Hi.

I want to modify the Standard creatures such as Dogs and Horses and so on with additional Bones for Extra Extremities.

The Problem ist that the .kf Animations are only saved with the Standard amount of Bones in the Herarchie.
I work with 3dmax.
If i add additional Bones into the Mesh and import an Animation to test the Weights the Hindleg of the Dog is ripped appard a little and rotatet in the 3dview.
The Animation is running normaly.

Have i to do all Animations again with my amount of Bones ?
Ive allready modiefied the Skeleton.nif File with the Additional Bones but it doesnt work.
I think the Saved Boneinfo in the .kf Files doesnt like it if additional Bones are set.


1. How do i solve the Problem with the Torm Hindleg ?
2. If i had to make own animations for the New Bones is the a possibility to make an NPC Creature with 2 Nif Models and switch between them ? I mean if the new animations are started that i disable the first Model and Enable the second model with the new animations.
3. I work with 3dmax and use the Nifla importer/exporter. Is there a better possibility to make animations and export them to a .kf file ? 3dmax is a kind of unstable and i am not familiar with this programm.
What is this about the Nifscope ? is it only an watcher that you can test the model and Animations or can you edit something with it ?

Please help someone.

I don't know anything about 3dmax, but I have recently been doing something like this with Blender.

I added extra bones to the Imp skeleton for a new creature mesh I'm working on. With the skeleton finished I modified the Imp animations so they would use the new bones and it all worked.
The difference might be that the version of Blender I use wont allow the direct import of a .kf
The way Blender does it is you choose to import the (new) skeleton and attach the kf at the time of import. Before I did this I tested the old animations in game with the new skeleton to make sure there were no issues there.

I don't know how you feel about Blender, I know some people don't like it, but it might be worth your while to take a look at it.

I myself found out the hard way that you can very well "append" an existing skeletal structure by adding additional bones "on the outside" i.e. as new "leafs" of the hierarchy tree, but you cannot "insert" any bones between existing ones, because this will alter the rotational "neutral positions" and the rotation in the .kf will be applied relative to the new bone, which of course is far differently oriented than the original bone, so that's why any existing .kf files are useless then and have to be redone.

(I'm using Blender btw., so there's no big difference regarding this point.)

What I did was extrude new bones from the NonAccum. I did not want to change the original animation, I only wanted to add to it. New body parts rigged to new bones and new bones animations added to the existing animation. The original Imp rigging and animation were not changed in any way.

This method worked for what I wanted to do, but obviously would not meet everyone's need.