How to animate meshes/furniture etc?

[reddix100]

Hi all,

 

I am desperately trying to understand and figure out how to animate nif files in 3dsmax so that their animation, that is playing in max, resembles what is happening in game.

 

For example, if I use a briefcase mesh and I animate it so it opens on a specific keyframe. How do I get this to happen in game?

 

It is clearly possible because many modders here have created unique furniture that have their own animations.

 

What I can do:

I can export animations.

I can load objects in game via AnimObjects

I understand about annotations

I understand a little about subgraph data and behaviour files.

I have succesfully got the ExtractorChair to animate it's vanilla animations via the 'initiateStart' annotation.

 

I'm aware that the mesh animations are sometimes simple open and closing of wrist guards etc, and I believe these are made in Nifskope (might be wrong). I have however spoke to a beth dev and he says it should be possible and all you'll need to do is animate the mesh as normal in 3dsmax but use the gamebryo plugin to create sequences and then assign it to a generic furniture behaviour graph.

 

I understand about the funiture graphs etc, but I don't understand the sequences he means. I would assume it was simply keying in frames on parts of the mesh in max, but this does not work. The mesh will simple remain static.

 

Annotations are obviously needed as per the extractor chair nif file, but it seems the annotations vary wildly for each particular furniture mesh. I also had a look at the torture devices annotations and they only contain simple Open and Close annotations which have not helped me crack animated nifs either.

 

Thanks for your time and any help you give.