Now, I'm a complete newbie at animations... Sort-of. I used to be able to make character animations in Blender, but I never figured out how to make them work in Oblivion. Something must have distracted me. ^_^

Anyway, I've been working on a mod that adds carriages, I know it's already been done before but I'd like to add my personal touch to it. Including custom meshes, textures, etc. However, I don't like having people do the work for me 'cause you learn very little if somebody does it for you, and you learn more from failures than successes.

So, I'm trying to accomplish making a carriage that has wheels that spin when it moves forward, and stop when it's stopped. I know that that requires some scripting, but basically I'm wondering if it's possible to do something like that, and if it is if anybody has a tutorial or an outline that they can point me to or.... if they're feeling nice explain.

And... can you add a skeleton to an object and have it use different animations based on the current conditions, or would that require it being a creature with forward/backward/standing animations?

Damn, that'd be fun, carriage-creature that follows you, and can die lol

:D lol, it would be. I think I could rig it so the axes would just tilt if it dies.

For the animation:
Inside your object mesh you hve different animations, each can be called via these names:
http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/AnimGroups

Idle will always play unless you tell it to do a different animation, but other then that its up to you.


So you can make the wheel turning animation then call it Forward (case sensitive), then a script you put

playgroup Forward 0

The animation will then play, make it a looping animatipon and it will continue to play until you call playgroup for a different animation. In your case, a static idle would be useful to make the wheels stop again.


About the carriage. I dont think object can have skeletons, but this has been tried before via attaching a carriage to a horse, it didnt turn out well (the wagon in that case just swung around as the horse turned). I think the best way would be to do alot of scripting and have the carraige follow the horse via a script.

Thank you so much for the help with the animation struggle I was having!

I was figuring I could do "MoveTo" and have it run every frame. I could attempt to make sure it's pointed at the Horse at all times too. :nod: So if the Horse turns it'll still turn only after it's moved in either direction and not just because it's turning a little. I'd probably have to re-make all of the waypoints on the roads to be more accurate too.

Activators can be comprized of pretty much anything including multiple complete skeletons and creatures (Take a look at the End Game activators) -> although for a wagon the required skeletal structure would be very basic, 4 wheels, a hitch maybe some reins -> A driver if you have the skills required to animate a complex activator.

And as Da Mage already pointed you to the Active Sequence Name index available for all animatable objects in Oblivion there are more then enough available sequences to do a Idle, Forward, Backward, Turn Left, Turn Right
set of anims.

But he did not properly explain the Special Anim Sequences and what they do especially when used in the same.nif
Idle -> will run once when the objects 3D is loaded and a SpecialIdle sequence is not present-> if the anim is set to loop it will run forever even if a SpecialIdle is present -> will cease to play if any other animation is called by script to play.
SpecialIdle -> will run once when the objects 3D is loaded no matter what other sequences are present -> will run forever if its set to loop -> will cease to play if any other animation is called by script to play.
Note: yes this means you can have both a looping Idle and looping SpecialIdle playing at the same time
Unequip -> causes all objects that are set up properly to fall into a Havoked State.

Does anybody know anything about Blender?

I'm trying to export the .nif, but it keeps saying "Multiple bones with name "Bone": ..."

But when I parent everything to one the armatures stop working with the animation... and when I join all the armatures together the stuff attached to them messes up. I'm stuck and I don't know what to do.