How to make custom skeleton work with HDT?

[zerguroth]

Long time lurker here asking for some advice.

I have problem with trying to get the pony race from Crimes against nature working with body animation, such as HDT.

 

I followed instructions from this thread (no problems there), but it became apparent that the pony race uses it's own skeleton, so no bouncy goodness for me. I then simply tried to replace the pony race skeleton with the XP32 extended skeleton_female.nif, which worked for the breasts and such, but now the characters head is not following the body's movement (image in the attachments). I tried the skeletonbeast_female.nif too, but got the same results. Simply running the FNIS again doesn't solve it either. When I swapped back to the original skeleton provided byt the CAN author the head behaved as it should again( though no bouncy goodness of course).

 

I don't really know a lot about the world of .nifs and Nifscope, but I suspect this has somethign to do with how the author of CAN has messed around with how the head mesh attaches to the skeleton? How can I fix this, preferably without having to move the mountains to do so? Can I tweak the XP32 extended skeleton to work with the pony race?

 

It also occurs to me that the Crimes against nature pony folder with skeletons doesn't include skeleton_female.hkx, could this be the source of the problem?

 

[zerguroth]

So, I poked around with the Nifscope and found out that the original pony skeleton has bone (NiNode?) called NPC ponyhead in addition to the NPC head node(bone?) found in XP32 skeleton. The head, neck and other head part .nifs are all attached to the NPC ponyhead.

 

So, I suppose I could fix this problem by attaching the head parts to the NPC head instead of NPC ponyhead.... but I don't really know how to do it.

 

Any suggestions?

[Gameplayer]

So, I poked around with the Nifscope and found out that the original pony skeleton has bone (NiNode?) called NPC ponyhead in addition to the NPC head node(bone?) found in XP32 skeleton. The head, neck and other head part .nifs are all attached to the NPC ponyhead.

 

So, I suppose I could fix this problem by attaching the head parts to the NPC head instead of NPC ponyhead.... but I don't really know how to do it.

 

Any suggestions?

 

This would have to be done in 3DS Max, or Blender.

 

Also there are not too many people that I would know to ask other than Groovetama.