Fixed those normals

Interestingly, the girls don't always go to their assigned jars. To get them to stay put, I used a Set package. Trouble is I can't use a linked ref to specify the jar because that won't work for girls captured with a spell. So they're just looking for a nearby item of furniture of the correct type, which hopefully won't cause too many problems in practice.

I might want to narrow the search radius a little though.

The other thing I notice here is that these jars are too small, Koriina, the Ayleid girl, manages to clip both the rings and the cork at this scale.

I shrank them this small so they'd fit on one of those Noble Shelf units, but if I'm going to keep that size as standard, I need to shrink the girls, and I'm using the 1/6th scale quite a lot.

Then again, here's everyone at 1/7th scale:

The difference is small enough, I think I might go for it. Most of the scaling is done in one script anyway.

So, you could shrink a character down to fit inside something like a Devious Device plug?

Probably, I don't know if there's a lower limit to scaling though.

Were you thinking to put them in the inside part, or the outside? Outside could be problematic.

Hi @DocClox

Nice article, but I am far at the beginning.

May I ask if you have a link to one ore multiple turoials on AnimObjects?

I am having a hard time to find anything on this topic and the CK Wiki is not helpful as well.

There's not a lot out there, to be honest.

What I did was to look at the FNIS documentation. That tells you how AO objects are defined.  Then I looked at some of the animation packs that used animated objects (ZaZ is good for this. You can also look at some vanilla AOs like the flagons that magically appear for certain drinking idles). After that, open up the CK and find AO object with the same name. That shows you how the objects are defined, and gives you the name of the nif file.  You might need a BSA unpacker.

Open the nif with Nifscope. You'll see there a block of type NiStringExtraData where the string name is the name of a bone. That's the bone the object will attach to when the object is equipped.

Copy that node to your AO, change the bone name to suit your needs. Create an AnimObject record in the CK for your nif, and then use that record and your animation to define a FNIS entry for your new AO animation. You might need to copy some flags from a working nif.

That's how I worked out how to do it, and pretty much all I can tell you on the subject.

Thats already a big help. Many Thanks.

So the general idea behind AnimObject is that you have a charakter doing an animation like drinking. And the AnimObject, for example a bottle, is tied to a specific bone. Most likely the hand in this case and therefore will be moved with the bone in the animation.

But the bottle in this case has no own animation, its just a static AnimObject, correct?

But I could also animate the AnimObject and then I would have a character performing an animation, an AnimObject which spawns in on a specific bone of the character and also performs a specific animation.

So in the case for the beautiful ladies in the jars the character performs the animation and the AnimObject contains the jar and the green cuffs which also move tied to the wrist bone of the character?

1 hour ago, 03368020 said:

So the general idea behind AnimObject is that you have a charakter doing an animation like drinking. And the AnimObject, for example a bottle, is tied to a specific bone. Most likely the hand in this case and therefore will be moved with the bone in the animation.

You got it. One variation I tried was to make the cuffs work as AOs. That needed four separate cuffs, each with it's own attach bone. I had to fiddle with the position and rotation a little to get them to line up with the ankle or wrist they were attached to, but after that the game did it all for me.

1 hour ago, 03368020 said:

But the bottle in this case has no own animation, its just a static AnimObject, correct?

I'm not sure to be honest. Many of them, perhaps all, have a NiTransformController node, and that defines some keys ... although in some cases it doesn't look like they do anything or not. They might be needed to make the AO work, or might just be leftovers. I stated out finding a similar AO to canibalize, then I ripped out the mesh and pasted my own in. Anything else, I didn't touch unless there was clear need.

1 hour ago, 03368020 said:

But I could also animate the AnimObject and then I would have a character performing an animation, an AnimObject which spawns in on a specific bone of the character and also performs a specific animation.

I expect so. I tried do that with animated textures to make the words revolve around the cuffs, but I ended up doing that as a spell effect because that seemed to work better.

1 hour ago, 03368020 said:

So in the case for the beautiful ladies in the jars the character performs the animation and the AnimObject contains the jar and the green cuffs which also move tied to the wrist bone of the character?

Basically, yes. I had problems getting everything to position right using an all-in-one approach and ended up with a separate AO for each cuff, and another for the jar which I linked to the root bone. But yeah, that's the essence of it.

Very nice, thank you very much. Then I will head over to the FNIS Documentation and see if I can come up with something working

Best of luck!

When you think they will be available for downlead? 

Not for a while. I've been doing some Raider Reform stuff for Fallout 4, and trying to make a working Blender->Havok exporter, and that's been eating up my spare time.

When I get that done, (or when I finally get fed up of 3D transform mathematics) I'll come back to this, and it should see some decent progress again.

Not for a while. I've been doing some Raider Reform stuff for Fallout 4, and trying to make a working Blender->Havok exporter, and that's been eating up my spare time.

When I get that done, (or when I finally get fed up of 3D transform mathematics) I'll come back to this, and it should see some decent progress again.