I am creating a huge library in my mod, and I want the player to be able to read the books in it. The problem is, as soon as I turn on the Havok simulator, all of my neatly arranged books burst out of the bookshelves and fall to the floor! I tried making them static objects, but then they can't be read! Help!!!

Does anybody know what would happen if I went onto Blender, removed the collision box, and then saved it as a new mesh? Would that stop it being affected by Havok?

would'nt it be easier to add a collision box around the bookshelves?

I'd rather do something that prevented the books from moving at all. Even if I used a collision box around the bookshelf as a 'cage', the books would still be squirming around inside the shelves.

Are there any OBSE commands that disable Havok on a certain object?

Is it possible to turn off havoc on books put into the shelves? (will guess here....)

I don't know. There may be a way to disable Havok using OBSE. Does anyone know if OBSE can do this?

Wait a minute, the books on shelves in the vanilla game don't go leaping off on their own. What's different about yours? Did you make your own shelves?

I'd guess that the issue is not with the books, but the shelves. If the collision for the shelves is a simple box outside the books, then they want to be back outside it and will do that. The collision surface needs to be more complex, to allow the books to sit on it.

No, not at all. They're vanilla shelves, but I've put all the books standing upright. When they're Havok'd they tumble over each other, and then fall out onto the floor. I might try placing them closer together, but then they could still try to tumble over each other and end up exploding out onto the floor.

EDIT: Yes!!! The reason that they were falling out was because their collision boxes were knocking into each other, forcing the books apart. Forced into the sides of the bookshelf, they had nowhere else to go but out onto the floor!!! Now that I've moved them further apart, everything works fine!

However, it is extremely annoying that I spent about three hours of hardcoe thinking about this when the solution was so simple!

put them farther apart? ive learned from ingame experiences that putting books to close together can cause them to fly off the shelf.

There's a mod on TESNexus with better book collision meshes. That might help some.

Otherwise, Nifskope has both Collision information in the nif and Motion System information. Removing the Collision might make them non-selectable in order to read them, but changing the Motion System information might keep them from jumping around on you.

Also, because I used the 'fall' command in a tight sopt, their collision boxes were forced into the bookshelf, causing massive clipping.

Now that I've tweaked their location, all is well!