Adding Animations to SA

[tehrawb]

Trying to add animations to the Skyrim Sex Addicts mod, but I really have no idea what I'm doing. 

I got some more animations from here: http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=SkyrimMods.Detail&id=13

and I'm really not sure if they're even compatible without rewriting a lot of the scripts. 

Anyway, if someone could give me a hand or just tell me some compatible animations to add to SA (and how to do so) it would be much appreciated. Like I said, I have no idea what I'm doing.

[WaxenFigure]

I have those animations and haven't found a way to use them in SA.  The current animation system in SA consists of separate animation files for each participant (two participants only, no more, no less which is in itself a limitation) one set considered the "offensive" and the other set "defensive".   Each sex act consists of four of those animation sets in pairs giving a sex act that therefore has four stages.

 

The current sex acts in SA are stored in the ...\Data\meshes\actors\character\animations\SexAddicts folder ans are numbered .hkx files in groups of eight files for each sex act with the first four files in each group of eight being the "defensive" animations while the second set of four files are the "offensive" animations.

 

Since they start at number 72 then 72-75 are the defensive animations for the Doggy form sex act and 76-79 are the offensive animations.

 

You could swap in a new set of animations by replacing the contents of those files with new animations but as always there's a twist and in this case it's a big one.

 

Positioning of the actors is the twist, and it requires some background.  Each actor has a collision box around them and they get pushed around when another actor's collision box contacts their collision box.   This makes animating sex acts really difficult because it's all about collisions .    The original author of the animations used in SA was very clever though and used a tool in the animation system to move the collision box 100 units away from the actor in each animation so the actors can be brought together in the game.

 

That was a really clever fix that has one very unfortunate downside, other actors not involved in the sex act can walk right through the action like you weren't there or even worse they'll stand right on top of the action and start into their lame dialogs.

 

Back to positioning though, that 100 unit offset puts the actors 100 units apart when the animation plays so part of the scripting for the mod is to position the actors to remove that 100 unit difference and then allow a little fine tuning of position to make the animation look just right. 

 

To replace an animation set in SA then you need eight animation files (4 defensive and 4 offensive - note can copy a single file to make 4 copies for a long changeless sex scene) that use the same 100 unit offset and minor positioning tweaks as the set you replace.

 

Released (but disabled) in recent versions of SA are some additional animations where the collision boxes were not placed sufficiently far apart so the sex plays ok but the actors move all over the place and a 69 animation that I simply can't manage to force the actors together.

 

Still if you want to try I'm all for your experimenting with it and only hope that any successes you have will be shared back with the rest of us.

 

So the numbers of the animation sets are 72-79, 80-87, 88-95, 96-103, 104-111, 112-119, 120-127, 128-135, 136-143, 144-151, 152-159.  Animations in SA in the future will no longer be added to the numbered sequence because the numbers only make it harder to separate the files into which animations they belong to.

[mithos56]

As far as you can tell Waxen, is the way it was done in the minilovers different then how everything was set up in animated prostitution collision box wise?  I'm curious as to how the animated prostitution animations seem to have no issue with character offsets.

[WaxenFigure]

I have no idea how AP did it.  I wouldn't know how it was done in Minilovers if it hadn't been described to me and I had to figure out how the positioning code worked.

[Zenevolution]

Thanks a lot, WaxenFigure!  That's all the understanding I needed to do all of my replacements.  I really like the features of SA but the animations are quite lackluster...  Arrok's set fixed that right up.  I was having trouble originally because I had the off/def animations backwards causing the actors' collision boxes to be the full 100 units apart without the ability to move them towards each other in-game.   Setting them as you said fixed the distance even better than SA's original set.

[Airock]

Thanks a lot, WaxenFigure!  That's all the understanding I needed to do all of my replacements.  I really like the features of SA but the animations are quite lackluster...  Arrok's set fixed that right up.  I was having trouble originally because I had the off/def animations backwards causing the actors' collision boxes to be the full 100 units apart without the ability to move them towards each other in-game.   Setting them as you said fixed the distance even better than SA's original set.

 

My animations are all mainly 100 unit displacements (blowjob is 120). 

 

The original MLA animations from (I think Japan) are not so uniform. This was probably a result of many micro-adjustments made after testing positioning in skyrim. So each animation set ended up with displacements ranging from around 70-120. And no actors are rotated.

 

The AP animations are displaced around 40-60 units apart, and most are rotated via animation (resulting in the need to script a rotation as well)

 

However, 40-60 units is a bit too close,...b/c if you use alignment keys in-game to adjust the actors, they start sliding much sooner than a safer 100 units away.

 

The rough animations are even closer together (like 20 units), so even slight alignment adjusting causes sliding. (20 units is the closest you can keep the 2 actors to have no sliding).

 

Originally,..I planned to only edit the existing animations to include BBP, but I soon realized that due to the variation in offset values from animator to animator differ wildly,...I really had to make my own set using a single, universal displacement value (decided on 100, due to the large amount of adjusting you can do with no sliding).

 

 

 

There is much more to it than the above as well, which is beyond the scope of a forum post. However,..this concept of offsets causes a considerable amount of communication breakdown b/w animator and scripter.  

 

I had to learn how actors were positioned in scripts to understand the depth of the confusion. 

 

There would probably be many more sex animations for skyrim this concept wasn't so unorthodox in game animation. 

 

Waxen, and Ashal are among the few scripters I know of that have spent enough time testing positioning to understand how the animation offset and scripted offset work together to appear as a paired animation.