Fallout 4 Animation Modding (for modders and animators)

[HornySpaghetti]

New wiki article on animations: http://www.creationkit.com/fallout4/index.php?title=Subgraphs

[Vader666]

Just wanted to say thanks to ShadeAnimator and everyone involved in the F4AK.

I actually got something that´s working...

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest kimbale]

Just wanted to say thanks to ShadeAnimator and everyone involved in the F4AK.

I actually got something that´s working...

 

 

 

XcrossTest.jpg

 

 

Is that a custom furniture animation?!

 

I got pissed with trying to get those working, please share how you did it!

[Vader666]

 

Just wanted to say thanks to ShadeAnimator and everyone involved in the F4AK.

I actually got something that´s working...

 

 

 

XcrossTest.jpg

 

 

Is that a custom furniture animation?!

 

I got pissed with trying to get those working, please share how you did it!

 

 

it´s just an AnimObject... i will mess with furniture stuff next.

But since im not having any experience with this stuff, im glad that i got the AnimObject thing to work, im not sure if i could help anywhere.

 

Edit : However, what did you tried and what isn´t working ?

[Acornus]

Hey peeps, me again.

 

I just thought to pass on a small comment that the CAT-Rig has a small twist at the base of the spines, so the model is slightly twisted, but should be easy to fix if the rotations are brought back to 0 if you use the Parent instead of view or local as you point.

 

Also, not sure if this is just a CBBE-Morph error or such, but the CBBE-Vanilla has gaps between the hands, I don't know if it's an importation issue in Max, the morph itself, or something else, thought you peeps might want to know, but disabling temporarily the modifiers such as skin, and vertex snapping them to the new point seems to do the trick.

 

Cheers in advance!

 

 

[Leito86]

 

 

 im glad that i got the AnimObject thing to work, im not sure if i could help anywhere.

 

 

I'm interested in hearing about this.  Is it a new animation via using the CK or just a animation replacer?

[Vader666]

 

 

 

 im glad that i got the AnimObject thing to work, im not sure if i could help anywhere.

 

 

I'm interested in hearing about this.  Is it a new animation via using the CK or just a animation replacer?

 

 

It´s Standalone added via CK.

[ShadeAnimator]

Just wanted to say this...

 

 

HAHA! I'm now a recognized mod author on nexusmods with more than 1000 downloads of a f4 mod (animation toolkit)! HAHAHA!

[Vader666]

Arm offset animation is working... finally

 

 

Next step : Furniture

[Vader666]

Has anyone already made working furniture animations ?

Basically i got them to work but im having issues with the 3rd person camera...

 

As soon as the Idle i made is played the camera rotates 180 degrees on X-Axis and it seems the CameraTarget is moved to the same point where the camara is,

because i can just rotate the camera around a fixed point while the camera is facing away from that point...

 

In 1st person everything is fine though.

 

Any idea is appreciated.

[Aliengirls]

So niiiice !!!!

[Vader666]

Has anyone already made working furniture animations ?

Basically i got them to work but im having issues with the 3rd person camera...

 

As soon as the Idle i made is played the camera rotates 180 degrees on X-Axis and it seems the CameraTarget is moved to the same point where the camara is,

because i can just rotate the camera around a fixed point while the camera is facing away from that point...

 

In 1st person everything is fine though.

 

Any idea is appreciated.

 

Got a fix for that.

 

I just converted a vanilla animation to fbx an imported it on top of my max scene with just updating the cameras.

Now everything is working.

[ShadeAnimator]

So, while I was gone...

 

Any advances on extending default skeletons?

Did anyone do any research about it, or willing to do it?

 

I don't have enough time right now to reverse-engineer hkx\xml\nif files, and it's not really my area.

I'll need to know which files to edit, how to add new bones, how to edit physics\ragdolls. Untill someone shines some light on it, we're stuck with default skeleton, and only CBBE's solution to breast\butt dynamics. Which I, personally, am ok with, to be honest, but I see people asking for extended skeletons more and more. And I can see some point to that too.

[garg]

So, while I was gone...

 

Any advances on extending default skeletons?

Did anyone do any research about it, or willing to do it?

 

I don't have enough time right now to reverse-engineer hkx\xml\nif files, and it's not really my area.

I'll need to know which files to edit, how to add new bones, how to edit physics\ragdolls. Untill someone shines some light on it, we're stuck with default skeleton, and only CBBE's solution to breast\butt dynamics. Which I, personally, am ok with, to be honest, but I see people asking for extended skeletons more and more. And I can see some point to that too.

 

I'd be happy to just see some progress, creating extended skeletons for this game is just too much trouble from what I have seen so far!

[Vader666]

As far as i understand this post, Groovtama already ported things from XPMSE to FO4

[ShadeAnimator]

Well, the thread seems to be stuck. Shit

 

I guess you all noticed, but until further advances with SexTec and other animation tech-stuff which is yet beyond me, I'm going into 'power-saving doing-actual-work' mode. But I'm still check this email often, and I receive notifications about PMs here, so I will reply and will see if I'm needed. And I will come back when I have more time. Cracking the binary data and even trying to reverse-engineer some havok\skeleton stuff, I don't have time for that right now, and binary stuff is really beyond me.

 

But maybe I missed something? Any advancements already made?

 

As far as i understand this post, Groovtama already ported things from XPMSE to FO4

 

Well, thats a 1 year old post, and from what I can read there, he never actually got everything to work. And in the end they just use what currently is in CBBE, butt and breast physics based on cloth sim of some joints. Cuz really, there are breast and butt joints already in vanilla skeleton, which are used for 'fat' scaling, and you can't animate them, but they can be repurposed. But I never got to actually making it possible to animate them.

[DexesTTP]

Well, I guess I could talk about it here ; I've been working since a week or so on fully decrypting Cloth data for Fallout 4. You can see my findings on GitHub (as always ). The goal at the moment is to improve the CBBE physics and I got like 99% of the things done (I've got only 12 matrices or so to solve, which is an incredibly tedious task though). From my tests, we have at the moment fully independent breast physics where each breast have the approximate shape of the real mesh. No news on collisions yet, but this seems to be also a possible thing.

 

The good news about this technique is that, if we intend to use the Cloth Physics, we can just add skinned bones to the nif without editing any other files and actually add physics to them - we're talking about CBBE but, why not, male bodies or any other kind of outfits (tails, wings, etc...). It's actually pretty cool. Also, there seems to be a way to deactivate the physics while running animations if wanted, but I'm actually not sure how it works.

 

About the skeleton itself, I believe Groovtama has stopped working on FO4 altogether. However, there seems to both be no need for skeletons yet and a lot of wiggle rooms with partial skeletons for physics. I'm not sure what more would actually be needed right now.

[ShadeAnimator]

Well, I guess I could talk about it here ; I've been working since a week or so on fully decrypting Cloth data for Fallout 4. You can see my findings on GitHub (as always ). The goal at the moment is to improve the CBBE physics and I got like 99% of the things done (I've got only 12 matrices or so to solve, which is an incredibly tedious task though). From my tests, we have at the moment fully independent breast physics where each breast have the approximate shape of the real mesh. No news on collisions yet, but this seems to be also a possible thing.

 

The good news about this technique is that, if we intend to use the Cloth Physics, we can just add skinned bones to the nif without editing any other files and actually add physics to them - we're talking about CBBE but, why not, male bodies or any other kind of outfits (tails, wings, etc...). It's actually pretty cool. Also, there seems to be a way to deactivate the physics while running animations if wanted, but I'm actually not sure how it works.

 

About the skeleton itself, I believe Groovtama has stopped working on FO4 altogether. However, there seems to both be no need for skeletons yet and a lot of wiggle rooms with partial skeletons for physics. I'm not sure what more would actually be needed right now.

 

 

Awesome news!

So we could just add any skinned bone to the 3ds\maya\blender rig of the character, export just the nif file, and just like that, without the need to add those bones to the rig-txt file, and without the need to edit xmls and stuff to include those bones, just add the physics to them?

 

Well, I think we could talk in skype or somewhere about it a bit, once you decrypt the final matrices, I think that there should be user-friendly tools for modders allowing them to add all that stuff. I could help with writing said tools for 3ds max and maya, though probably, if the workflow is actually is as I see it (just export skinned nif), then maybe it would be even a better idea to add those tools to Outfit studio or something like that. Would be much more universal. But they'd have to probably add physics... This is to be able to tweak sized and values. Well, anyway, lot's of questions.

 

About the skeleton, the only real reason to want to make extended skeleton, is to be able to control the angle of the cock during animation. Because you can't just have it at 90 degrees to the body at all times and in all poses, it has to bend up and down, sometimes left and right. So thats a thing to solve. Maybe with a workaround or something. Twisting hips to angle boners could do the trick, but it will probably make pose looks underalistic in the spine and hip area.

 

Other reasons include only stuff like wings, tails and other things that should be controlled through animation, but I personally could live without that.

[ralfetas]

I made some very crude physics to the butt, and the biggest problem is when jump, the mesh breaks a lot, and if you fall the butt looks like fabric in the wind lol, but when running or walking the result is very nice.

So with this changes we can fix that? So we can use the vanilla engine to add physics without the need a extension like hdt?

[DexesTTP]

I made some very crude physics to the butt, and the biggest problem is when jump, the mesh breaks a lot, and if you fall the butt looks like fabric in the wind lol, but when running or walking the result is very nice.

So with this changes we can fix that? So we can use the vanilla engine to add physics without the need a extension like hdt?

 

Actually, you can remove the "fabric" motions when falling just by changing two of the values in the .hkx file (gravity and globalDampingPerSecond). The mesh breaking might be a more tricky thing (matrices solving and all) but it'll definitely work. I may make a tool to automate these things if/when I manage to break the code behind them.

 

I guess it can replace HDT entirely ? I'm actually not familiar with what was really available in Skyrim - I started last year with FO4. What the "adapted" cloth physics can do is jiggling and (maybe) collisions with the "landscape" and body parts.

About that last part, this is supposition, based off the opened HKX files. I didn't have time to go in-depth in that yet, I'm focusing on more "basic" stuff.

 

I've no idea if we can put other things than cloth data in these blocs either. To be honest, we only had the technology to make these kind of edits the last month or so, and I've been sparsely playing with it. There may be loads of undiscovered things via the ClothData blocs.

 

To go more in depth about what a .hkx cloth physics file can do, you can open them up with HKXPack - the names are pretty self-explanatory.

[ralfetas]

 

I made some very crude physics to the butt, and the biggest problem is when jump, the mesh breaks a lot, and if you fall the butt looks like fabric in the wind lol, but when running or walking the result is very nice.

So with this changes we can fix that? So we can use the vanilla engine to add physics without the need a extension like hdt?

 

Actually, you can remove the "fabric" motions when falling just by changing two of the values in the .hkx file (gravity and globalDampingPerSecond). The mesh breaking might be a more tricky thing (matrices solving and all) but it'll definitely work. I may make a tool to automate these things if/when I manage to break the code behind them.

 

I guess it can replace HDT entirely ? I'm actually not familiar with what was really available in Skyrim - I started last year with FO4. What the "adapted" cloth physics can do is jiggling and (maybe) collisions with the "landscape" and body parts.

About that last part, this is supposition, based off the opened HKX files. I didn't have time to go in-depth in that yet, I'm focusing on more "basic" stuff.

 

I've no idea if we can put other things than cloth data in these blocs either. To be honest, we only had the technology to make these kind of edits the last month or so, and I've been sparsely playing with it. There may be loads of undiscovered things via the ClothData blocs.

 

To go more in depth about what a .hkx cloth physics file can do, you can open them up with HKXPack - the names are pretty self-explanatory.

 

 

Thanks a lot for this feedback, i will take a look on these tools, but i am very ignorant in these area.

 

For the mesh breaking, they break when we fall, so if the falling could be remove or the gravity adjusted, we are good to go, and for what i understand, we can make things bounce even more

 

In skyrim i am not sure what we have, but i know that sometimes the meshes have some very strange behavior too.

[ralfetas]

So, i unpack the skeleton.hkx, and take a look on the XML, all i could see was ragdoll information, no cloth, the cloth information must be on animation or skeleton?

I dont even find the basic OverridableSimulationInfo, so i am sure that i am with the wrong file

[DexesTTP]

So, i unpack the skeleton.hkx, and take a look on the XML, all i could see was ragdoll information, no cloth, the cloth information must be on animation or skeleton?

I dont even find the basic OverridableSimulationInfo, so i am sure that i am with the wrong file

 

Oh, yes. The data is embedded in the .nif files, not the HKX.

 

Open the file on Outfit Studio and use the export menu (under files) to export the cloth data.

[ralfetas]

 

So, i unpack the skeleton.hkx, and take a look on the XML, all i could see was ragdoll information, no cloth, the cloth information must be on animation or skeleton?

I dont even find the basic OverridableSimulationInfo, so i am sure that i am with the wrong file

 

Oh, yes. The data is embedded in the .nif files, not the HKX.

 

Open the file on Outfit Studio and use the export menu (under files) to export the cloth data.

 

 

Thanks! I told you i was ignorant on this

 

So after 3 readings on all the XML i see some values that make sense to me, but the best would be to compare 2 or 3 extreme values, like the dress, hair and the googles etc. Some values are too vague to understand, others i really don't understand...

 

I know cloth simulation only in 3d apps, for what i see, HDT work with softbodys so the values are much more easy to change, now adapting a cloth to be softbody can be a challenge, in special in the deformation.

 

Edit: I test to reduce the damping, the result was pretty nice, the butt in special bounce a lot more like a softbody, but breaks a lot more, i will make some different files with extreme values on each and put them on the same outfit to compare. For what i can see, if we up the shiffness (must be there somewere) and reduce the damping we can have a less breaking mesh.

[ralfetas]

Tests done, and more questions arrive them answers lol

 

I manage to break the physics/meshes most of the times, some very strange results, but, reducing the collision tolerance give some nice result, still something that needs a lot of adjusts and tests. I change the shiftiness and the effect was bizarre, the same goes for the damping or gravity, i think the key to manage the breaking mesh is on other place, maybe the rest position, reducing it, don't know for sure.

 

Maybe i am wrong, but from what i see, there is lots of cloth values there, and most are based on bones that have the values set on the cloth data, so if anyone want to make for example a dress with breast physics, the cloth data will need to combine both values.

 

I am sure this is the future, but i am too newbie to make anything that will help, but i will continue to play with it, making tests etc... if i manage to discover anything i will post here.