Replacing the animation engine for scripted animations

[PinkyAndTheBrain]

Did Hydro ever release any source or docs of where (s)he hooks the engine to tweak the skeleton before it's drawn? I wonder if the same methods can still be hooked/shimmed in FO4.

 

With the lack of FNIS and the eternal mess which is Havok I wonder if the HDT-SMP approach to animation couldn't be used, not just for physics of a few body parts but for an entire scripted animation. "Just" run around the characters in T-pose as far as the game is concerned, shim a high level animation call and "just" change all the bones based on an internal animation engine, before the engine draws them on the screen (rather than just tweaking a couple of bones like HDT-SMP).

 

The animation engine is relatively trivial, nothing which NifSkope can't do, because of the simplicity of the use case. You don't need individual animations for multiple body parts blended together, with some IK for terrain following like Havok is able of performing. Simple keyframe animation of skeletons (ideally with bullet physics as well, but that could wait). Ideally vertex level animation actually, so you can use your own skeleton, but that might take more invasive modification of the engine.

 

The skeleton approach might with a little luck take only a single shim for one method.

[darkconsole]

i've long been a fan of procedural animation, main reason its not a big thing is its a waste of cpu compared to more important things the game engines should be doing.

[PinkyAndTheBrain]

Well if SexTec ever gets released procedurally stringing animations together for an orgy could be interesting, but that's not really what I'm talking about.

 

I'm just wondering if the way HDT-SMP injected it's own animation into Skyrim can still work in FO4. If so I think it would be worthwhile to just do that for the entire skeleton, since messing around with the build in animation system is such a bloody mess.

[alucrad90]

FO4 has a ingame skeleton bone offset tweaking system...