Hey guys, Im trying to make a "combined" animation. I want an Ogre to pick up an npc by the scruff of his neck, smack him around a bit, and then chuck him really far away.....

How in the hell do I this?! Ive been puzzling over it for over a week now....

I can make an animation for the ogre picking something up...

I can make an animation for an NPC being smacked around and thrown away....

What I cant even being to touch upon is how I would get these animations working flawlessly together? I can add static objects to an animation but in this case both actors would be fully independant as I would like this to be tiggered on any npc in the game (the orgre would be summonable)

After downloading a few er, 'questionable' japanese mods to see how such animations work, I know that combined npc to npc animations can be done....I just cant understand them enough to figure out how it has been managed. What I did learn is that many of the animations positions seem to be controlled via an .ini file. Does anyone know how I would even start to go about this? With so little info available about this.....Well I would REALLY appreiciate any help or pointers!

I think Bethesda might have had a hard time doing something like that too -


Spoiler Alert for those who have not played Oblivion yet..:


If you look in "meshes\creatures\endgame\battle.nif", you'll see that in order to get two entities to interact in a complex animation, they basically put them both in the same nif.

There might be a way to do what you want to do, without resorting to the setup above, but I am not sure what that would be.

Maybe using summoned XMarkers that tells the NPC where to be standing or laying during parts of your ogre animation, so that the ogre can play its attack anims with NPC in proper place?
Maybe the Idle Manager can be used to make ogre and NPC interact in correct order, by spelling out when each would play their respective animations?

Heck, I even thought of making an "inventory" clutter "idle" object, that is actually an ogre set to animate in specific sequence. The NPC has the ogre put in their inventory as an anim "idle object" when the ogre is to attack that specific NPC, and then using the "Anim Objects" (or is it "Idle Objects" ??) section in CS to set up what animation to play with the ogre and the human (the same animation can affect both the human and idle object at same time, like with the juggling balls used in Shivering Isles - so it is possible). Actually, this would be the most seamless way to go about things...

The "idle Object" route, is the most stable way I can think of to have an NPC interact and animate together with another object. The ogre would not be a creature, and would not be able to be killed, but it you unsummon it after it has thrown the NPC and if it is supposed to be invincible, then you shouldn't have a problem.

I've never attempted this, though, nor have I worked with Idle Objects.

Koniption

The only Combined Actor animations that Oblivion can do are NPC's attached to Mounts all others would be a scripted to seem combined solution like placing actors at two predefined positions from each other and triggering the 2 seperate anims at the same time so they seem to be in sync.

As for any specific mods that use outside tools and ini's to try to attach 2 actors together I doubt that is whats going on.

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As for your problem your best Option is to convert the Ogre into a Mount (there is a tutorial on exactly how that is accomplished and the tool required for doing it), then through scripting and animations you force the npc to mount the Ogre(Mount) at that point the HorseMount SI (you have to set this up and create it) will play you can then force the Ogre(Mount) to kick the NPC off through a custom HorseUnmount SI.

Problem being only NPC's can mount anything so it will not work for creatures....

I will add that I have personally done this to animate climbing up and down stairs/walls/ropes and well as making it seem like the player is using a whip Indiana Jones/Metroid Style to to swing across chasms and other obsticles -> works perfectly when done right.