I'm making a toy centurion, and I'm having a problem with setting the scale of a creature in a script. The problem is the creature's collision makes it impossible to put the little guy on a bookshelf. He does fine on tables, but a shelf causes his collision to kick in and sets him on the floor underneath the bookshelf.

When the token item is dropped, it uses PlaceAtMe to place the creature. The scale is then set in the creature's script. I did it this way because I want the creature's scale to be set to 0.1, which is too small to set in its object references.

So, I tried editing the .nif file to make the creature itself smaller, and it has a problem with nodes. The scale is set fine, but the creature is floating in the air, and I can't figure out how to fix it. I tried lowering it on the z axis, but as soon as I hit "apply" in nifskope, it bounced back up to its original position.

Is there any way to fix this?

The creature gets positioned back to it's original position, because the position is determined by the animation. If you only want to have a static toy, you can take the xnif as artfile, because it does only contain geometry (no animation). If you want to scale it down, you would have to scale down any single node, cause scaling on the 0NiNode will get ignored!!! My advice would be to do this in blender, there is no special knowledge required, just scaling all down and re-export it.

To erase collision inside NifSkope, you'll have to choose Render->Show Hidden and collision-meshes will get displayed. For Bounding Boxes you have to turn on Render->Havok. If you rightclick on those shapes you can choose to remove them. Hope that helped!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

I'll see what I can do. I'll play around until I get it working somehow. Thanks for the advice!

The best way I've used for scaling animated objects, is by scaling down the animated root node (not scene root), this is Bip01 for most creatures, and then scaling down the translation animations on the root node by the same amount.
If you find yourself stuck with this, pm me the .nif along with what scale you'd like it at, and I'll scale it down quickly for you.

edit: You'll also need to edit the Bounding Box with this method, to fit the smaller model, this is easy in the latest versions of Nifskope though, as you can just right click on the Bounding Box NiNode and select edit->bounds (or something like that).

I'm trying to scale three standard creatures on the Morrowind CS disk, The Sphere Centurion, Steam Centurion and Spider Centurion. I can't find any listed Bip01 in nifskope for these creatures though. There's NiKeyFrameController. Is that what I'm looking for?

Also, I'm using Nifskope 1.0.20. Is there a later version that still handles Morrowind nifs well?

Well, as TDW said, you're best doing it in Blender, that should make it clearer for you.
Doing this in NifSkope is possible... but tricky and time consuming. One of the NiNodes should be named Bip01 btw.

You'll need to do some extra editing for my method, so try out TDW's first, if it's just a toy creature.
Anyway, I cba to explain what I mean atm, do you want me to give it a go in max later?

I'm sure TDW could show you how to do this in Blender if you want to scale it yourself, he's pretty damn good with Blender.

It's a fully functional creature, but just reduced down to a scale of 0.2 or 0.1. I've made it much weaker to match its size though. I would kind of like a good excuse to finally try to learn how to do something in blender, so I'll give it a shot myself and see how it goes. If I can't get it to work, I'll come back begging for some more help.