Possible Projects Interest

[Randomdays]

Checked Skeleton 1 again and he's working for me. I didn't put a readme in the first rar so maybe its a little unclear, but you have to place the new kf in the directory, delete the old one, and rename the new one either "character.kf" or "keyframes.kf."

You'll know if its working in character creation when you assign a melee attack. When you select the animation, you should see "melee1",etc. If the title at the top is blank, then its still bad.

Uploaded 12 more fixed imports - these have both the box fix and the melee fix.

NWN2 - Bombardier Beetle, Fire Beetle, Lobster an Stag Beetle

Oblivion - Mud Crab. You can also copy the kfs from here to the DAoC Crab and that should fix him.

UO - Giant Beetle

WP2 - Bluetip Shark, Crocodile, Giant Lizard, Hammerhead and Hammerhead Rider, and Ankylosaurus.

Another dozen or so and I think everything will be update and working.

Also, the WP2 imports have the problem of only having 2 testkeys as stated above, but I was able to figure out to how add more keys. Simply go to where the total keys is shown, change it from a 2 to 3, or whatever you need, update, and it creates a new blank key where I can put in time and type (contact)

So I'll be able to fix the warrior and scorpion and put their fixes up later.

Please keep me informed of any issues, suggestions, or possible help. I'll try to work out any issues.

RD

[cranlox]

YES! With your last post I managed to make everything work perfectly with the characters that correspond to the last fixed files.

Thank you for all your dedication.

[Randomdays]

Doing it because its fun, like most here, but knowing people are using it is a good thing.

Finished the upgrades I think;

EE3 - Barbarian. The Scooby Caveman uses the same kfs so copy those there if you have it.

NWN2  Snake - renamed to WP2 NWN2 Snake. Its using the Dragon Moray kfs, but AO has a dedicated snake that I'll be importing hopefully and suing the same NWN2 model

WP2 - Dragon Moray, Pachycephalosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Protoceratops, Sea Lion, Stegasaurus, Styracosaurus, T Rex, Triceratops, Utah Raptor and Velociraptor

The Civ 4 scorpion still animates fine in the character viewer, but not in game. Since the AO Scorpion is working, I'm going to put that to the side.

RD

[SickAlice]

Speaking of Capt Caveman is up next, he's going to be easier then you might think. I finished the Spider-mobile model and am just adding the polish then the Webshooter animations. On a side note if you're inclined you should keep a How To's document and drop it later. When you mentioned fixing contact points for example I remembered that I don't know how exactly to do it anymore nor where to find it. The last time I used it was when I made a generic rolling ball for Sonic The Hedgehog. I don't need it at this moment but it would be a nice thing to have handy around here. I have a bookmark folder myself I'm building up for such a page, namely making a list of links all about the basic property values we've been talking about here as well how all XYZ positions work.

[Randomdays]

I left room in the modding / skinning part 2 tutorial for updates, so I'll probably put the contacts info and a couple of other things there.

Had a third AO import that I had to abandon. Like the other 2, part of the mesh just vanishes during certain animations. For the first one that had happened to, the octopus, I had rigged a different mesh to the armature and it still happened. Must be something to do with the kfs are doing.

[SickAlice]

Kind of speeding ahead of me here, so you did get the process of translating non-Netimmerse animations to this games keyframes? Let me know the basics if so, like say I'd have the most simple animated format, FBX and then want to make a nif keyframe out of it. Reason I ask that specific one is I mentioned Android/Unity games and know how as to extract them as basic formats (FBX, PNG, so on) with all the animations and rigging intact regardless of their original format.

On a side note I wish I could host the extractions. The 3d model rip sites are unusually fussy about hosting and format, one of the above is they don't like animated non-Tposed models for reasons I can't really understand. Deviantart doesn't mind but sharing art there resulted in waves of death threats for reasons so I retracted from their service.

[Randomdays]

Nope SA, not yet.

AO (Atlantica Online) is still a nif game.

One problem I've had with the non Net-emerse games are a warning on export that the process "doesn't support envelope skinning" on the armature in Blender. Following  Blender's console help doesn't work, and searching the web, I see other people have the same problem for various other game nif exports, and no one seems to have an answer.

I think that Max 8 could overcome it, but getting a format out of Blender into Max with its armature and skin weights is an issue.

RD

[Deaths Jester]

Not sure if this might help or is useful for any of you but Nexus Mods has a Nif import/export additon for the 3dMaxs 5 -9 here :https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/51450.

[Randomdays]

Thanks DJ

It might be the one I'm using already but I'll check it out.

The main problem with the different programs, as discussed above, is the various holes in the import/ export for the various editor programs. I might be able to get a working mesh with animations going in Blender from NWN 1/2 or UO, but can't get it to export to a nif due to a armature problem.

MAX might be able to overcome the armature problem and get the kf working , but I can't get a format to export from Blender with the needed information, and import to MAX with something it likes, and then out as a nif.

Or vise versa.

With SA's help, we're close, but not quite without a lot of extra work.

[SickAlice]

Yeah that version issue is a natch, same as Nifskope. I don't know, I thought about Max. I haven't been a student in over five years so nothing to apply with there, I could use my company but I just hate how that program eats up the system. Else I really think you had it as of that crab we were messing around with. It had everything it needed when I exported it just in the wrong order and some of the settings weren't right for  . I did that with 2.49b again mind you. I think you should backtrack to that and looking at exporting files but then polishing them up outside of the 3d programs the same as you do when you weight paint in Blender over to Nifskope.

Still chugging along on Spider-mobile. It's turned into something bigger, again I'm going the distance for the skopers and skinners here. I also scrapped the comic book based engine and went back to building a proper engine as well a proper axle type buggy body as DJ had suggested. It just looks much better this way. You'll see, big hold up is a server problem causing issues with uploads to the website. I'm not sure where the boss is these days and I'm waiting him out until then.

[SickAlice]

Of interest and this seems to hit on what was going on there. They didn't list enough details on one hand here but get to the issue about versions and the resolution to it when it comes to exporting Nifs here.

https://morroblivion.com/files/modeltoskyrimguide.pdf

[Randomdays]

Tried a few things with that - downloaded 2.62 and intalled it -> loaded up the animated spider dae - -> saved as a blend and went back to 2.49b and loaded the blend -> got the spider with his skinweights and armature but lost the animation. Was able to export the spider as a nif with no error. Slight improvement there.''

Took the spider to max8 and loaded it, and then its gr2 walk file -> looked good but no animation.

But I started to think about a few "other" things to try.....

With the crab that looked "exploded" but had all of its animations working in nifskope- the one that came from Max8 -> Imported into Blender 2.49b with "Import Animation" clicked on, but no kf selected -> the nif imported and animated in Blender with all of its animations (yay!) - still looks exploded as its mesh pieces weren't lined up with its armature.

Next - Exported the nif by itself and the kf by itself -> the kf looked like a good FFvt3R one and I changed its flags from "12" to "40" as with all standard kf exports from Blender -> in character viewer, the nif did not animate (boo!) . The kf was 48 seconds long with I assume all the animations still in it.

Last  -> Exported the mesh with the animations embedded in the mesh, like the way it came in, as an FFvt3r mesh. The max nif with all animation was 189k, while the new export was only 67k -> In nifskope, the mesh went though two or 3 animations for about 5 seconds, then ran though the rest of the time motionless -> in character viewer, it ran though one animation and then "vanished" from the screen. Since it was an embedded animation, I have no idea how to make the animation "loop"

But importantly, the mesh DID animate in the character viewer. I know there's a way in Max (and Blender) to fine tune the animation set to just one. Maybe its way too long for it to work properly, and if it was cut to just the idle sequence, there might be better results.

SA, you might want to try a few things with this info.

Anyone else, I had already uploaded the max created nif to the "requests" folder on the mega site, called "NWN test.rar" if you want to look at it.

Some progress I think.

[SickAlice]

I'm heavy on art right now honestly, finishing Spider-mobile among others in addition to the real life work (nothing like having a plot of woods and being reminded you have to rake all the leaves and needles). But it's on the to do for later. Though what they laid out there tracks about 2.49b storing information. I noticed difference early on in fact I messed up once and used 2.49 without "b" and the results were unfavorable. More though the later part of the reading about going back over the exported results and adding and fixing values since Blender doesn't really set them properly. I say it again because I exported keyframes fine, I sent the results to you. They were missing some things like a header and footer and a value or two needed to be changed but the animation data itself was all present, accounted for and usable. My results was more the nif came out wrong, almost like everything was inverted in the transition. It's just clean up work I swear and otherwise Blender won't make something game ready. These plugins were never finished anyways and not for these specific games. That's why I gravitate to the Morrowind forums, I know who was scripting those plugins was emphasizing on that game engine. I kind of get something about you're finding, I'm not doing Max so it isn't of much use to me but it's that long work after making these product. For  I would be then trying to take the values from the combined nif and transplanting them to a keyframe file. Likewise removing them then from the nif to match the set-up this game series uses. Mind you here nif and keyframes are not intended to be separate things with this format, this is specific to moddable games.

Not sure if I'm missing something here but about the vanishing at the end act go to the keyframe and click on the NiKeyframeController, well make sure it is exactly that and if not change it to it, then right click > Flags and set Cycle to Clamp or Clamp to Cycle depending on what's there. This is one those fussy things.

The other that will cause this is a difference in time scales, this is why again I do not pointer different strings to a single keyframe. So check the NiKeyframeData, make sure it also is this type and if not change it to that too, and look at the end times of all the data sets, be they XYZ, Scales, Translations and so forth and make sure they all are the same exact time. So for example if it's 0.3333 they all must be 0.3333. Otherwise the mesh or parts of it will vanish at the end. Also the same Stop Time must be present in the NiKeyframeController. So 0.3333 in my example. Otherwise again that will cause the thing to vanish, otherwise it's the Clamp/Cycle thing.

Check those exact things and see what results you get.

[Randomdays]

Hey SA

Good info. I knew about the clamp/ cycle. I usually set them numerically. Most of the Irrational kfs use "8" for cycle and "12" for clamp. When Windblown set me up with the first set of working imports, he(she?) had set them up with "40" and "44". I'll double check the roll outs to make sure they're correct. I'll also check out the times to make sure they're all the same.

I think the real problem with these embedded kfs is that they're are so many of them, and some are one or the other, in a long series. The total length of time is 48 secs. It would be similar to taking a complete FF1 kf file and embedding it in the nif.

I know you don't have max, but the free version, Gmax, can do most of what the old max's did, and its less system intensive. I can help you get that installed and running if you haven't tried it and want to. I've got a pack of scripts for Blender/gmax and max that covers most of the formats we use.

Now, on the Granny file format - some good news. I had gotten the UO spider imported and working with its walking kfs in Blender 2.69 after exporting it from Noesis as a FBX, but was stuck there. Max 8 wouldn't take it because the version was too high. I was able to find updated FBX scripts for Max and get it imported. FBX is good since its one of the few formats that will keep any animations with it when imported and exported.

The same problem happened as with the NWN crab I've tried to export as a separate nif/ kf pair - A good nif and an empty kf, but an animated nif with embedded kfs in Nifscope, and now in Blender.

This time though when I exported them separately from Blender 2.49b and adjusted the kf to a looping idle, the spider animated in the FFvt3R character viewer! The mesh was a little "flickery" with parts vanishing and appearing, so I'll see about tweaking it some more.

But, it DID animate, with the "Idle" showing as its one and only animation - So I could probably add new animations the mesh has like I've done for Civ4, AO and EE3, to build a bigger KF.



Since the spider and its kfs were originally for Granny1 and converted to Granny2 by the Granny Viewer, that might be part of the problem. Next, I'll try to get a NWN2 Granny2 skeleton/ kf animated with its mdb mesh, turned into a nif and see how that works.

There's a lot of Granny games out there that this could open them up - The UO and NWN2 games to start with. Also, there's a possibility that ANY format that has a armature that animates a mesh in Noesis might work. I know that some formats animate the mesh directly, so those probably wouldn't work. I think though that this a major breakthrough to get a non-nif format turned into an animated nif for FFvt3R.

RD

[SickAlice]

Nah, not going to GMax. Only Discreet product I bother with is Meshmixer for lowering polycounts if need be. Too much bulk on my system like I said. Same with ZBrush. I liked it and the features but Windows is bad enough alone (are we seriously already being pushed to 11 this soon?). It just is. Also and mostly a habit from when I worked in Hollywood I don't support Discreet. I get why you think I should. Note too again I'm not as into conversion as you are here. I like making my own models. I'm an artist and largely a sculpture in real life so doing this appeals to me.

And yeah, this was what I was on about in my Vanishing Limbs thread. I boggled over the vanishing issue for years and it tends to be one or the other. Not limited too though, as usual it's important to align all settings. Anything off and specifically any function this game engine does not utilize so therefore recognize, and Blender spits out values like that for FFvTTR nifs regularly will result in errors. As you say there is a lot going on. That means there's a lot to be fixed. My motto with keyframes is as I said I open a second usable and compare and copy where need be. Always a Gren keyframe for me since he knew what he was doing. Most likely because it plays for a duration, the KITT that I sent you does this where it plays all if it's keyframes (which are in the nif) in sequence in about that duration. Hoff does the same but it moves at a natural pace just an FBX. So since you say it plays before the flaw must be at the end of said timeframe. Though with what I said that speed could be virtual, remember you can set the pace of animation. Something you learned with animated textures right? So it could be a very long amount of time but the pace is sped up. But regardless it's at the end of a time scale then.

As you say this error is probably present in multiple places but I'm guessing either A.) end times do not match everywhere or B.) something similar with a different setting. Or still the wrong type, remember this game engine only reads specific things it has in it's code. If say some other value that is available to Netimmerse is present and the engine gets to the point in the code, tries to read it then fails. But the time thing. Like just one and common example I ended up fixing in hexed keyframes was there would be different end times say between the Rotation and Scales in an animation or more. Or different between values and the one in the keyframe header. You get the point, has to be the exact number for every single one within that animation. No expectation to the rule and hence why it takes so long to manually do keyframes. You have to enter the value over and over and over and over and over...

Crab didn't fail for me individually. My keys where fine short of a few overall settings and lack of header, the nif was a mess. Else again the problem I saw with your Crab is the Nif was inverted where the Nodes were inside the Editable meshes. Because of it the models were not attached to the bones thus not being moved. The armature was probably moving but you can't see it in CTool or game of course. Cool about getting it working. Adjusted to looping? Like Cycle in Nifskope or in some other program? Straight away I noticed I can't look at the animation track in 2.49b. I may be missing something but others online say the same problem for that version. Add speaking of FBX it's ability to import usable formats like FBX or PSK for example is well terribly nonexistent. I did try importing an animated Milkshape file but no effect. An animated DAE and no effect. Unless you know something about it? Otherwise yes I think adding one at a time is the way. My understanding from Valandar back when was that's the way it's normally done in Max anyways. I have his keyframe workfile on my hard drive still. Sadly not his meshing one which is also lost even from the Wayback.

You got me thinking and I'm going through a ton of animated models on my drive, mainly drawing from Android games and ones that are comic book related. It would be awesome to import them (especially Doctor Octopus!). Kind of kicking myself too. It seems a few of my favored files are lost to both my two hard drives ago and the internet for that matter. I had the legit Alchemy suite for example given to me by one the developers at Activision a long time ago. So I could draw from X-Men Legends and Ultimate Alliance and such. Other large work files are gone too. I could have sworn they were on my last drive which I still have and an IDE of course (two, one for each drive version).

Wish Windblown was around actually. They know way more. Or Gren for that matter. He would probably blink and answer these questions without so much as squinting about it.

[Randomdays]

Going to try working on a few things today since I'm off.

The looping idle - Changed in nifskope - all NiKeframeControllers were set to clamp so I switched them all to Cycle normally.

With Blender 2.49b I tried importing various animated meshes like dae, etc and opening a legacy Blend, but no animation when tested.

You said something about nifscripts for Milkshape? I was only able to find some specific for the Bridge Commander game, which are a very early form of nif.

Looked some more at the Crab in Max. Tried deleting all the animations but idle and then exporting the nif with the embedded kf again, but all the animations were still there in nifskope. The walkthru I have for converting NWN to NWN2 has you selecting the idle and then exporting it out as an single anim granny2 file, so I might see if I can combine the unanimated nif with that and see if they work together.

Windblown does pop in occasionally - without his help a few months ago I'd probably still be stuck with nothing moving. He's even skinning a bit and Heroforce has a "coming soon" for his work on their site.

I keep hoping he or someone else would popup and wave their magic wand of knowledge.

[Randomdays]

Checked over the Spider's kfs again and found that while the animation was .8 seconds long, some of the NiKeyframeControllers had their Quaternion keys ending earlier.

I adjusted all the final keys for each bone to end at .8, and rechecked in the character viewer and no more disappearing legs! I also tried a new mesh form UO, an Ancient Dragon, and went through the process I has set up for UO files;

1) convert the grn files to the updated gr2 format with granny viewer
2) opened the dragon mesh and its idle animation in Noesis
3) exported out to the fbx format with the "oldversion" argument
4) Imported the fbx to Max 8
5) exported out to a nif with embedded kf
6) imported the nif to Blender 2.49b
7) exported the nif and kf out as separate files for FFvt3R
8) adjusted the kf to cycle with flags of 40.
9) checked it in Character viewer, and saw a working idle dragon. The weight painting is slightly off, so I'll have to adjust that.

A pretty long process to go through, but I think worth it to get a new format and its animations working for FFvt3R.

This mesh also had part of the body vanishing, caused by the same problem as above. Adjusting the times fixed this problem as well.
I'll try setting the dragon with a complete set of kfs and see how he looks.

I think that I should be able to import any of the UO models with their kfs. The major breakthrus were getting updated fbx scripts for max, using the oldformat argument in Noesis, and SA's help with the vanishing mesh parts during the animation.

SA has been a huge help with this, so many thanks there!

With the above, you can get animated meshes into Blender 2.69 (also checked with 2.62 and it seemed to work) by exporting daes or fbx from Noesis. But so far, using Max is the only way I've found to turn it into a nif. Maybe if there's better nif scripts for Milkshape than the ones I have, SA can work through that to make some progress.

[SickAlice]

See, hence my whole thing about wanting a keyframe program that does checksums and handles a preset amount of stuff. So like one of those features would be that clamp/cycle attribute and you'd tick a checkbox and the program would do it to the whole thing. And it would add dummy strings where tracks were missing a string. Adjust end times to the header of keyframes. Yadda yadda. I figured out at some point I probably would have spent less time to have dropped myself at a tech school taking the right programming class and making this thing then I had manually combing animation settings. It is of course a lacking thing with what came with the tool suite for modding this game. We got the art manipulation stuff, official code stuff not so much.

Milkshape right, that's the one I have. BC (Star Trek) is the one on site. The ones I had and that's on the lost drive and lost to the internet now where developed from Niflib at the same time as Nifskope and the Blender plugins. They imported the various games, Freedom Force included and likewise exported but to a limited degree. I can't find a copy of those anywhere online at all anymore. Though then they were sites that are now defunct and/or forums that are (I think NPI forums then for me here).

Those darn end times! I tell you and welcome. I know it's a pain and time consuming, I avoid it when and where I can. Like building Spider-mobile keyframes which is the webshooters you wanted I can't for example. But again that vanishing issue is one of two things and if it happens at a specific time it's that one.

There is a third rare instance where a mesh is baked/weighted but is not weighted to say one specific called upon node/bone that are called up in the keyframes. More often though that one results in "dragging" where those vertices will stay in place as the rest pull away and move to the animations. But if it's a large enough area that can make it vanish and then the solution is to re-cook the thing. My trick is to shrink the piece in Blender, say if it's the hand for example but not the fingers nor forearm I'll shrink it down so it's inside just the hand, weight it than scale it back. I do that with weighted weapons since like with a sword a lot of the faces are too far from the bones and mesh and won't pick up the weight painting. Else the other is delete any of the parts of the model being copied from leaving just the desired faces, this say if you have a piece that's too close to other body parts. But again there I feel shrinking works just as well if not better. It's too hard to visually see in Blender if there's maybe a single vertice that's too close or not. So long as it's in whatever choice area it will snap up just those bones weights. I make a copy of the model at this point so I have a template to resize the weighted piece back too. When I release Lady Death finally you might see where I did this in the Nif. That's a real complex nif and keyframe I'm making, hopefully it will provide a decent service to modders.

[windblown]

Those are some cool imports! It's great to see new keyframes in FF 

btw, I'm still around (less than I'd like though). Just let me know the file that you want me to check and what should I look for. My knowledge is mostly based in trial/error though, so maybe I'm not able to achieve it, I'll do my best though.

[Randomdays]

Thanks Windblown.

Sent you some files to take a look at. Take your time and anything you can figure out will be appreciated.

One quick question on contact points - now that I figured out that they're need for melee to work correctly, are they needed in any other animations?

For the disappearing limbs problem. changing the time on the keys fixed the new UO spider and dragon problem, as well as the AO octopus. The other two with that problem, the AO snake and crayfish are better, but still not completely fixed. yet.

Update - for the UO Ancient dragon, except for the idle animation, exporting the nif with embedded animation crashes Max. Trying with the UO spider - I've done 4 kfs so far without a crash. It does look like though that because of the way the game handles animations compared to FFvt3R, I'll have to go into each animation and change the times, since they're not all the same length.

This might be a case by case basic where some creatures work and some won't.

Looking at the animations available for the game, they're pretty much standard for the monsters - attack, die, hurt,etc. Some of the human animations though could be fun if I can get them to work - argue, attack from different mounts, attack with different weapons (crossbow, mace, etc), different spell casting, applaud, blow kiss, bow, different dances, drunk,among others - setup for both male and female. Even sit, which I remember was asked for a while ago,

If the spider gets done without any problems, I'll see how the humans go. Since the meshes are from a RPG, the base skins are in their underwear, with the various hairstyles and clothing/ armor meshes having their own skins on top. I'd have to pick a few choices and add them to the base mesh if and when I work on them.

[SickAlice]

Likewise good to still you're still around WB. Hoping you get hosting figured out, I want to look at your work. I'm having trouble with our server myself lately and can't seem to find our boss anywhere. I'm spending more time than I'd like on it myself which means life is stalled out at this point though I'm not complaining, I'm in a better position than most and entitled to such things as this.

[windblown]

Thanks Windblown.

Sent you some files to take a look at. Take your time and anything you can figure out will be appreciated.

You got mail. Let me know if you have any doubt because English is not my first language and this is quite difficult to explain.

One quick question on contact points - now that I figured out that they're need for melee to work correctly, are they needed in any other animations?

You need the text key "contact" for melee animations, and the textkey "leave_hand" for ranged/area/direct animations (the time that you set for those text keys is the moment when the power acts on the enemy).

Update - for the UO Ancient dragon, except for the idle animation, exporting the nif with embedded animation crashes Max. Trying with the UO spider - I've done 4 kfs so far without a crash. It does look like though that because of the way the game handles animations compared to FFvt3R, I'll have to go into each animation and change the times, since they're not all the same length.

This might be a case by case basic where some creatures work and some won't.

Looking at the animations available for the game, they're pretty much standard for the monsters - attack, die, hurt,etc. Some of the human animations though could be fun if I can get them to work - argue, attack from different mounts, attack with different weapons (crossbow, mace, etc), different spell casting, applaud, blow kiss, bow, different dances, drunk,among others - setup for both male and female. Even sit, which I remember was asked for a while ago,

If the spider gets done without any problems, I'll see how the humans go. Since the meshes are from a RPG, the base skins are in their underwear, with the various hairstyles and clothing/ armor meshes having their own skins on top. I'd have to pick a few choices and add them to the base mesh if and when I work on them.

That sounds great, especially if those human animations can be added to the FF ones.

[Randomdays]

Thank you very much, Windblown. Those problems solved at least.

On the UO imports - On the spider, the mesh simple vanished at the start of the combat animation. I had already fixed the times on the quatkeys, so I'm not sure why. With the death animation, the spider rolled over on its back with its legs flailing around. Exporting to nif in Max crashed the program. With the dragon problems, and some male human crashes with exporting the melee animations, I'm thinking that if the animation is too complex, it will crash Max out. Since max is the only way I have to get the granny 2 animations into a nif, I'm kind of stuck there.

For the male human, the mesh turned out to be a skeleton only. Since UO is a rpg, all the different body parts are separate meshes as I thought - even the unclothed- underwear basic body is different parts. Instead of dealing with all that, I took a male basic boots from FF1 and rigged it to the armature. The first 4 animations, idle, melee idle, walk, and run worked fine, but the two combat animations crashed max with the nif export.

The armature is very similar to standard FF meshes - Bip01 pelvis, Bip01 head, etc. I tried a standard FF kf on the UO armature and had no reaction. With the UO kf on a FFvt3R reaction, I got a "twisted" mesh that had the idle animation going.

Windblown, I'm going to add a couple of "social" animation in if I can and send it your way to look at compatibility when done.

I surely wish that the newer Blender versions had better kf support, that max worked better, or some other program was out there. I see that Maya and "Outfit Studio" offer some nif support, but it doesn't look like kfs are included.

[Randomdays]

Well, I just don't know - a very complex animation of the character choking to death on poison, grabbing his throat and then sprawling on the ground on his stomach and dying exported from Max fine. But animations of the character waving, saluting and folding his arms crashes the program.

The problem of my kfs exporting out empty might be that you have to set up a "dope Sheet" with notes for the beginning and the end of the animation and attach it to the mesh for the animation to export as a kf instead of embedded.

Max is a pain.

[Randomdays]

Well,I would say I'm stuck again.

I'm not sure why Max 8 crashes on some nifs with embedded kfs and not others. The empty kf export problem still persists. If anyone knows how to do that properly, using the dope sheet and setting up the keys that could solve the problem.

I can get the complete animated mesh out in gr2 or fbx format, but once again, can't get it into Blender 2.49b to get out again as a kf.

I tried working with the Nexus Buddy 2 program, but its specifically written for Civ5 gr2 files.

[Randomdays]

With all the frustration with the UO files, its easy to forget the things that are going right.

Thanks to SA and Windblown, some of the problems I've been having are solved;

The AO octopus and snake are fixed - The NWN snake has been rigged to the AO armature and is read to go as soon as I add the bounding box. The octopus is having its animations done, but its a slow process since its got a lot of bones I have to go through on each animation to fix the disappearing parts problem.

The octopus has an alternate skin and the the snake has 5 skins. Once the octopus is done, I'll rig a more normal mesh to it so Benton can use it if he wants. It'll be more useful than the one I already sent him.



The AO Scorpion, the Civ4 Spider and all the meshes based off of them can now climb walls.

The Oblivion Mud Crab now has a normal looking run. If I can follow what Windblown did, the opens all the Oblivion meshes up again for import.

The updated kfs and the completed snake and Halloween Witch will be up soon. Also working on the black cat's animations to get that done.

RD

[spydermann93]

That Octopus would make for some great Atlantean mayhem!

[Randomdays]

The Octopus is coming along nicely - there's a bit of vanishing on a couple of arms. I'll be asking for help from Windblown or someone willing to help if they can on that and other things. Still trying to figure something out.

Looking over the Nexus Buddy 2 program and some Civ Forums, I think it might be possible to turn their granny meshes and animations into nifs. Not sure if there's anything there, with the large amount of content available from Civ4 already.

I don't have gmax installed at the moment, but. that might be an alternate to max 8. Something to try again in the future.

On the UO male basic - not quite so frustrating - tried importing five more animations;

Drunk Idle - just weaving a little but - Crash!

Applause - Hands clapping - no problems - character claps his hands - thank you!

Argue - The main mesh was way above the base bone so the character jumped into the air while arguing. I was able to adjust that and get him back down. The anim also has him turning to the side while arguing.

Grasp head with hands and shakes head - well, instead of grasping his head his arms are out in front like he's saying "No!"  Maybe my rigging. The mesh vanishes at the end of the animation for some reason.

Folk Dance 1 - Now you too can river dance! - Mesh vanishes in the middle of the animation for some reason.

[SickAlice]

I can take a look at the octopus but I can take a good guess and whatever keyframes are related to those tentacles have mismatched times or some other value isn't lined up, usually the case.

[Randomdays]

Thanks SA. I'll package with a couple of other files That You can look at if you want. One is a crayfish- centaur like creature that has the same problem. I had sent it to Windblown but haven't heard back on that one yet. The snake that he fixed, the crayfish and the Octopus all have the same problem - parts disappearing at the very end of the melee animation.

Here's Windblown's explanation of how he fixed the snake - "The NWN2 snake on the AO Snake: I watched the animation on the character viewer and detected the part that disappeared. I opened the nif on Nifskope to see what bone is the one that affect that body parts. It's "Bone22". I opened the kf file and looked for the Bone 22 on the melee animation (240 NiKeyframeController), as you can see, there are two keys on the scales section, so I deleted them (put 0 instead of 2 and refresh it with the green arrows). It's working now, so I did the same with the melee_2."

So it might be a scaling problem for the two others. The crayfish and the octopus I think have multiple parts disappearing.

The other problem he fixed that's a big help is the forward motion of the mesh during animation for kfs from Oblivion and Morrowind. His fix should work on any mesh from those games for that problem. Here's his explanation for that - "The Oblivion  Mud Crab: I opened the nif in Nifskope to see what bone is the one that affects the whole body, these can be Bip01, Bip01 Spine0 and Bip01 NonAccum. I opened the kf file and looked for them on the run animation, if there were keys on the translations section, I deleted them as I explained before."

Windblown - I hope you don't mind me releasing the info above. I figure it'd be helpful for anyone who doesn't know a lot about kfs.

I'll be packaging up the "male_basic_uo" set so you can see how compatible it is with FF male_basic, and to look at the problems with some of the anims mentioned above.

SA, I can put that up as well if you'd like to take a look at it.

One thing I noticed with the human kfs  - I think that every animation for FF has a NiKeyframeController for every bone that sets its location, even if its not used in that  animation - like the legs in a "wave" animation. IT looks like UO doesn't do that. In the Character viewer, idle only sets up about half the bones, so it looks different after a run that it does after a walk.