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Creating rig.txt files for FO4 critters?


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Crazy and Leito have done amazing work putting together rig.txt files for the wasteland's creatures, but there are a couple more critters I was hoping to be able to animate (scorpions and some of the dlc creatures). After reading through Shadeanimator's notes, putting together the rig file for HCT export seemed pretty straightforward - just a matter of typing in names for all the bones in 3ds and approximating the hierarchy of the creature's skeleton.

 

And so, several wasted days later, I am hoping someone can point me in the direction of what I'm missing. Writing a rig.txt that allows 3ds to export with no errors (and the same warnings that occur when exporting a working human animation) is no sweat. The in-game results are hopelessly mangled. I thought I'd start with Bloodworms - how hard can it be? The whole skeleton is basically a set of bones that run down the body, and then 4 sets that run down each of the mouth parts. No such luck. Playing with the working rigs by Leito and Crazy seems to indicate that (1) there is no predictable system for getting the bone order right, other than a very general 'start with root and work down,' and (2) arbitrary choices (like putting a left arm hierarchy before a right arm one) matter a lot.

 

So...my two questions are:

 

1) Do Shadeanimator's tools for automatically generating rig.txt files get the order right? (or, does getting the xml file provide more insight into the right order than the layer window in 3ds?) If so, I'll try to get those tools working for me (they don't - the errors are things I can troubleshoot, but if all the tools do is save me having to type in the bone names...not really worth it....).

 

2) Is there a predictable set of rules for ordering the bones in the rig.txt file that I'm missing?

 

3) Or am I just waaay out of my league here and missing key parts of the process.

 

Any answers appreciated. Otherwise I'll probably throw in the towel on this and go back to animating things that are already rigged....

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It's been a long time since I've converted skeletons to a txt file but I think this was how I did it with some of the ones i did do.

 

Use HKXPack/HKXAnim 

 

Basically you convert the vanilla critter skeleton from hkx to xml.  Then change the .xml extension to .txt.

 

There might be a bit of cleanup you have to do to the xml but I don't remember.

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On 10/6/2018 at 7:42 PM, Leito86 said:

It's been a long time since I've converted skeletons to a txt file but I think this was how I did it with some of the ones i did do.

 

Use HKXPack/HKXAnim 

 

Basically you convert the vanilla critter skeleton from hkx to xml.  Then change the .xml extension to .txt.

 

There might be a bit of cleanup you have to do to the xml but I don't remember.

That worked.

 

In case anyone finds this in the future and has a similar problem, here's what worked for me: (this is just to generate the rig.txt file that will let you export animations from 3ds 2015, using the F4AK/HCT presets)

 

1) Download the tool linked to in Leito's post (note: This looks like a different version of the HKXpack tool included with F4AK, none of the F4AK tools worked for me without throwing up compiler errors, but the tool above did work).

 

2) Take the skeleton.hkx for the critter you want to make a rig for and use the tool to convert the hkx file to an xml file. If you're used to exe based software this process is a little weird, you need to open a command prompt, and enter something like:

 

java -jar c:\temp\hkxpack-cli.jar unpack c:\temp\test.hkx

 

Except that you will need to change the file pathways to match the locations of hkxpack-cli.jar and the hkx file you're trying to convert. I've included a .bat file with this command in it as an attachment (so that you can edit the pathways in the bat file and not have to deal with the sad excuse for a command line interface that comes with windows).

 

**I had to install the latest Java Runtime Environment and convince my antivirus software that the tool was ok and didn't need to be quarantined when it ran in order for things to work. YMMV.

 

3) The xml file will have a massive amount of stuff in it, but there should be a set of hkobject tags near the top with all of the bones listed in the correct order. For example, for the bloodworm hkx file...

 

                <hkobject>
                    <hkparam name="name">Root</hkparam>
                    <hkparam name="lockTranslation">false</hkparam>
                </hkobject>

 

The only important part of this is that there is a bone named Root (you can also see this in 3ds max).

 

In notepad++ (or whatever you use to edit txt files) copy down all the bones from the xml file, in order. You will then paste that list of bones into a working rig.txt file (overwrite the bones already in that rig file), and save the rig file using a new name. I have attached the xml file for the bloodworm skeleton, and the resulting rig file as references.

 

4) Use that rig file in 3ds. Import your critter as a nif (and import its skeleton as the skeleton for that nif), animate it, and then under the HCT export function, you load F4Animation.hko as your configuration set, like normal, then select the new rig.txt you've created rather than FO4_Human_3rd_Rig.txt).

Rig_Bloodworm.txt

ConvertTesthkx.bat

BloodwormSkeleton.xml

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