A litte help with Animated Objects?

[nosdregamon]

I'm making some progress on animations and how to integrate them into CK. I worked on animobjects and had some trouble aligning them properly, and made this thread up. With some help of resident animators, I got a workflow, that's kinda tedious, but it works:

1. We require the animation/pose you have in mind, this helped me a lot. With the tutorial you should be able to create animations. The following things will just add objects.
   
   I'll recreate a background element of an old Amiga game Stormlord 2 was metal as fuck...
   
   I created the basic animation and exported it as "xDancer.hkx"
    
2. Obviously we need the object(s) in question. Create or reuse an existing object for your animation. I'm not good at creating so I used a rope found in one of skyrim's port meshes and simply deleted everything I didn't need. I also re-cycled some cuffs from the game. The Idea is to attach these to the NPCs limbs, creating the illusion, the ropes are tied to the cuffs and connected to the ceiling/floor. It ended looking like this:
   
    
3. To get there, Import the object into your animation. Turn off auto keying in 3ds max and never make an animation-key for your AnimObject (these will not carry over, at least not the way I describe it).
4. Then use the Link/Unlink-Tool  to drag the object to the bone it should align to.
5. Play the animation, the linked bone should drag the object along, and the objects get's rotated according to the bones spin. Re-Position it, if it looks strang, or use a different Bone. For example, my instinct was to link the arm-cuffs directly to the bone undeneath but that bone just looks like the forearm, it's actually steering element of the hand (it's even called Hand, D'oh!) and my objects mirroring the hand were always off.
   Experiment, and re-align until it looks ok, just remember, No Animation Keys!. Copy the name of the used bone to a txt-file, we'll need it later.
6. Now. Save everything. And also use "save as" a new file, because what we do now, might damage the Animation.
7. Let's work with the new file, and hide everything, except for the bones and our object. Then select the object and open the hirachy rollout on the right side and chose "Affect Pivot Only" . Then use the Align-Tool to give the object the same Pivot (coordinates and rotations) as the linked bone.
   
8. Next Step: Close "Affect Pivot Only". Rightclick the Move tool and set all of the object's coordinates to zero. Rightclick the Rotate tool and set all of the object's coordinates to zero. This will probably look like the Object has been turned up-side down. In the game, this 0/0/0 will be the point where our object connects to the linked bone.
    
9. Next Use the main Menu's Export-Selected, chose  Netimers/Gambryo from the rollout and export it with the following Settings:

   Update tangent space  / Collapse Transforms / Zero transforms /   Weld vectrices (put to Zero)   /  Transforms, all the rest unticked.

   
10. Open the resulting Nif in Nifskope, insert a Block "NiStringExtraData" name it PRN and add the bone's name as StringData.
    
11. Place that file in Skyrim under data/meshes/MyModName (or create a new mod in Mod Organizer and place the file there in the meshes directory).
12. In CK, create/open MyMod and in the Object window go to Miscellaneous->Animobjects. Create a new object here, give it a unique ID and write down the ID (xDancerCuffRightArm for this example), select the nif-file for model and set AnimObjectUnequip as a unload event. (If you don't do this, the player/NPCs will carry the object around like a arrow stuck to him after the animation).
    
13. In the FNIS-List add the modifier -o before the animation that uses the object and the CK ID after this:
    

    b -o xDancer xDancer.hkx xDancerCuffRightArm

    You could also add more objects as you like:
    

    b -o xDancer xDancer.hkx xDancerFloorRope XDancerCuffrightLeg xDancerCeilingRope xDancerCuffRightArm xDancerCuffLeftArm xDancerCuffLeftLeg
    

14. Register the animation "xDancer" in CK under Gameplay->Animatons and create the required FNIS-Files.
    
    In game you can now use console commands such as "sae xDancer" and the animation should play with objects. Other options would be to use it in idle-markes and furnitures, but that's a story for another day, another thread....

Examples:

 

Thanks a lot for constructive help, hints and brainstorming to komotor, Kurg4n, SirNibbles and a lot of others I bothered with PMs.

[gregathit]

It may take a bit for you to get an answer.  There are only a handful of folks that know how to animate.  If a couple of weeks go by and you still don't have any comments, you might try looking at some of the Sexlab animators and try PMing the one that is most active.

[darkevilhum]

(Not 100% sure this applies to you has you're using CK where as I didn't delve that far and only made use-able anim objects and anims)

 

The only way I managed to do this when learning animobjects not too long ago (and with help from other animators) was  to set it up as you said.

 

Following that, I would adjust the animobject.nif by trial and error to where I thought it should be (rotation and all if you can get away with that in your animating software which can be weird) and then import it back into max to see if it was where It needed to be. So essentially all the positional and rotational changes to the animobject are done in the nif and then imported into your software to see if accurate, rinse repear trialerror etc.

 

It sounds sucky but it's not too bad once you get the ball rolling, couple of adjustment imports and you'll have it where you want it. Not sure if the same can be said for in game functioning furniture? Clueless on that matter.

[nosdregamon]

I got it to work and edited the entry-post, should someone else have the same problem.

 

Thanks a lot for constructive help, hints and brainstorming to komotor, Kurg4n, SirNibbles and a lot of others I bothered with PMs.