Normal map animation?

[Vicyntae]

I don't even know if this is possible, but here's what I want to do. I need to create a simple animation over a mesh which has bodymorphs applied to it. Since the mesh varies dramatically between it's min and max states, normal animations don't really seem possible. But I think it would be possible if I were able to animate the normal maps of the mesh, since all I need it to do is move in and out from the rest state. Can this be done?

[MadMansGun]

do you mean like the ice wraith's mesh? (fxicewraith2ndform.nif) i don't 100% know how to make them but you can have meshes that move on there own, but moving textures are much easier to setup than animated meshes.

[Vicyntae]

51 minutes ago, MadMansGun said:

do you mean like the ice wraith's mesh? (fxicewraith2ndform.nif) i don't 100% know how to make them but you can have meshes that move on there own, but moving textures are much easier to setup than animated meshes.

Not quite. What I'm trying to do is simulate skin moving independently of the body mesh, like goosebumps showing up. I don't know if standard nif animations would work well, since I can only translate, rotate, or scale. I need to edit on a vertex level, and it has to remain (somewhat) consistent between the different mesh shapes. Can Skyrim support moving normal map? Also, can I have two normal maps on a mesh, since I'd rather not remove the normals already there.

[foreveraloneguy]

You can swap textures with skse. Look at some of the mods that change the normals based on the characters weight. or at wet function which swaps specular.

[Blaze69]

6 hours ago, foreveraloneguy said:

[...] some of the mods that change the normals based on the characters weight [...]

That's not a SKSE function, that's actually from the vanilla game.

 

If you create a FormList with several Texture Sets and then assign in in the "Texture Swap List" of the naked skin, the engine automatically assigns one of those textures depending on weight. You can't set the exact intervals, though; it can only equally distribute the texture sets over the 0-100 slider, so the amount of textures and their order in the FormList determine which interval corresponds to each texture.

 

For example, if you add two textures to the list, Texture A will be applied for NPCs with weight 0-49 and Texture B on those with 50-100. With 5 texture sets you get 0-19, 20-39, 40-59, 60-79 and 80-100. And so on.

 

(I am aware this doesn't help for the original request unless you change the character's weight to access the proper textures, and that isn't exactly the best way to do it. But I wanted to mention this fact for future reference.)

[Azazellz]

SKSE have SetSkin feature, which can change whole actor's body to another one (and all textures, related to this body).

[Vicyntae]

Sorry for disappearing. I got too wrapped up in actually trying this. Here's what I found:

• Normal map animations are possible, BUT they are limited to UV Translations, UV Scales, Alpha changes, and color changes.
• In order to animate like a movie does, one must make an animated texture, that is, an enlarged texture with all the frames of the animations within it. See here for an example: https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/3540845-dds-animation-tv-mod/. The fact that actual animations aren't available even in Fallout 4 is both surprising yet expected, somehow.
• What I want to do, that is, making the surface of the mesh appear to move, likely won't be possible, as normal maps seem to work best on small details that can't really be examined closely. What I need is way too big and prominent to work with normals.

Thanks guys for all your support. Unfortunately, this feature is probably going to have to wait until the next version, since I need to bugtest my mod first.