Long neck, ect.?

[SickAlice]

Hey there. So I was playing around with Nifskope today. Normally I can go to a node for a body part, say the arm, and adjust the size and that works fine.
Tonight I went to the head node and moved it upward, then fore ward, causing the neck to stretch like taffy. Same mesh as before. But after saving my work
and viewing it, everything went back to as if I hadn't moved it. Is moving around nodes in such a fashion possible, am I doing it wrong, or should I move onto
something else. Thanks for your time.

[Tomato]

The problem you're running into here is that the keyframe file is actually telling that bone where it should be, not the actual nif. You can change the scale of a particular bone in nifskope, provided that the keys don't tell it how large to be, but the position/rotation of the bone are controlled by the keyframes (thus how the keys are animated)

There are two ways to do what you want, however. The best way is to change the keyframes themselves (which is tedious and has to be done for each keyframe of every animation you want to have a long neck, but will work best with add-ons like glasses and hair meshes) but you can also adjust the mesh itself by clicking "Niskindata" (under "niskininstance"), opening up the "Bone list" dropdown in the "Block data" window (usually near the bottom) and finding the bone data that corresponds to the bone you're trying to move.

[SickAlice]

Oh ay, I expected to hear from you. After digging for about forty minutes last I found this. It's not titled conveniently unfortunately for searches.
Your brilliant by the way.
http://freedomreborn.net/forums/index.php?topic=54727.0

I used your SkinData method last night. Checks out fine. Character number one has a head elevated one step. Character number two is the real problem though,
here I'll show you. This is WIP and getting her into shape by just using the direct nodes. It's eventually to be Kryb from the Sinestro Corps:



Okay, but of course in game this reverts to normal. So I attacked it using your method. The problems I had there were speaking of tedious...it is in this case. Aside from all attachments have to be adjusted as well. The SkinData nodes also move from a bit different positions on the mesh? I'm having issues getting that hunch back so I have an area to put the bone crib model I made for it (and the babies, yes....eeeeew!). I moved the Spine1 bone, Neck bone, Spine bone, Head bone, and both Clavicles, yet, the upper center of the back just won't move fore ward with the rest of it like in the example I posted. Any clue what I'm not doing there?

While I have you here I'm also looking to give two more arms of course. I remember doing this in the past, but can't clue into it now. They don't need new animations and I'm fine if they move right alongside the original arms. At worst I'll make two dummy arms and attach them that just hang out. Thanks for all the help and for being so versed too!

[Tomato]

I'm sorry, but I don't know if I can be any more help on this... I would suggest that you try an alternative mesh to see if the problem occurs universally, or just with that mesh type (I believe that's inks, you might have better luck with gren's or mine), but that also means losing the work you had here. As for the arms... unlike this method (which I've found useful for a variety of reasons) I haven't had a reason to do anything like that, so... *shrug*

[SickAlice]

Oh no, you were a great help actually. If you look at my newest release thread your method shows up a time two whereas characters have an extended body parts.

- Proof of concept here, this method works. As well, the method of using Blender to extend a body part and re-import the mesh via Ewzzy's tutorial works fine,
http://www.freedomforce.ewzzy.com/Blender.php

But, this only works for changes that aren't too in the extremes, or keeping the body relatively in the same shape in other words. When I tried major deformity (Kryb) again using the Bone method in Nifskope (and yes, I tried multiple meshes hoping for an import), the issue that occurs is that the body portions can be moved, but the move into the same garbled mess that would appear when otherwise. That's just due to the shape of the low poly mesh itself not being able to conform to such standards. As well, in Ctool, more parts get screwed up, like say if a hand is really far from it's original position. All the same when using Blender. I could assume that's because the rest of the Scene like the bones and bounding boxes, and the notes within the keyframes aren't lining up with this altered mesh. It's safe to say that more monstrous things need to be done from the ground up.
Not to worry, my Max program is just late in coming, so I'll get it. Plus I think I really want to introduce a " lurking " monster type keyframe into our FFVTTR world anyways.