Skyrim Weapon Animation Mod
Maritza Swims
Dragonborn always looked like a robot when standing or sitting, and have you noticed how woman walk exactly like men? It might also be nice if a secondary weapon shows on a character. New stand or sit idles are easy fixes, but dual sheathing or special body physics (boob jiggle or combat) require some extra steps.
Here I cover how to install new bodies, with or without breast and butt physics, new animations for idles or walks, and having two sheathed weapons show up on your character. In another post I cover my choices for body replacers, skin textures, and more on making characters pretty.
Keep in mind that some non-FNIS custom animations replace existing animations, and for each action you generally get one animation. Your character can sit in a different position, cross-legged or whatever, and will always sit that way with a few exceptions. I share a couple suggestions below under step H.
Note that some (T)BBP options may be pure animations without HDT physics. For these you need a supported walking, running, or combat animation that include bode jiggle. HDT body jiggles reacting to character motion using the in-game physics engine.
I tried this out, but ended up not using these animations. Some animations are covered by XPMSE. The installer lists multiple animation replacements that you may pick with checkboxes. If you want one, best installed before XPMSE.
Be aware that adding a high number of animations increases the chances of CTD (crash) when loading a saved game. Note the number the generator reports and aim for no more than a couple thousand. I recommend not including pose mods on regular play-through; load when you want to take screenshots and unload before continuing play. Workarounds include loading older save file first, or disabling unused animations from animation index text files and re-generating FNIS. Best to plan play-through around heavy-animation mods, choosing supporting mods for that theme, to keep the memory usage down.
After adding a new mod, run the patcher again. Naturally, the patch file must load after weapon and armor plugins. It may be easiest to keep the patch file last so as not to have to move it whenever running the patcher.
Some mods support alternate styles, but you may want other styles for other weapons. Do you like two swords on back? Easy. With custom sword drawing animation? Depends. XPMSE covers some, or if you did step D, you may have it. Keep in mind that these animations are 1-to-1 replacers, so changing them mid-game or having different animations for different characters may not happen without extra work. Using the MCM, you can let each character sheath their weapons in different styles.
Check your character and NPCs for animation, custom idle, custom walk, and skin textures. If you find a problem, review installation order and mod load order. Pure texture replacers can be re-installed, and pay attention to file overwrites to achieve your desired result.
Included in the mod is replacement animations for all weapons and devices shown in the first person. There is also new particle effects for muzzle flashes and ejecting shells for all weapons. I have also included new sounds organized in folders for ease of use. As a note Parts I and II are now obsolete. The final version has everything included. All previous issues have been fixed and you can now enjoy the mod crash and bug free.
Visuals There may be less visual mods than you may be used to with a modded game, but there is good reason for that. The game has a pretty unoptimized renderer, built on now 20 year old DirectX 9.
Mesh replacers are often grossly unoptimized, which is disastrous, since the mesh pipeline is the main performance bottleneck.
ENBs may make for pretty screenshots, but they are near-impossible to play with due to the many bugs, performance problems, and vision-obscuring effects they use.
Texture mods often suffer from being inadequately oversized, which leads to wasteful memory usage and increased loading times and stutter. They also create a great disparity between the new textures and the vanilla textures, both in quality and in style, making for some jarring texture transitions or seams. Creating a Separator in MO2
- Right-click the empty space in the left pane of MO2 and select Create Separator.
- Name the separator Visuals.
- Main File - Faster Pip-Boy Animation (2x) 1.0
Anniversary Animation Pack Installation instructions:
- Main File - Anniversary Anim Pack
Not included, but really needed is some basic knowledge of 3ds max and rigging and animating. If you never rigged and animated anything before, all this might be very overwhelming for you, but for anyone who has at least some rigging and animation experience, and even better - some realization of how 3d animation works in general - all this should be really easy to follow.
If you want to start animating for Fallout4 or any other game, but you have no experience with animation and rigging, I'd suggest you starting with someting else first. But if you absolutely sure that you want to make animations for FO4 (or need to), then I'd sugget you first going through some tutorials.
I may suggest Digital Tutors, tutorials like intro to 3ds max, rigging (preferably not CAT or Biped but tutorials about making custom rigs, they will give you the understanding you need.) and animation.
2. You make your animation however you like. By default skeleton is connected to the CAT rig, but you can switch it to Biped using F4AK Rig Connector (documented below). The reference body mesh in the scene will move with the rig if the skeleton is bound. Disconnect and Reconnect with the F4AK Rig Connector to bind if the body doesn't move. Freezing the reference body meshes allows for easy rig access.
6. In the "Create Skeletons" filter settings on the right, you need to select From File and pick the FO4_Human_3rd_Rig.txt. Sometimes you may have to refresh it, by choosing some other option, then From File again. And selecting a file. It will just load the list of bones and their order from that file. This is also the list of bones which will have animation on them. But it's really easy to break this file, because order and names are important, so you can experiment with it, but carefully.
Any MESH object in 3ds max scene, is there just for preview purposes. It won't be exported with animation. Max scene files come with a few meshes included, you can Hide and show them however you like. For example, there is a CBBE body which might be more pleasant to look at while animating. Also there are a few hair styles. And you can import more meshes. How? Described in another section of this text.
It is possible to export 1st person animations using this Kit.To do it you need to follow the same workflow as before, with just a few exceptions.1.Use the FO4_Human_1st_Rig.txt (thanks to MaikCG) instead of FO4_Human_3rd_Rig.txt2.Follow the guide from MaikCG
What I have to tell you. For all animation F4 using identical skeleton. And of course weapon bones saved with them. The difference in these two skeletons - in the 1st person skeleton absence 14 bones for skinning, it has no effect on the animation, as well as an absence of bone CamTarget in the Fallout4Rig1st.txt for HCTAnimations for the FPS weapons (\Actors\Character\_1stPerson\Animations) - weapon directed at the axis +Y, neck and head rotated back by 90 degrees so as not to accidentally fall into the camera. Body movement only in order to hands not stretched. HCT export with preset AnimationExport1stPerson.Animations for the TPS - the same direction at the axis +Y. Most of the animation is done in place. Locomotions to do with the actual shift skeleton root. Still need to change the position of the Camera and CamTarget bones, as its default offset from the character is taken from an animation file. HCT export with preset AnimationExport3rdPerson.For weapons exists a set of common animations (Actors\Character\Animations) and an additional set which stores the individual weapons pose bones (Actors\Character\Animations\Weapon). I looked up a couple of files, there is no even animation, just a pose.
All annotations for animations recorded in Note track. Warning! Note track should not be added to the main track Root object, it should be added to the transformation track.In any case, use vanilla animations as an example.
First you need to disconnect the skeleton from the rig, using F4AK Rig Connector.Now, Import FBX , in the FBX importer settings choose "File content: Update animation" (by default "Add and update animation"). It should load animation onto existing skeleton, as far as the joint names match.
Blender currently (Jul 2016) does not have all the tools to export animations for F4. However, if you are experienced with it, you can use Blender to animate a character, then use Max or Maya to do the export.To do this you need to import FBX into blender. Animate it however you want. Then export the animation to FBX.
Basically you can open any vanilla animation after converting it to FBX, load definition, bake animation to rig and fix anything you want. Unlike 3ds max animation to rig load approaches, this will be 100% accurate to vanilla animations.Unfortunately, right now this Guide does not include any tutorials about how to use Motion Builder, but it may be here later.You will still have to export your animation through HCT-supporting software.
Then the tested and working way to test it is to export animation as PoseA_JetUse.hkx and put it into this folder (you can create it yourself, or extract Animations archive and replace a file):steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Data\Meshes\Actors\Character\Animations\MT\NeutralThen, in the game, open console with , and type:player.playidle IdleUseJetAnd you should see your animation playing.
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