Fallout 4 Animation Modding (for modders and animators)

[Adenan]

Ah,i see.

Thx for the answer

[c0mpute]

Well even though i am still learning and taking a whole heap in, I have some ideas for positions within the game if you guys are interested ...

Also, I have a great idea for a mod, that could have an adult version and non adult version, Lets just say it would be a great idea to help advertise loverlab to get more members and modders and it would be totally unique, specially if we can get the projects to be made by the community...
Like NVidia did for their company.  making a mod for fallout 4.

[Halstrom]

Of course if we just work with what we have and issues are noticeable then perhaps the body creators will be more inspired to update and improve their work too.

[ShadeAnimator]

Of course if we just work with what we have and issues are noticeable then perhaps the body creators will be more inspired to update and improve their work too.

 

I think it could be a valid approach. Skinning and topology can be fixed, and it won't break animations.

 

Making custom skeleton involves too much hassle and can cause a lot of bugs. I'd limit custom skeleton work only to adding some new body parts, without touching vanilla one. As it was done in Skyrim. Nobody changed vanilla base skeleton there, if I did not miss anything.

 

As an animator, of course I want to totally change the skeleton. To make 2-joint knees, so they bend much more naturally. Add joints to control muscle bulging, and other deformation corrections. Add some fleshy physics to all muscles, so that thighs, butts, tits, and even biceps jiggle a bit while moving.  And a lot more.

 

But we need to be realistic here. I don't think it's worth it. Not now anyway.

[pipdude]

 

As for the stretch up butt area, is there a proper comparison to a real body? I would assume it would stretch up to some degree!  Let me go check!

 

I think it does. But, gravity pulls on the skin/fat that remains loose, keeping it rounded.

 

To me, both Jane and CBBE look pretty bad in that position.

 

Stretching is fine, its more about the final shape once it's bent. As you can see, part of it is pushed upwards. Thats not right It should be rounder. 

 

Hm, I wonder now how hard is it to add your own morph target into CBBE... Is it something that's inside the osd file? I don't know what that file is.

 

It seems that butt mass works similar to breast mass. So, in theory, the same technique used to make breast physics could be applied to the butt. It would round itself out with Havok at different angles.

 

Though, my understanding is that we don't have a FO4 equivalent breast physics set-up yet?

[ShadeAnimator]

 

 

As for the stretch up butt area, is there a proper comparison to a real body? I would assume it would stretch up to some degree!  Let me go check!

 

I think it does. But, gravity pulls on the skin/fat that remains loose, keeping it rounded.

 

To me, both Jane and CBBE look pretty bad in that position.

 

Stretching is fine, its more about the final shape once it's bent. As you can see, part of it is pushed upwards. Thats not right It should be rounder. 

 

Hm, I wonder now how hard is it to add your own morph target into CBBE... Is it something that's inside the osd file? I don't know what that file is.

 

It seems that butt mass works similar to breast mass. So, in theory, the same technique used to make breast physics could be applied to the butt. It would round itself out with Havok at different angles.

 

Though, my understanding is that we don't have a FO4 equivalent breast physics set-up yet?

 

 

 

Well, buts are round when people bend not because of gravity, they are round because of muscle and bones under the skin, and fat.

 

About simulation. Yes, when it comes to fake simulation, then basically breast and butt and whatever else skin physics works the same in the game. 

 

But there are two approaches. One is to use bones for that. Jiggle bones, It's like normal bone but it jiggles and everything that's skinned to it as well. This is how it was done in Skyrim with HDT. Without HDT jiggling was just animated using those bones.

 

Another approach is to use cloth simulation on parts of the body. Cloth simulation is basically making every affected vertex of the mesh 'springy', it tries to get back to it's original position while being affected by gravity and inertia. This is what CBBE's  breast physics is using in Fallout 4 at the moment, I believe. I like this approach actually, it should allow non-uniform deformation as well. Yes it should be possible to apply it to the butt as well. But I don't know the process of adding such physics yet, it has something to do with BodySlide.

 

And not one of these approaches will help make butts round. Only better skinning will.

[pipdude]

 

Well, buts are round when people bend not because of gravity, they are round because of muscle and bones under the skin, and fat.

 

I think that gravity is a factor on shape. Similar to how a breast looks completely different when a woman is lying on her back compared to standing.

 

To me, it looks like the unnaturalness of these examples comes from the butt skin following the back when the body bends. Part of that mass should roll/hang down toward the bottom of the butt.

 

 

Another approach is to use cloth simulation on parts of the body. Cloth simulation is basically making every affected vertex of the mesh 'springy', it tries to get back to it's original position while being affected by gravity and inertia. This is what CBBE's  breast physics is using in Fallout 4 at the moment, I believe. I like this approach actually, it should allow non-uniform deformation as well. Yes it should be possible to apply it to the butt as well. But I don't know the process of adding such physics yet, it has something to do with BodySlide.

 

That sounds ideal.

 

 

 

[ShadeAnimator]

 

 

 

 

Well, buts are round when people bend not because of gravity, they are round because of muscle and bones under the skin, and fat.

 

I think that gravity is a factor on shape. Similar to how a breast looks completely different when a woman is lying on her back compared to standing.

 

To me, it looks like the unnaturalness of these examples comes from the butt skin following the back when the body bends. Part of that mass should roll/hang down toward the bottom of the butt.

 

 

Another approach is to use cloth simulation on parts of the body. Cloth simulation is basically making every affected vertex of the mesh 'springy', it tries to get back to it's original position while being affected by gravity and inertia. This is what CBBE's  breast physics is using in Fallout 4 at the moment, I believe. I like this approach actually, it should allow non-uniform deformation as well. Yes it should be possible to apply it to the butt as well. But I don't know the process of adding such physics yet, it has something to do with BodySlide.

 

That sounds ideal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To me, it looks like the unnaturalness of these examples comes from the butt skin following the back when the body bends. Part of that mass should roll/hang down toward the bottom of the butt.

 

 

Exactly, yes. It's just not gravity, it just stretches and bends over the bone. You can try bending yourself and touching your own ass

 

And yeah, just checked, bodyslide can extract cloth data from nif into hkx, and load it back into nif. But it's still a question how to export that data. I don't think it's as simple as exporting everything in the scene with some HCT Cloth filters... 

[pipdude]

 

Exactly, yes. It's just not gravity, it just stretches and bends over the bone. You can try bending yourself and touching your own ass

 

 

Haha. Well. My "breasts" also don't change shape when I lie down. But, females are built a little differently in those areas.

 

I think you're right that it's mostly about muscle/bone. But, there's some wiggle there too that kind of hangs over and affects shape.

 

 

And yeah, just checked, bodyslide can extract cloth data from nif into hkx, and load it back into nif. But it's still a question how to export that data. I don't think it's as simple as exporting everything in the scene with some HCT Cloth filters... 

 

 

Hm. Probably too good to be reasonably feasible then. Jiggle bones may be a good justification in a custom skeleton then. People end up wanting a minimum of jiggle for breasts, butt and belly.

 

 

 

[uXa]

Has anyone decided on placing both halves of the animated bipeds root bone in the same x,y,z location (for MF animations) and moving their hips to different positions within the animation, or something else? I'm an indie animator and was just curious. I do that with my own games, so it would make the most sense, but last I read it was still undecided. It would helpful if some of us didn't need to re-target animation sequences if at all possible.

 

Thanks!

 

-DA

[ShadeAnimator]

Has anyone decided on placing both halves of the animated bipeds root bone in the same x,y,z location (for MF animations) and moving their hips to different positions within the animation, or something else? I'm an indie animator and was just curious. I do that with my own games, so it would make the most sense, but last I read it was still undecided. It would helpful if some of us didn't need to re-target animation sequences if at all possible.

 

Thanks!

 

-DA

 

What do you mean "both halves"? You mean both characters' roots in the same position?

 

We discussed it with CPU, and, to be honest, I forgot all the reasons why it can't be done, but in SexTec there will probably be a few pre-defined positions where you can place roots. If it will be like this, I'll add those positions\markers as points in the rig scene.

[Guest]

 

We discussed it with CPU, and, to be honest, I forgot all the reasons why it can't be done, but in SexTec there will probably be a few pre-defined positions where you can place roots. If it will be like this, I'll add those positions\markers as points in the rig scene.

 

 

The problem of having all actors (that will play different animations, not as paired animation) is that if we have as starting point the same for all actors (let's say: 0,0,0) then we will have the problem SexLab is having with the actors overlapping for a fraction of second when the animation starts.

So, we will prefer some "sweet markers" for the actors involved in the animations, so they can start in a safe spot (that then will be handled by the framework as XMarker for the actors.)

The "official" set of positions is not yet decided, but with ShadeAnimator we already did some preliminary analysis.

[ousnius]

1.) CBBE and JB need that many vertices for the morphs to look any good, especially since FO4 uses mesh normals for the lighting instead of the model space normal maps that Skyrim used. Meaning in FO4 the shape matters for smooth lighting, while in Skyrim it didn't.

 

2.) The outfit stretching bug after unequipping/equipping an item with the CBBE Physics body has been fixed in CBBE 2.1.

Physics themselves are still the same (the ones of Sturges goggles).

 

3.) @ShadeAnimator: Yes, you can create new morphs for any body or outfit with Outfit Studio. You just add an OBJ file as a slider with the new shape.

However, I always hate it when people take CBBE and add 2, 3 or 50 new sliders and release it. All it does is make people confused about what to use and split up conversions (or one doesn't get any at all). In fact there's no open permission for doing that.

 

4.) And yes, Outfit Studio can make outfits move along the sliders of the body with a single click. Read up on our mod page and the guides linked in it.

However it's not a process that should be automated for quality's sake, so you should touch after every slider afterwards to fix clipping and weird stretching/shapes that the outfit isn't supposed to have to make it look better.

 

5.) Jane Bod has too many morphs (my opinion). It's impossible to make every morph look good for every outfit without spending a week on one single conversion (just the sliders) and it makes for huge BodySlide project files (100 MB per outfit or so, unless it's just a panty).

 

6.) We won't be touching the CBBE topology or weighting for compatibility reasons, at least there's currently no intentions to. Even if something is easy to fix.

[uXa]

 

Has anyone decided on placing both halves of the animated bipeds root bone in the same x,y,z location (for MF animations) and moving their hips to different positions within the animation, or something else? I'm an indie animator and was just curious. I do that with my own games, so it would make the most sense, but last I read it was still undecided. It would helpful if some of us didn't need to re-target animation sequences if at all possible.

 

Thanks!

 

-DA

 

What do you mean "both halves"? You mean both characters' roots in the same position?

 

We discussed it with CPU, and, to be honest, I forgot all the reasons why it can't be done, but in SexTec there will probably be a few pre-defined positions where you can place roots. If it will be like this, I'll add those positions\markers as points in the rig scene.

 

Yep, that's what I meant. Thanks Shade.

[ShadeAnimator]

1.) CBBE and JB need that many vertices for the morphs to look any good, especially since FO4 uses mesh normals for the lighting instead of the model space normal maps that Skyrim used. Meaning in FO4 the shape matters for smooth lighting, while in Skyrim it didn't.

 

2.) The outfit stretching bug after unequipping/equipping an item with the CBBE Physics body has been fixed in CBBE 2.1.

Physics themselves are still the same (the ones of Sturges goggles).

 

3.) @ShadeAnimator: Yes, you can create new morphs for any body or outfit with Outfit Studio. You just add an OBJ file as a slider with the new shape.

However, I always hate it when people take CBBE and add 2, 3 or 50 new sliders and release it. All it does is make people confused about what to use and split up conversions (or one doesn't get any at all). In fact there's no open permission for doing that.

 

4.) And yes, Outfit Studio can make outfits move along the sliders of the body with a single click. Read up on our mod page and the guides linked in it.

However it's not a process that should be automated for quality's sake, so you should touch after every slider afterwards to fix clipping and weird stretching/shapes that the outfit isn't supposed to have to make it look better.

 

5.) Jane Bod has too many morphs (my opinion). It's impossible to make every morph look good for every outfit without spending a week on one single conversion (just the sliders) and it makes for huge BodySlide project files (100 MB per outfit or so, unless it's just a panty).

 

6.) We won't be touching the CBBE topology or weighting for compatibility reasons, at least there's currently no intentions to. Even if something is easy to fix.

 

1. Oh, did not know about that. Well, sucks a bit. But okay. 45k polygons is not so much nowadays in the end.

 

3. Mhm, I was mostly thinking about making some adjustments for myself, I did not plan to release anything. I am all up for standardizing too, both as developer\modder\animator and as player. Making a mess out of different versions of the same thing does not benefit anyone. But it should be possible to add some way to allow other people to contribute their shapes to CBBE somehow. I would like to have some body with more defined muscles, not like bodybuilder, but like some nice fitness-bikini girl. Current muscle sliders are a bit not enough.

 

4. Oh, okay, yeah, it's awesome! It's as awesome as I thought after all. Conform to sliders, right? Just not intuitive term for me, coming from Maya and Max background. yes, of course it must be touched manually. 

 

5. Yes, I agree with that. More does not always mean better. 

 

6. Mhmm, okay. Yes, now that I think again about it, I guess you HAD to stick to vanilla skinning, to avoid possible clipping issues with some outfits, hm?

Well, thats bad, we'll have to stick with weirdly bending butt then, huh?

 

 

 

Mhm, okay then. What are your thoughts about custom skeleton, allowing animators to control boner angle during animation, adding more physics to the body (butt at least)?

 

Also, could you clarify, is cloth physics in fallout per-vertex or bone-based? Like it's just a jiggly bone, or actual cloth sim?

[ousnius]

Mhm, okay then. What are your thoughts about custom skeleton, allowing animators to control boner angle during animation, adding more physics to the body (butt at least)?

 

Also, could you clarify, is cloth physics in fallout per-vertex or bone-based? Like it's just a jiggly bone, or actual cloth sim?

 

The physics use the bones that it's assigned in the BSClothExtraData block (which is just a binary .hkx file stuck into a NIF, made with the HCT Cloth addon). Outfit Studio can extract the HKX, and HKXPack can convert it to XML and back, OS can load it back in.

 

But as far as I'm concerned there's still a few issues and a lot of unknown data with it. At least it wasn't possible for me to extract, edit and put the CBBE physics back without something breaking (including instability) or working any better than it does now.

 

Custom skeleton doesn't really bother me much, as long as NONE (!!!!) of the existing bone positions or scales are touched. You do not want to move things around in a skeleton NIF like XPMS for Skyrim did (XPMSE is normalized) or it will cause all kinds of incompatibilities or offsets, just like it happened when people mistakenly used the game-ready XPMS NIF inside Blender for rigging.

[Guest kimbale]

Some Vanilla NIFs have bhkPhysicsSystem blocks (which look like jiggle bones or similar to me; see jangles01.nif - it uses the same phys data for each node, just position/rotation differs).

And there's a bhkRagdollSystem in the skeletons.

 

If i get goddamn 3dsmax to run, i'll try to get those natively from the tools bethesda provided.

[ShadeAnimator]

 

Mhm, okay then. What are your thoughts about custom skeleton, allowing animators to control boner angle during animation, adding more physics to the body (butt at least)?

 

Also, could you clarify, is cloth physics in fallout per-vertex or bone-based? Like it's just a jiggly bone, or actual cloth sim?

 

The physics use the bones that it's assigned in the BSClothExtraData block (which is just a binary .hkx file stuck into a NIF, made with the HCT Cloth addon). Outfit Studio can extract the HKX, and HKXPack can convert it to XML and back, OS can load it back in.

 

But as far as I'm concerned there's still a few issues and a lot of unknown data with it. At least it wasn't possible for me to extract, edit and put the CBBE physics back without something breaking (including instability) or working any better than it does now.

 

Custom skeleton doesn't really bother me much, as long as NONE (!!!!) of the existing bone positions or scales are touched. You do not want to move things around in a skeleton NIF like XPMS for Skyrim did (XPMSE is normalized) or it will cause all kinds of incompatibilities or offsets, just like it happened when people mistakenly used the game-ready XPMS NIF inside Blender for rigging.

 

 

 

Yep thats what I thought. I actually want to encourage people to not create custom skeletons for anything but boners, max.

 

But I'd love to somehow refine workflow with physics. Do you have HCT to test all that stuff out? I can wink you in direction where to get HCT 2014 to gest all the stuff, if you need  

[ousnius]

We have it.

[pipdude]

 

The problem of having all actors (that will play different animations, not as paired animation) is that if we have as starting point the same for all actors (let's say: 0,0,0) then we will have the problem SexLab is having with the actors overlapping for a fraction of second when the animation starts.

 

Is this a new quirk in FO4? I don't recall seeing this problem in Skyrim when actors all started on 0,0,0.

 

 

5.) Jane Bod has too many morphs (my opinion). It's impossible to make every morph look good for every outfit without spending a week on one single conversion (just the sliders) and it makes for huge BodySlide project files (100 MB per outfit or so, unless it's just a panty).

 

This makes sense.

 

Though, it does seem like the morphs in JB result in less unnatural distortion at their min/max values. It seems like CBBE is more geared toward allowing ginormous breast settings. The natural size range gets a little choppy looking compared to JB.

[J.O.D.]

 

 

The problem of having all actors (that will play different animations, not as paired animation) is that if we have as starting point the same for all actors (let's say: 0,0,0) then we will have the problem SexLab is having with the actors overlapping for a fraction of second when the animation starts.

 

Is this a new quirk in FO4? I don't recall seeing this problem in Skyrim when actors all started on 0,0,0.

 

Well, I see it in SexlLab in Skyrim everytime the animation starts...

[pipdude]

 

 

 

The problem of having all actors (that will play different animations, not as paired animation) is that if we have as starting point the same for all actors (let's say: 0,0,0) then we will have the problem SexLab is having with the actors overlapping for a fraction of second when the animation starts.

 

Is this a new quirk in FO4? I don't recall seeing this problem in Skyrim when actors all started on 0,0,0.

 

Well, I see it in SexlLab in Skyrim everytime the animation starts...

 

 

Weird. I've never seen it after modding and using mods in Skyrim for more than a year. Maybe it's a graphics card thing?

[skeletor]

I think it happens if the actors have to re-position (teleport) to a save zone. In order to do the animation, you dont want them clipping through the wall or something.

[ShadeAnimator]

The problem is that to match animations actors must be in pre-defined zones, same zones they were animated in.

 

In SexLab it was 0 coordinates. So first thing that happens in the script - characters are teleported into 0 coordinates relative to the 'main character'. Which means they are teleported into each other.

 

Then the animation is loaded.

 

So you should only see it for a few frames. If you blink at that moment, you won't even notice it. How long it takes depends on the length of animation transition, and maybe on time it takes your PC to load the animation. I don't know, i'm just talking about the general idea behind how it works in SexLab from what CPU told me, and from what I know about this stuff in general.

 

In SexTec CPU planned to create multiple teleportation points, surrounding the central character, so that they will first be teleported to stand around\infront\behind the character. 

 

But now that CPU is not working on SexTec himself, the idea may change.

 

Personally I don't think it's that big deal if they blink in the middle for a moment. Personally, after thinking about it some more, I'd prefer to just hide it with screen fading, for example, like in "Cutscene starts", rather than making the system harder to code. 

[Acornus]

Hey guys, sorry if I stirred up any issues with my previous posts, don't mind me, I don't know what I'm talking about half of the time (or how things work) but I can foreward them to my grinco and tell me to stop asking me questions about this kind of stuff

 

But a small question, sorry if this has been posted about before (also, not sure if this is the right place to ask it) but just to be clear, we still don't have a high-heel system as well, right? All I know is that Skyrim had the entire high-heel thing, but it was very rigid or static or something, and got replaced later on by the Override stuff by Cell iirc, etc. but either way, at least as of this date today, Fo4 doesn't have a heel system without some kind of skeleton change (like the ones from the Maid/Bride dress in the download section) right?

 

Anyways, I'm off and thanks for any replies!