I finished the nix hound model and put a temporary texture on it for the time being. I've read in Cute Unit's posting on the ES forums that if you want to bring a new ceature model into Oblivion you have to export the skeleton of the creature that you're using as a base for the animations, and then rig your new model with that skeleton. I don't fully understand how to get the skeleton exported properly (I want to use the mountain lion). I can rig it once I have the skeleton because I know how to rig models, it's just properly getting the skeleton from the mountain lion nif file that I don't understand. Does anyone have any idea how to accomplish this?
Here's a pic of the model with the temporary texture (it's just a recolored nix texture from Darker Morrowind I believe, mapped similar to the way the original nix in Morrowind was mapped).
Wow. It looks very nice. I don't understand skeletons either, but it must be pretty complicated.
I believe every creature has a directory, with the skeletons they use in it. Perhaps by simply putting the mountain lion skeleton in the Nix Hound directory, the engine will recognise it as Nix Hound Skeleton? Have you tried looking in NIFskope? (Not that I'm an expert on modelling or animations or anything, but just some suggestions)
What you could do is go into the 3DS or Blender or whatever you're using, and paste the Nix model overtop of the Mountain Lion, that might make it so that all the animation settings or whatever are preserved, and then all you'd have to do is copy everything from the Mountain Lion Directory. Actually, that might not be such a bad idea...
the whole paste over it thing might work out right ID and all you need to do is rig it right and the animations will work
Quote:Originally posted by Green @nt1-n00b
the whole paste over it thing might work out right ID and all you need to do is rig it right and the animations will work
I like this, I'm a genius. :yes: :]
(and people think I have an ego, bleh)
just grab urself a mentos!
Refreshing...
But something else to take into account is if the anims will be deleted if the original mesh is deleted, though if you can simply tweak the Mountain lion mesh, that could work too.
It doesn't quite work like that. I haven't tried it yet - I was just hoping I could find someone to do it for me... but I might end up giving it a shot to see if I can figure it out. Here's the text explaining it from Cute Unit's thread on the ES forum:
What you have to do in order to make a skeleton Riggable:
to make a skel riggable is reasonably easy now.
open the .nif that contains the actual model of the creature
select the Trishape or Tristrips of the chunk of body you want, right click it in block list and choose Copy Branch
click File>New window. in the new second instance of Nifskope, open the skeleton.nif that was in the same file.
go to Spells>Block>Remove by ID
it should be automatically filled with things. You can add to the end of it |^NiTransformcontroller if you want, I always do. Basically you want no nodes left in the nif other than the ones that say "NiNode Bip01 Whatever" and of course the scene root they're all a child of.
When the skeleton is clean, right click the block list and choose "paste branch"
the creature model will appear in the nif, though possibly not in the right place.
Now left click Scene Root block, and in the block details window you will see "Num children" with a value next to it. Double click that value and change it up by one. So if it says 74, change it to 75.
right below that is an expandable list named Children. Right click it and in the menu that pops, choose "Array" then "Update"
now if you click the plus symbol next to the word Children, you have a list of the other things in the nif. Leave them there. At the end is one that says NONE though. double click NONE, and it'll change to a number of negative one. Delete that and type in whatever number is to the left of the NiTriShape you pasted in a second ago, let's say it's 50. Type 50 and click off of it. the creature model should snap itself onto all the bones. Save this special cleaned nif somewhere else with a NEW name, don't overwrite your oblivion files...ever. You can import this into blender now just peachy.
Quote:Originally posted by cryonaut
It doesn't quite work like that.
Ah well, worth a shot anyway.
It sounds like it is definately possible, and those instructions look like they might work, so go ahead and give it a try. :goodjob:
I wish I knew what to tell you, but I think you're the most far along creature modeller we have around here cryonaut. I'm crossing my fingers it'll pan out
