I apologize if this is a duplicite thread but I've spent hours searching for answer and found none. Only acknowledgement of the problem in aeon's Noob Tutorial.

While creating custom idle character animations, I'm having problem understanding how to translate character's center correctly in order to achieve things like sitting on the ground or jumping. When I do it by switching off the NPC COM bone with Bone Tools, I can shift the body in 3DS anim just fine of course, but it doesn't work correctly when exported in Skyrim.

Simplest example:

I switch off the NPC COM, do simple pelvis rotation, segment it to keyframes by saving & reloading the animation, mark the start/end notes and export. Pelvis transformation is completely ignored while playing the idle in Skyrim. However when I also animate any children of pelvis and spine, like thigh & arm rotations, these work correctly.

I tried to tinker with NPC COM itself, translating it upwards to elevate character above ground, but in Skyrim the character simply got prolonged between spine and pelvis, while standing on the ground. As if pelvis was unaffected by translation.

Using 3DS Max 2012, hkxcmd from Nexus. Tried with both vanilla & custom skeletons, same result. I'm expanding the animation from 1st frame of vanilla mt_idle.

Any hint will be greatly appreciated.