anyway, the item is worn by a boss draugr, so it being pickable is a must. I'd rather have it not moving with the jaw than breaking the whole purpose of the mod, which is implementing a series of advanced ancient-nord themed items in a inmersive way, through a fairly difficult dungeon questline.

[wishnot4]

I've done something similar to your beard thing(it was a brow) and I did it in blender.  I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to go about it in 3ds max.  I have made TRI files for a race, and I have no idea how that could be used with an armor mod.  I guess I would try to use the TRI file technique and then instead of making it a head part, make it an armor.

[rahrahrah]

Odd idea I know, but I reckon it might be worth a try weighting the jaw piece equally between left and right clavicle and testing or even a clav/clav/neck equal mix, see if the results are acceptable enough.

 

Separate version for the draugr like you did obviously

[WTFF1]

Odd idea I know, but I reckon it might be worth a try weighting the jaw piece equally between left and right clavicle and testing or even a clav/clav/neck equal mix, see if the results are acceptable enough.

 

Separate version for the draugr like you did obviously

I may try that option if everything else fails, the problem is that, while it may work for the player shouting animation (because you tilt forward, and I still doubt it would look fine), it won't work for npc's speaking animation, so will be weird on companions.

 

I've done something similar to your beard thing(it was a brow) and I did it in blender.  I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to go about it in 3ds max.  I have made TRI files for a race, and I have no idea how that could be used with an armor mod.  I guess I would try to use the TRI file technique and then instead of making it a head part, make it an armor.

I'll check that, thanks.

That said, here are some photos of how it looks on the draugr boss, after tweaking the UV and textures. Still have to make the helmet itself look a bit more matching, I'll probably use the playable ancient nord helmet texture. You can also see the axe and custom armor I made for him, shield is from immersive armors, made thinner, retextured and shaders edited to match the draugr set (still have to solve a quite visible clipping issue when used by draugr)

 

 

Scary guy, huh?

[WTFF1]

Well, apparently the CK doesn't like the word "default" in nif files. Been all day trying to export different configurations for the playable version, trying to find what was failing, but ck allways crashed. Changed the file name and no crashes anymore.