Jeez, copying animations is slow!

[stumpy]

This is just a rant, I guess, though I would be thrilled with suggestions to speed up the process.

I am thinking of a ranged power-based character I'd like to play with. Thumbing through the meshes I have installed and the animations they have, I decided on the vxmale_noface_heels2gaunts mesh with vxMaleOmniPowerful keyframes. But, silly me, I still wanted a few more options for ranged attacks with multiple contacts. So, I thought I would use NifSkope to copy some of the existing animations that had the look and timing I liked and add some leave_hand contacts to them. I chose four ranged animations and started copying the first of them...

Something like an hour and a half later, it finished the paste-branch operation. And, I basically wasted a couple hours earlier today by thinking that NifSkope must have crashed because it was taking so long to paste. I even updated to v1.06 and checked that it wasn't any faster with uncoverted keyframe files. Oi! Honestly, the only reason I even know it takes that long is that I decided I would let it run in the background overnight instead of killing the program, just to see if it got anywhere. Ninety minutes later, I noticed that the NifSkope screen had repainted.

When I think that I wanted eight "new" animations (the four ranged, plus the corresponding hover_ranged variants), I want to scream.

The odd thing is that I have done this before (copied an animation within a mesh to tweak the number of contacts or their timing) and it didn't take near as long. I mean, it took a long time alright, but like fifteen or maybe twenty-five minutes. Never and hour and a half! Of course, most of those were with melee animations, but I sort of doubt that's a real difference. I have no idea if there is something different about these keyframes or what the heck.

Is this about what other people expect when doing that sort of operation?

[Carravaggio]

M25 made a ketframe transfer tool, it takes, like, a minute to do the same job, and allows you to easily rename animations.
The two sets of keyframes have to be compatible, but for transferring animations I find it far superior to nifskope.

[stumpy]

Aargh! I totally forgot about that. Thanks for the mention of it! That will be a lifesaver.

The silly thing is that, when I first saw how long this was taking, I actually said to myself, "I'll bet I could write code to use the niflib module to do this and have it debugged before I finished the job with NifSkope." And here M25 already did even that!  :lol:

Excellent!  :thumbup:

[Symon]

Yeah, NifSkope takes a LONG time to perform some operations on keyframes. M25s little tool is much better for the operations it supports.

I keep trying to find the time to get my head round NifLib and write a generic keyframe hacker.

One day...............

Still, things take time. I finally got round to compiling NifSkope 10.0.6...err...add a .5 I suppose, for my self. Fixed my texturing issue.

[Talavar]

I'm slowly working myself up to trying to transfer some animations.  Where could one find M25's keyframe transfer tool?

[Previsionary]

http://freedomreborn.net/archive/index.php?topic=42706.0

[Talavar]

You, sir, are a scholar & a gentleman.  Thanks!