Before anyone says anything, don't worry! I'm not planning on doing anything illegal. I'm perfectly aware of beth's copyright laws.

However, I wanted to inquire about the method of downgrading oblivion creatures for use in Morrowind. They don't seem to use the same X.nif and X.kf formats which Morrowind animations use. Is there a way using blender or nifskope to downgrade a creature made for oblivion for use in Morrowind?

Thanks for any replies,
-Melchior Dahrk

No they aren't. Morrowind's monolithic keyframes are pretty unusual. Freedom Force keyframes are much easier to handle, even though they are the same engine version.
Later Nif based games, such as Oblivion tend to use discreet keyframes, one file for each animation.
I haven't experimented, but if I did, I'd start with trying to convert the keyframes to 4.0.0.2 with NifSkope and the use Liztail's anim kit to combine the separate Oblivion keyframes into valid Morrowind kfs.

Good luck, it sounds a lot of work to me. Working with keyframes is always a lot of work.

Well, I haven't animated for Oblivion myself, so I'm not sure about this at all, but I suppose you'd have to merge the .kfs into one file somehow (I'm not sure if the anim toolkit can merge oblivion .kfs, as it was made for Morrowind). I think you can import oblivion .kfs into your 3d modelling program (or at least max IIRC?) by selecting the matching skeleton .nif in the import window.

I don't know the scale of creatures in Oblivion, hopefully you wont need to rescale the .nif (would require animation editing, scaling the scene root wont work AFAIK, you have to scale the animated root bone).

You'd have to edit, or perhaps place down from scratch the text keys (not sure how similar the text keys are for Morrowind and Oblivion). edit: Btw this isn't hard at all, just tiresome, as long as you know how the text keys are setup. Read a couple of creature tutorials, and read the webpage with the text key list if you don't.

You'd need to get rid of the collision on the creature and create a bounding box for it. edit: This is really easy too. You should be able do it in NifSkope.

Again, I know little about animation in Oblivion, this is just a quick guess from seeing the creatures in Oblivion.
If some of it is wrong, or some things are missing then feel free to correct me, I know screw all about oblivion modding in general.

edit: Didn't see Symon's post. His idea of converting the Oblivion .kfs to 4.0.0.2 first is a good one.

Thank you for the tips both of you! I was honestly hoping this was going to be easier, but perhaps this could be a learning experience for me

But first, I guess I am not quite that familiar with Nifskope. How would I go about converting the keyframes to 4.0.0.2? Would that require renaming the keys/nodes or what-not or is this a simple press of a button? I have Liztail's anim kit, so I may be able to figure out how to combine the seperate Oblivion keyframes into Morrowind kfs with it.

Glad that helped. I found working with keyframes the most tedious operation you could do with NifSkope. If you aren't very familiar with NifSkope already...

You think changing texture paths trivial.
You happily paste nodes from two Nifs together to generate a third.
Think nothing of tweaking a meshes UV.

you might attempt it. Sorry, I doubt it will be easy at all. I've used NifSkope in five different Nif based games (FF, Morrowind, Oblivion, FFv3R, Pirates and Civ4) for years now and it could be very hard.

I have Obvlivion and the customary hoard of mods for it, so if you want to PM the name/source of the keyframes you need converting, I'll look and assess the scope of the work. Be prepared for a sharp intake of breath (grin).

hmmm a while back there was a similar thread but it seems to have been purged from the forums. essentially from what i remeber from that thread theres all so a problem with physics. Basically due to oblvions use of physics the animations for the creatures need to have the physic's animations removed ( i.e those that paly when you pick up a limb still attached to the body, touching the body, throwing a body down hill ect...)

while i dont pretend to know what any of this means, i may have got it completly wrong and those physic animations wont be a problem.

anyway good luck theres a few oblivion mod creatures i would like to see converted to morrowind

Don't you mean upgrading creatures from Oblivion? ^_^

Oh yeah, good point Midget, though I don't think removing physics would be too hard, what might be hard for those unexperienced at animation is making a new Death animation (it is required by the creature really, else it'll look stupid). The creature wont have knockout or knockdown animations either, knockout is the animation played when a creature reaches 0 fatigue so it's good to have, but knockout animations (knocking them over with your weapon) aren't really essential.

Yeah normally the physics stuff is played during and after death... lol. It could be easy to remove similar to static meshes :shrugs: but if its all tied into the death animation then a new death animation would be required.

Oblivion creatures dont have knockdown animations??? Now thats something i didnt know.

Removing un-needed nodes is never usually a problem.
Changing the version of the node can be tricky.
Worse case scenario: nodes are present and needed in the newer version that aren't in the 4.0.0.2 spec.
Animated waves spring to mind.

They use physics for knockdown and knockout too, don't they Midgetalien?

Anyway, Symon seems to know what he's talking about, so i'm going to creep off and let him handle it. :ninja:

I am not sure. I havnt really examined Oblvion creature meshes in any great detail. But i just presumed they worked the smae way as the Morrowind ones in terms of knockout and knockdown.
but yes Symon knows all so i am going to follow Dirnae but in a less stealthy way: :shocking:

(grins) Oblivion has Havoc and ragdoll - it doesn't have physics.

Having played it, I honestly believe that Morrowind simulates real life physics better than Oblivion does.
Last time I picked a coin up from a table in real life, coins a few inches away didn't fly onto the floor. Happens all the time in Oblivion.

The slow motion, floppy death animations of Oblivion can be jaw dropping sometimes, but they are a tad silly and not anything like real life either.

Anyway, this isn't about Havoc really, it shows that converting keyframes means you'd have to source all the required creature animations. Might need to re-purpose quite a few.

Edit:
No he DOESN'T know all - just that it could be very hard and the minimum that would be required. (grin).
Serves me right for offering!

I just heard the name and rolled with it. =P



I meant what I said as a compliment, from the sounds of it I seriously know [censored] all about Oblivion compared to you.
About you knowing all though, that's going a little over the top. =P

same here - didnt mean to offend :nope:

No problem, I did take it as a complement. Just wanted to point out that I've not tried it before, so that even though I have a good idea of how you might do it, I might fail or declare it 'too hard to be worth the effort'.

I once created some keyframes from scratch in NifSkope, to animate a Shadow Cruiser from Babylon5, that I'd exported from Lightwave via a complicated chain of programs into Freedom Force (as a vehicle).

One of the most tedious things I ever did. Never again. Worked though.

Hmmm, yes, keyframes can certainly be a pain in the butt. I've PMed symon, hopefully we'll be able to sort something out.

Thank you all for this conversation. I honestly didn't know most of this, but it makes sense (having only played OB a few times).

Ugh! I was afraid of this. I don't think this is practical.
An animkit extracted sequence is an NiSequenceStreamHelper with a chain of NiTextKeyExtraData's and a chain of NiKeyFrameControler's.
An Oblivion keyframe is an NiControllerSequence with a load of unchained NiTransformInterpolator's and unchained NiSplineCompTransformInterpolator's.

In short they have almost nothing in common, although they do the same job.
I'll poke around but I don't think this is doable. My experience has always been that upgrading Nifs to later versions is doable but downgrading is dicey, without resorting to Blender.
It might be doable in blender but animation support for Nifs is still an on-going project, but getting better every release.

Tried once exporting creature from blender to morrowind (unreal engine 2), only thing that happened was some issues with walk cycle (i was exporting each animation as separate kf and merged it with animkit)

Bummer, thanks for looking into it.

I was wondering after you told me it used an OB creature animation if it would be possible to link it to a Morrowind (or modded) creature animation. Using simply the mesh instead of the animations?


I have blender and I may try that approach, thanks Bahamut.

I would imagine so. I once tried to rig the Oblivion troll to the Uderfrykte Matron skeleton. It worked (sort-of) but the weight painting was beyond me. I think the skeletons would need to be similar for it to work.

Are there tutorials on linking/rigging a model to a certain animation/skeleton and to support deformation (I don't know if that is the correct term)? The same way that BB models are rigged to certain creature skeletons. I've known about this method for a while but never tried it myself.

BUMP. I didn't want to start a new thread to ask this question.

I am trying to do the same thing with an oblivion horse. Since I did not have oblvion, I Dled a grey horse replacer for oblvion just to get the meshes to make a morrowind horse. I Dled Gmax wth the nif plugin and put the various pieces together and exported as a morrowind nif. My problem was that i had no animation for it. It is essentially a "shell". I am trying to use Cait's horse animation with my model, but i have the same problem. I dont know how to link\rig the anim with my skin either. Ob's meshes can be so confusing. lol :gun: :gun: <_< <_<

Sorry for not responding sooner. You're both using Blender, right?

Well, firstly I'm assuming you mean you want to weight the mesh to the armature (using blender terms here).
Linking (or parenting) is just attaching one object to another in the hierarchy, and rigging is when you make the armature/skeleton.

You can read about the armature modifier (the modifier you use to weight the mesh to the armature) here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Advanced_Tutorials/Advanced_Animation/Guided_tour/Mesh/Amodif

You can read about vertex painting here (you have to use vertex painting AFAIK, envelopes wont export correctly): http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Advanced_Tutorials/Advanced_Animation/Guided_tour/Mesh/vg

Because you are using an armature not designed for your mesh (you usually make the mesh first, then the armature, then animate it) you might have to alter the mesh to fit the armature/skeleton. The lattice modifier might be good for this (I've used 3ds max's equivalent, the FFD modifier, to do this before): http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Basic_Animation/Lattice

I think you can also use the Blender bone weight copy scripts to transfer the weighting of the original model attached to the armature, to your new mesh, though I suggest altering it afterwards with weight painting to make full use of the higher poly mesh.

I advise going through the Blender Noob to Pro tutorials to get used to Blender first if you aren't comfortable with it.