Hi guys, I need to import the base animation into Blender or Max 5 to do some studies, but Blender doesn't seem to finish the import (still processing after more than an hour with no result) and Max 5 with nif importer for that version does crash immediately on import. Does someone have experience with that? Can maybe someone with a powerful PC try to import the base animation into Blender and if success send me the blend-file, would be much appreciated!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

Be patient, it took 5 hours for me to import the baseanim IIRC I'd offer to send it to you, but I did it some time ago before the improvements in animation import, so better to do it again and get a correct blend file.

Would you be able to use LizTail's kf_split tool and look at the component animation groups rather than loading the entire file at once?

@melian: 5 hours!!! That's hard, guess the developers of Morrowind never closed the program once they had loaded it, LOL!!!

@NMZmaster: I need to have the animation inside Blender, cause I wanna study exact text keys and alter parts of the animation!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

There are a few templates for that lying around. I'm not sure where you could find them, but they have the complete animations in .MAX format already. One of the people over at GHF sent me one, once (I'll try to look up a name or find the link). You might check Thanos' Tower, I don't know if there's a copy there.

RX31 has imported several MW animations in Max4 (including base animations). I have these Max files. PP me.

Would you mind uploading them somewhere easy to find? (and somewhere that will stick around, so in the future there's a link we can just hand out for this question). Or PM them to me and I'll put them on Mediafire (assuming that's allowed in the usage).

To be honest I am reluctant to do that ("release" these files) for two reasons: 1. I have no idea about the legal side; 2. RX31 did that some yeas ago, I was embarrassed to asked him for permission for "public" distribution.

RX31 did that with his Max scripts:
http://rx31.rethan-manor.net/pages/animtool.htm

Scripts are working fine in Max8 (slow with big files), unfortunately, in Max2010 these scripts have problems (for me) with biped arms, I have no idea about other Max versions.

Now I remember, I must have that max files somewhere on my external drive, loaded it down a while ago!!! But as I'm very new to max, it'd be much easier for me to work with it in blender. I think I will try to import again and wait some hours til it's finished.


TheDaywalker :rock:

You can use the animation kit to seperate base_anim.kf into smaller .kf sequences, as NMZmaster said, and then use the preview program that comes with the animation kit to make preview .nifs of the animations, but they don't have the text keys attached, so you just copy the text key node over from the .nif's .kf file to get a working, easily importable and useable animation.

The niftools importer for 3ds max takes a lot less time to import base_anim.nif for me, around 2-3 minutes, and my computer isn't that powerful either.
You could import it with that, then maybe import it as a .3ds file into Blender, and see if that takes less time. If you go with this method though use the x.nif from the original base_anim, chances are the one exported wont work well. :shrug:

Have fun animating!

That's wrong: they (preview nifs) do have NiTextKeyExtraData (note track) node but it is parented not to the Bip01 node but to the nif rout node (bug). Hence, simply re-parent it.

.3ds format does not contain animation data; Blender has a working MW animation importer script.



And you get an animation error message, CDT in the worst case scenario. Reason: preview nifs as well as all created in Max custom animation nifs have toe bones, original xbase_anim.nif don't. x.kf file cannot have bones that are not specified in skeleton x.nif, but x.nif can have bones that are not present/animated in the corresponding x.kf file.

It is a nightmare to work with a complete base_anim (206 sequences, ca.5000 frames). So, splitting/merging is an option.
However, be very careful: merge_kf has several bugs ?
1. It supports only linear controllers (check that all bones have specifically this controller type).
2. merge_kf processes carriage return (CR) character in a wrong way: avoid it in your text keys (btw, original animations have CR quite often).
3. merge_kf does not support scale keys.