Animated armor pieces - how is this done?

[faenthir69]

Seems to be possible, but how does it work? I plan on animating mandibles from this soon but I'm not sure how animation works in regards to armors.

[dave14125]

Look up C5Kev either here or on nexus.  He has several animated armors.   Note that "animated armor" means that the texture is an animation, not the that pieces move.   

 

 https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/102740

[OpheliaComplex]

Bit of a minor necro maybe, there's animated dragon wings and that backpack mod you linked to look at. The trick is to make your animated nif then attach it to a single bone of the character. In the nif you do that by adding a NiStringsExtraData block with the name AttachT and data 'NamedNode&<bone name here>', for example 'NamedNode&NPC Root [Root]'. I believe both the backpack and animated dragon wings attach to Spine2

 

In the creation kit, if you have that nif you made into the 'hit art' of a magic effect that is then attached to the player somehow (perk, spell, power etc) it can then respond to character events. This is how animated dragon wings work.

 

An example gif below using the method and doing it's animation on the normal character event WeaponSwing.

 

 

-OC

Edited March 8, 2022 by OpheliaComplex