Animation Tutorial

Looks very comprehensive. Nice! 

I've tried making animations in the past, but they always got corrupted on the export. Maybe following your tutorial will help me find where I went wrong. :) 

Thanks for the tutorial :)

great! thank you.

Hi Deadman,
Your Instructions show Max 2011-14 as optional.
I have 2010 and 2015.  Should I reinstall 2010 for max compatibility (not a pun) or will '15 be fine?

Cheer's for that.
Luckily '12 is the oldest Autodesk will give me and I have '10 on disk. I'll install both tonight.

This is really awesome. I actually have animating experience, but I've never really gotten into animating for TES since the process has always seemed so troublesome. Not the animating itself (which I love) but the process of importing it into the game, and getting it to work etc. 

I actually have Max 2011 installed, I might just take a look at it. Thanks!

Great tutorial. But i want to make first person combat animations for the player. I tried following the tutorial but when I attempted to load the previously generated txt bonelist file havok content tool, it tells me that the bonelist includes bones that either don't exist or are named differently than the bones in my scene. I generated the bonelist txt file from the file skeletonfirst.hkx found under meshes\actors\character\_1stperson\characterassets using the dumplist function in hxkcmd.exe

And to summarize what I did in 3ds max 2010, I imported skeleton.nif from \meshes\actors\character\_1stperson . Then I imported 1st person kf animations (exported from hkxcmd) on top of the skeleton.nif. The animations look fine when I played them in 3ds max, but once exported into the game using havok content tool they become totally broken with arms twisted and fingers misplaced.

I have made many 3rd person animations using havok content tool + 3ds max 2010 so far using the bonelist made by xp32. But xp32 didn't make a bonelist for the first person skeleton and he seems to have gone AWOL since then. I've been trying to make it on my own but never had any success. Does anyone have any idea what I may have done wrong?

One strange thing I noticed is that when I open the skeleton.nif in Nifskope, I can see two camera nodes, Camera1st [Cam1] and Camera Control. But when skeleton.nif is imported into 3ds max I end up with four camera nodes, namely Camera01, Camera02, Camera03, Camera04. Does anyone here know why this happens?

There is a good tutorial in russian here about creating animations and behavior files for Skyrim including custom tools, maybe it would be helpful

http://modgames.net/forum/216-12839-1

http://modgames.net/forum/216-12828-1

It shows all steps in youtube videos. I can translate parts of it if needed.

Thanks for the links Zilav. It's always good to see tutorials that I haven't seen before, even if it's in Russian :) I had a look at the tutorial video in the first link. It seems Mr Apyonov has demonstrated everything except the one bit of detail that I happened to need. At 17:23, he navigates to the Create Skeletons page in the havok content tools plugin interface, where it appears he's using the option "Automatic" under "Build Rig". This works for simple animations like opening and closing visor because there're only 2 or 3 bones involved. With creatures and especially humanoids, the bone structure is a lot more complex and is usually hierarchical. Hierarchical bone structures cannot be preserved when you build the rig using the Automatic option from what I understand. So we will instead have to select the option "From File" at that step, and then browse to a 'bones list' txt file that nominates the list of bones that are involved, in a certain hierarchical order. And in my case I need to know how to make this bonelist txt file and more specifically, how to determine in what order the bones have to be listed in that file.

p.s. I've always wanted to learn Russian or maybe Polish or Czech or maybe even Slovenian or Serbo-Croatian but I heard Slavic languages are even more difficult than German and Icelandic so I guess I'll wait, until I grow wiser with age.

Try to PM this guy on official forum

http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1515802-info-behavior-by-havok-animation-tools/

he created some of those tools, uses name of "anton" on the modgames forum I linked. Maybe he could help.

Thanks Zilav I'll pm Anton tomorrow or Sunday and see if he can help me with my problem.

@Deadman I'll try playing around with the bone list and I'll let you know if I discover anything useful.

I might be getting somewhere. I altered a few things in xp32's maximum skeleton for 3rd person in 3ds max to suit the bonelist generated from skeletonfirst.hkx via the dumplist function in hkxcmd.exe. (The same bone list can also be found on Saidenstorm's website if you can't be bothered generating one yourself) To be more specific, I added the "x_" prefix to all the skirtbones on xp32's skeleton, and removed all the "x_" prefixes from NPC LookNode [Look], NPC Translate [Pos ], NPC Rotate [Rot ]. Then I unlinked "NPC Translate [Pos]" from "NPC COM" and moved it down to (global)z=-120.5 because for some reason the default postion causes the arms to float way above the camara in game. Not sure why the translate bone has to be that far below ground for it to work. I suspect this is not the proper way of doing it and maybe I should have let it stay near the default position and link it or attach it to some other bones to prevent the said glitch, but the important thing is my current method worked, for now at least. I've attached the 3ds max file here just in case anyone wants to have a look

Does anyone know where I can still obtain the Havok creation tools mentioned in this tutorial?

Thanks in advance.

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