Animation: Making Draugr Idles For SSE

[DocClox]

There are a couple of idles that I'd like to convert so that they will work with draugr. I got as far as extracting the draugr skeleton and having a look ... and that's about it.

 

Now, the draugr skeleton I looked at has nodes for wings and all sorts of fun stuff, which makes me wonder if it's not a straightforward XP32MSE skeleton. In which case, I might be able to just rebind existing animations in FNIS.

 

Haven't tried that yet, obviously. I will and I'll report my results. Meantime if anyone has any hints, or can point me at a tutorial, I'd appreciate it.

 

[edit]

 

This has ended up as more of a discussion on how to animate draugr for SSE. Changed the title to reflect that.

[DocClox]

Well, that didn't work! I can use SLAL and FNIS to set up the idles OK,, but sexlab rejects them at run time. I was hoping to make a Draugr X-Cross animation for Girl In A Jar, but I'm clearly still missing something.

 

Oh well, I can manage without. Maybe something will come to me.

[DocClox]

OK. So apparently I opened the wrong skeleton file. The actual draugr skeleton is a lot simpler than the XMPMSE one. I should have really worked that out before now. Power of Wishful Thinking, I suppose.

 

So - couple of things. One of the anims I wanted was the Dibella temple praying routine. It doesn't have to be  that one necessarily, but I wanted some sort of ritual obeisance. Turns out the draugr ave very few RP idles. Who'd have thought it? Anyway, this I might try and animate myself. I've imported the skeleton into Blender using the skeleton.nif file, rather than converting the hkx skeleton. If that doesn't work, I can still try working from the hkx version. The animation is simple enough, so I'll see how I get on. If this works it'll be my first all-new animation.

 

The other thing is, I've been looking at pyfi and I've been wondering if it might be possible to create a generic conversion script. Say, convert the source animation into a .kf file, load the destination skeleton, and then read the source kf and apply the same transforms to the destination skeleton, ignoring any missing bones. Sounds doable, but I'm not sure I have the energy and enthusiasm to assail that particular learning curve right now. (On the other hand, I'm just coming out of a bad reaction to a Covid jab, so I may feel differently tomorrow). If I do it, and if I can make it work, I'll post the script.

[DocClox]

Well, I'm happy enough with the animation. It's a basic Wayne's World "We Are Not Worthy", which is entirely appropriate, considering where I plan to use it.

 

 

Now I just need to get it in game, and hope it doesn't look like shit once it's in there.

 

[edit]

 

Just for laughs, I thought I'd import the body mesh. I tried this before and it didn't work. Turns out the Blender niftools import doesn't understand the Bethesda extensions that were added with SSE. Well, either that or there's an option I've not yet noticed, one of the two. Anyway, what I did was I used SSE Nif Optimizer, which has an option to convert SSE nifs back to LE format. Then it imported just fine.

 

I'm glad I did.

 

 

 

Speaking of looking like shit... That said, when I parented the skeleton I used automatic bone weighting, so chunks of drugrboy's mesh is depending on things like special effect attachments, which I figure, if it needed to move with the body, it would probably be parented to something . So I'm going to leave them where they are and hope for the best.

[DocClox]

OK. I have my hkx file. In the end, it was a lot less bother than I imagined it would be. I mainly followed @Bubbajones_ya's tutorial

 

 

and used Anon's N3 tools. There was a slight hitch when the .kf file didn't create for no apparent reason, and I had to do some fiddling with the skeleton.hkx and skeleton.txt files. In the end, (I think) I used the human skeleton and the skeleton.txt generated from Anton's scripts. It reported  lot of unrecognized bones being ignored ... which is probably OK, since it's still animating the ones that do match.

 

It also open up the possibility of using these tools to do the xcross conversion I mentioned earlier. Convert the hkx files into .kf, then convert them back again using a draugr skeleton's bone list.

 

Of course, this all assumes that my new hkx file doesn't crash the game or similar...

[DocClox]

Hmm... got FNIS to process the hkx file without difficulty. Easy enough once I got the folder and list file correctly named. But the idle doesn't play. Specifically, "sae" gets "the event was not processed by the graph" and playidle just does nothing.

 

I've a feeling I'm missing a step.

[DocClox]

I tried overriding the draugr races's mtidle.hkx (Dragur don't do underscores, apparently), and that at least plays. But ...

 

 

Not exactly the pose I was looking for. Also half the draugr is underground

 

 

I mean, the helmet makes an interesting fashion statement, I'll grant ...

 

Anyway, when the idle triggers it seems to all happen at once, which is probably just me getting the timescale wrong on blender, and then he stays like this for quite a long time, possibly because that would be the length of the mtidle animation. And, again, I'm not sure where that leaves me.

 

I might try again, making sure I have consistent skeleton.hkx and skeleton.txt files. That would seem to be the most likely cause of problems. Failing that, I can always fire up 3DSMax and try that way, although I'd far sooner work with Blender if I can.

 

I'll take one more tilt at it, and then I'm going to work on something else for a while.

[DocClox]

I must be some sort of glutton for punishment since I'm still banging my head against this particular wall. It turns out that hkxcmd A) does support creature animations and B) doesn't support SSE. Practically every path get working animations involves hkxcmd, either directly or indirectly, so this constitutes something of an impediment to further progress.

 

I did try doing an oldrim version, but of coruse hlxcmd doesn't do creatures. (At Least the Skywind tutorial I followed said the most useful version didn't, so I wonder if there's an older one that does?) I also tried importing the skelton into 3DSMax (worked) and importing the kf file onto the skeleton ... but then Max did the thing it sometimes does where the top half of the skeleton is a 90 degrees to the bottom half and I can't be arsed to watch a couple of hours of video tutorials just to try and find out what I'm doing wrong.

 

Eh, dont't mind me, I'm still recovering from that covid jab, and feeling more than usually tired and cranky.

[DocClox]

OK. Good night's sleep and feeling better, but still can't leave this alone.

 

I tried being a bit systematic with hkcxmd, set up a new folder and tested the various skeleton files in the oldrim draugr folder until I found one that dumped bones with hkxcmd dumplist. It's the "character assets" version, in case anyone find this thread with similar problems.

 

So then I set about using it to extract animations from hkx to kf format. Nothing. Not a sausage, I ended up copying all the dragur animations and running conversion on the folder. Zip.

 

So, then, I tried the same thing with the human skeleton and idletake. Still nothing.

 

So then I bumbled around a bit reading up stuff. Eventually I followed a tutorial from waaaaaayyyy back when that did just what I'd been doing but put the file names in quotes, whether they needed it or not. So I did that. And it worked.

 

Suddenly I could convert idletake.hkx to idletake.kf, and better, I could convert it back again. Then I tried it without quotes and it still worked!

 

So then I tried the same thing on the draugr animations - and it worked there, too!

 

What I think changed, was I reinstalled the Havok Content Tools. When I first set this up, I was pretty fuzzy about HCT and Max and versions needed and I think i had something like 2014 installed. Then I read through the comments section on a certain YouTube page and noticed someone commenting that only 2010 worked with Skyrim. So I reinstalled making sure to install that one. So that's the likely cause of my recent woes.

 

Time to try again with some of those keyframe files I've been building. 3DS Max might work too, but I have no idea if the 2010 HCT plugin is going to work with MAX 2015 or not. (Note to self - find out if I need 2015/HCT 2014 for Fo4 or not before returning to Raider Reform School...)

 

[DocClox]

This is turning into a bit of a blog, this.

 

Anyway! Took my first blender .kf file and converted to hkx and then again to SE format.

 

 

So: better than before. A lot better. Looks like the inverse kinematics didn't pull the skeleton down like I'd expected (that's OK - I can use that for another anim I want to make) and there is zero interpolation between poses, but now that I have the damn thing in game I'm sure I can fix that.

 

I actually got an animation to appear in game. A new one. Whooo! All I need to do now is make it look good

[DocClox]

OK. Let's try that again.

 

 

You know what? I'll take it. Not as polished as some on this board would make, and lord knows I can see things I might like to tweak... but for a first successful attempt, I think that's fucking marvelous

 

Only serious problem remaining is that he stays in the end pose for way, way, waaaaaaay too long after the idle ends. So that's the next thing to figure out.

 

And if I get that done, maybe I can apply some of this to that xcross animation I was thinking about when I started this exercise.

 

[edit]

 

Forgot to add the important bit: fix was to select all the bones and choose "sample keyframes" froom the "Key" menu on the dope sheet. That adds a keyframe for every frame. A bit brute force, but maybe that's what the engine needs.

 

Also, I seem to have a 200 frame animation in a 250 frame timeline. Which might account for some of the delay in the thing ending...

[Guest]

On 3/28/2021 at 1:52 PM, DocClox said:

OK. Let's try that again

How can this be used in game and how do you incorporate it? Do we need to make a new draugr race that uses this idle or will any vanilla draugr be able to use i? Can the idle be linked to a standard idle marker and be performed by the draugr once the draugr reach that idle marker?

[DocClox]

15 minutes ago, Thor2000 said:

How can this be used in game and how do you incorporate it?

 

Well, it's a hkx file, so you declare it with FNIS and run the idle, same as any other animation. Look at the FNIS docs if you're not sure how to do that. It's not too hard once you get the basic idea, but there's too much detail to try and sumarize here.

 

Once you have it set up with FNIS, you can run the idle, again same as any other animation. If you look in the video clip there I used sae (short for SendAnimationEvent) to test the animation.

 

15 minutes ago, Thor2000 said:

 

Do we need to make a new draugr race that uses this idle or will any vanilla draugr be able to use i?

 

Any Draugr, or at least any that use the same skeleton. I'm using a bog standard Restless in the demo shot.

 

15 minutes ago, Thor2000 said:

Can the idle be linked to a standard idle marker and be performed by the draugr once the draugr reach that idle marker?

 

Yeah, that was exactly the plan. I had a tile in the dungeon that spelled out "WORSHIP" in glowing dragon script and put an activator around. So each draugr lines up for his turn, activates the tile, and that sends the animation event. Then they'd get up and approach the altar and the jar ...

 

.. and that was about the point where something in my head rebelled at how dark this whole thing was getting.

[Guest]

18 minutes ago, DocClox said:

Yeah, that was exactly the plan. I had a tile in the dungeon that spelled out "WORSHIP" in glowing dragon script and put an activator around. So each draugr lines up for his turn, activates the tile, and that sends the animation event. Then they'd get up and approach the altar and the jar ...

 

.. and that was about the point where something in my head rebelled at how dark this whole thing was getting.

I can hear the amount of hours stacking up now ?... but I'm sending draugrs on a gathering patrol outside their tombs to fetch some wood for their numerous fireplaces. It would be cool to have sidetrip up to a talos shrine to do some worshipping before they went back home.

 

So I would need to create a new idle animation record based on something vanilla and then link to my marker? It sounds easy when I say it ?. But I haven't modded anything including hkx files yet.

[DocClox]

1 hour ago, Thor2000 said:

So I would need to create a new idle animation record based on something vanilla and then link to my marker? It sounds easy when I say it ?. But I haven't modded anything including hkx files yet.

 

Yeah, I've done similar tricks before. There are (if I remember right) blank idle markers in the CK. Copy one, set the idle and you should be good.

 

You can test it with a human actor and an idle from ZAZ, just to make sure you have the marker making down. If that works, substitute the dragur idle and test it with draugr.

[Guest]

Will do. Btw, is this hkx file available as a upload somewhere?