Working with Jik's awesome dragon?

[SickAlice]

The short question is how would one make a neck-less dragon from it?
I want the head to rest on the shoulders instead of the end of the long neck and then to get rid of the neck (this will be taken out in the model itself).
This is a tricky nif to work with. I remade the body subtracting the neck as stated and moved the head into it's new position (tried this several different ways in more than one program), yet at best that head always jumps out into the air and follows the animations as if it were hanging off the end of a neck.

[hoss20]

There are a couple of ways to tackle this, but I think the easiest way is to attach the head to a different node. In the original mesh, there are 5 Neck nodes with the head being attached to Neck4. What you might try is attaching the head to the Neck or Neck1 node which are closer to the body. The reason the head is currently flying around is that the keyframes are still using the original head position to perform the movements. For what you are wanting to do, I think it's great that the head (and lower jaw) is a separate piece on this mesh. It makes things a lot easier. Of course, this solution may also depend on how the neck was subtracted and what parts of it were eliminated.

You can also try to fix things by manipulating the keyframes, but since I doubt you want to edit every animation, I think this way is easier.

[SickAlice]

That's brilliant hoss and works like a charm thanks. Your right about the head too. As well that method allowed me a cleaner look since I was also able to zero the size of the now unused neck nodes. And much less time consuming than alternative methods.

[hoss20]

Awesome. Glad it worked out.

[SickAlice]

Only putting this down more for knowledge database reasons but the keyframes still need to be edited. The reason for it is during animations in which the dragon breathes fire the lower jaw rotates too far back where it falls inside the body and comes out of the backside. Luckily, the notes are as follows: Scales = no info, Translations = no info, Quarternion = Y -180 P -0.00 R (variable). So it's pretty easy to figure out to just bring down the R variables in the Quarternion to fix the issue.