Custom animations

[Karma92]

Hey guys is it possible to make custom animations yet? If so, what tools do i need?

[South8028]

No. Need a new hct. Export animation to new format af/afx. hct may appear in the official bgs plugins along with other ck tools next fall. If Beth doesn't release plugins for 3ds with ck, then custom animations will never appear in Starfield.

[Karma92]

Hmm i see, i remember them mentioning a completely new animation system. Would it be possible to make a completely new armature in blender to swap out the old one in the game? Thing is i am new to modding, but i do know quite a bit about gamedev, im just not familiar with the process of modding in new things in a foreign game engine. I have been looking into Skyrim modding but i dont know how relevant that is going to be with the new updated engine. I have a lot of spare time on my hands, so now is the time to make prep work for what i want in the game until their official mod support is released.

[DocClox]

You might look at The Forge for a few hints. Apparently Bethesda has switched to that project for its rendering and animation. They're using Maya internally, but there are (again, apparently) well defined export paths from Blender and the like, and some folks have had success replacing games meshes with .mesh files from Blender.

 

Not hat I've tried any of this myself as of yet, but if you already know the basics it might be a starting point.

[South8028]

1 hour ago, DocClox said:

You might look at The Forge for a few hints. Apparently Bethesda has switched to that project for its rendering and animation. They're using Maya internally, but there are (again, apparently) well defined export paths from Blender and the like, and some folks have had success replacing games meshes with .mesh files from Blender.

 

Not hat I've tried any of this myself as of yet, but if you already know the basics it might be a starting point.

The af file structure is identical to hkt, just repacked into a new format. Metadata is exported accordingly to afx. As a result, the physics in the game are havok and the animations are also havok. To create collisions, you still need bgs plugins and even more so to create animations.

[South8028]

4 hours ago, Karma92 said:

Hmm i see, i remember them mentioning a completely new animation system. Would it be possible to make a completely new armature in blender to swap out the old one in the game? Thing is i am new to modding, but i do know quite a bit about gamedev, im just not familiar with the process of modding in new things in a foreign game engine. I have been looking into Skyrim modding but i dont know how relevant that is going to be with the new updated engine. I have a lot of spare time on my hands, so now is the time to make prep work for what i want in the game until their official mod support is released.

Skeleton.nif opens in 3ds with the nif.importer (available in the f4ak package from Shadeanimator for fo4). The rig can be done right now, but there is still nothing to export the animation to af. Perhaps if a method for packing xml into af was known, it would be possible to export to hkx, unpack into xml, parse into xml for af and afx, and pack these xml back into af and afx? Don't know.

[South8028]

Skeleton.rar

[Gray User]

On 10/28/2023 at 12:45 PM, Karma92 said:

Hey guys is it possible to make custom animations yet? If so, what tools do i need?

 

It is possible. I think right now the only way is to use NAF to play the animations in game, but you can make them in Blender and export as a .glb

 

You need:

NAF

Blender

gltf/glib plugin for exporting

working blender rig with the skeleton imported (if you PM me, I can send you the one I'm using, I think there is one on the Nexus somewhere as well)

the exact export settings maybe depend on your blender version but I put screenshots of what worked for me in the animation pack I uploaded this morning

 

It is not fancy though. Still things get weird sometimes when calling the animation in game. Like, I think maybe it handles euler xyz better than quaternions, and there's no IK, just manual bone rotations. But it is very possible to make animations