Hey, If anyone could help me, I have a horse model for morrowind, however, it is not animated. I have tried to animate it, however it just wont work. If anyone knows how, could you please take the model and animate it just like a normal horse? Thanks a whole lot!

Have you checked the MW animation tutorials?
http://www.ageinc.com/Morrowind/Thanos_Tower/tutorials.html

An excellent one on simple animation there.

I looked and tried those, but none were for gmax or nifskope. Any other ideas?

Neither GMax nor NifSkope are designed for animation. GMax is essentially 3dsMax, minus animation (and a couple other things). NifSkope is meant to be a low-level editor, and doing animation is possible but would take forever.
If you want to animate stuff (and you're probably better off doing it yourself, both to stay true to your vision and it'll be faster), you'll need a full modeling program. If you can get Max 5, you're set. Unfortunately they don't make or sell it anymore, so you'd have to run across a copy online or in a store somewhere you can pick up. Otherwise, the more recent copies of Max work ok and people have reported Blender can export NIFs, if you can figure out how to work the thing.

Yes, but with blender, i could not get the exporting\importing nif thing to work even though i spent hours working with it, and i cant afford the real 3ds max. Is there anybody out there would animate this for me?, please?

The Blender nif scripts work perfectly fine, just grab a Blender-Morrowind tutorial and use the settings on there.
Make sure you've got the latest version of the Blender nif scripts with Blender 2.49b. Blender is way better than gmax.

I have blender including nifskripts working installed.
Though it needed to be an older version of Blender in order to be compatible with the Nifskript-version I'm using (These nifskripts aren't the latest either).

-Blender 2.46
-Blender Nifskripts 2.4.9
-Python 2.5.4
-PyFFI-2.0.3

But it works.

There is a tutorial on animating creatures with Blender by me.
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29223

for the case you still want to try it with blender...

Ok, I will look into this. Thanks for the advise and help.

Ok, I DLed and installed everything with the correct versions you specified. And, it still wont load a nif. It wont show up in the import list and it wont load as a blend. :banghead: I have tried and tried. What am i doing wrong?

The latest install instructions:



Then "File->Import->NetImmerse/Gamebryo" and select your NIF to import - if you don't already have a local copy of the game resources you will need to use / copy from the Construction Set CD or extract the files from the BSA (I'm not sure what's being recommended for that ATM).

GMax has animations that export correctly with NiFTools plugin in kf files. But Gmax cannot correct wrong skin pose that often exists in MW files. Gmax does not have CS biped (at that time CS was a Max plugin, now it is a Max integrated "module").
I would definitely use/learn Blender.

Alright, I got blender working and am attmpting to get this horse to life. But ugh. Its a mess lol

the animation of a creature is not much different from the animation of a npc

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=136072&id=8118

after you learn it, you may understand the tutorial by muspila and animate the horse

Ok, thanks! I will try to figure this out!

Ugh, I just cant figure this out. It's like, I have a horses skin, but no skeleton. This is really confusing.

Have you rigged your horse mesh (made a skeleton for it using bone objects)? You have to skin/weight the mesh to the rig afterwards too to get the mesh to move with the skeleton (use vertex painting in blender).
If you don't know how to animate in Blender, learn how to do that first. I suggest the Blender Noob to Pro tutorial (google it).

Hmm, I dont know...... could i use cait's skeleton with it?

Yeah, you can use cait's (then you don't have to mess around making new animations either).
You'll still have to skin/weight the mesh to the skeleton using vertex weight painting (other ways of weighting don't work from what I've heard) but you probably already knew that.

Are there tutorials on how to skin\weight the mesh? I mean, every time i make a little progress, i end up hitting a brick wall. But, anyhow, thanks for all the help!

Yeah, I've answered in Melchior's Oblivion creature downgrading thread.

Ok THanks!