Importing an animated Nif into Blender

[Sigurd Stormhand]

OK - Today's question:

 

How do you import an animated Nif, life a static or activator, into Blender and preserve the animation.

 

Specifically - I'm looking at merging the various parts of the vanilla ship together and I'm stuck on the mast - the furled sales are supposed to swing back and forth, but importing the nif into Blender seems to strip the animation out and I cannot find instructions on this anywhere online.

 

I don't want to edit the animated parts, just the rest of the nif, to be able to merge it with the other parts of the ship.

 

Any and all help appreciated.

[BrettM]

Can't you just copy over the nodes controlling animation from the original nif after you create your modified version? If you haven't changed the position of anything animated, or the names and name positions in the string index, it seems like it should be that simple. Otherwise you might have to do some manual editing of the controllers and string index to make everything spiffy again. I've copied a few animated objects into static-nif mashups, and it really wasn't hard to do, just tedious to make sure all the references were pointing to the right things.

[Sigurd Stormhand]

The controller can't be mapped to the parent - apparently. If you've been editing meshes in nifskope that's not the same as importing them into Blender and then exporting them again. Everything relating to the Controller is gone on export, it's wiped out, and the blocks have been reordered.

 

Besides which, as much as I appreciate you attempt to help, this isn't a solution to my problem - how to import, edit, and export a nif whilst maintaining existing animation. I'm going to combine various nifs together at the node level - import three nifs and then reduce the number of niNodes on export. That will mean the blocks will be completely re-ordered, so I doubt you method would work in that case, unless I've missed what you're suggesting doing completely.

[Sigurd Stormhand]

Update: Simply running an import/export from Blender raises the file size by 110kb, despite completely removing all animations and the controller, everything in fact except the "start" and "end" text keys.

[jamochawoke]

I've never had a problem importing animated .nif's into blender (except on morphs, but I eventually figured that out thanks to Throttlekitty).

Perhaps take a screenshot of your import settings (or maybe your process in general) and we can look into how you are importing it?

[Hanaisse]

Are you selecting Import Animation and providing the path the Keyframe File (.kf) when you import?