[SKY] Tools needed to work on animations?

[BrettM]

I need a hint to get me started. If I want to fix these animated salmon to turn them into decent aquarium fish, what tools do I need? Are there any good tutorials on getting started with Skyrim animations?

[Leonardo]

There are a few tutorials I found on Nexus.  I know it isn't much, but a least it gets you started.

 

Animation tutorial for 3DsMax

Skyrim Guides and Tutorials

 

You can always check the library of tutorials that exist on TESA.  Good luck whatever you wanted to do.

[BrettM]

Thanks. 3Ds seems a little pricey for someone who isn't planning to do a lot of animating, but I'll go that way if I have to. I had already searched the tutorial library here and came up dry. The Nexus link you provided doesn't seem to have anything relevant. I'll keep googling until I turn up something that gives me a foothold on getting started with this.

 

Edit: I think I'm starting to get an inkling, but I need some pointers.

 

There are actually TWO animations in the FX file.

 

One is the animation that controls the bones and produces the swimming wiggle of the body. It seems to correspond to the regular salmon animation that is controlled by some "hkx" file that I guess needs to be converted to "kf" for import into Blender. Except that the FX makes no reference to the hkx file. The same animation seems to be built into the salmon in FXAmbWaterSalmon, with no need for any external source of animation data.

 

However, I have no desire or need to mess with that animation, though I need to know how to put each fish in the starting position I want and have his bones come with him. Applying any translation or rotation to the fish in NifSkope seems to move the body further than the bones instead of keeping both together, and I have no idea how to change that.

 

The second animation simply determines the location and angle of the body in any given frame, like a stop-motion animation of a wooden block moving around a table. That's the thing I need to fix, and there is no hkx, kf, or any other kind of file I can feed Blender to modify the existing animation. Can I generate this animation data from scratch somehow, perhaps by creating a new animation using a dead salmon with no skeleton, and then attach it to the FX salmon after I export it? Or is there a way to export this positioning data from the nif in a form that Blender can use?

 

Or am I pointed completely in the wrong direction?

Edited October 4, 2013 by BrettM