Is really digging into nifskope worth it?

I've been playing with it for a bit, trying to wrap my head around what is actually in there, with little or no documentation available. What is available are tutorials pertaining to non-FO3 games that even in their context don't cover much more than the very basics of how to set a texture path (most neglecting to mention things like disabling shadow related stuff for non-body parts).

from what I can tell, unless you want to take the rigging / animation from vanilla objects and apply them to custom models, there really is no good information out there for animating objects or characters (especially if you wanted to do new creatures with different skeletons).

most of what I see in it is the potential for a near infinite number of blocks / nodes with a near infinite number of variables that each have a near infinite number of possible bit / float / integer flags, only which a very small number of possibilities actually have any effect in the game. this makes tinkering almost completely pointless. It's not very encouraging for casual content developers, even ones with a lot of time on their hands.

I understand the difficulty in trying to reverse engineer a format, but there seems to be so little information or tools built in to make any of this really useful. When you have only a few variations of a variable that are ever used, some variables that are never used, and simple things like what features are available in what game, why is there no "helpers" or restriction to what these things are?

I know some people are very capable in nifskope, and I assume the reason they are is because they either A) have spent MANY hours hacking apart vanilla game content till the various aspects sink in B) are robots or C) have some working knowledge of the format from a design perspective

I guess my question is... Is using nifskope and really digging into what all the features and aspects of it are beyond tweaking the few variables that exporters like 3DS or Blender set incorrectly worth the time (which to me seems nearly infinite)?

You can do quite a lot with it- http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6773 http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=31821 http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=29853 I've made have been basically nothing but nifskope work (two of those also include sort-of-tutorials on editing nifs). Adding animations is I think covered quite well on the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Basic_Animation_Tutorial- whilst it's not Fallout, from an engine perspective Fallout is Oblivion With Guns, so it's almost all applicable.
It's not set up to create new creature animation sets from scratch, although it's certainly possible to once you've got a handle on how it works (I've got an unfinished Bonelord from Oblivion made in Nifskope/Oblivion Animation Warper from stitching together two animation sets and bits of skeleton). Editing the animations to add the tags etc. isn't really documented, but then it's just a matter of comparing different files to see what each one has.

That's pretty much the key to NifSkope, I guess. Like you say, the vast majority of variables and options are useless so in order to use it you mostly just compare existing files and figure out what's different, copy-paste and change content etc. All the stuff I linked in the first sentence basically came about from comparing different skeleton and animation files and filling in the blanks, and alternative uses of the tree structure/bone names- it's all just alterations and edits of existing content, but then NifSkope by itself isn't really a content-creation tool, just an editor/finaliser for stuff created in proper modelling tools.

I'd question the assertion that it's not much use for casual editors- there's lots of armour, weapons etc. out there that were created just from messing about in NifSkope, because it's really easy to just copy-paste things in and move them about. You can put a hat onto a robot with one copy-paste, a bone rename and a change in translation. You can turn a mop into a weapon with one copy-paste. You can put pauldrons and ammo bags onto a vault suit by copy-pasting them from other armours. It's really easy for a casual modder without any modelling experience to use it to put unique-looking creatures, NPCs and gear into their mods.

maybe my problem is biting off more than I can chew. I'm pretty capable in 3DS, so I take that end of things for granted, but only recently dived fully into the GECK and nifskope and have been a bit overwhelmed. When I can set up something easily in 3DS, like an object animation, but then have to spend hours screwing around with nifskope to sort out how the hell to preserve it in bringing it into the GECK / Fallout 3, I get frustrated. An example: I just wanted to bring in a rotating object into the game, very simple, easily keyframed, even looks correct bringing it into nifskope, but then have a TON of variables I don't understand that seem to effect how it animates in the GECK / game. best I Was able to do is get the thing to rotate once, then after tinkering for a while got it to continue to rotate, but not smoothly. It sorta speeds into the rotation, then slows down at the end of it to a stop, then starts over. I tried opening up some of the Zeta ship stuff, that has a tone of things that rotate smoothly and without this speed change, but there are layers and layers and layers of blocks that I eventually get lost -_-......

I can understand if I want to do things like having it be an activator, or animated under certain scripted conditions, that'd make a difference and be some level of stuff I'd have to add for it to recognize what everything is, but to have this much setup required (at least with my current very low level of understanding of what's going on) seems a bit overwhelming.

Clearly this isn't the way these games were developed, and it IS a good reverse engineer of the format. It's a shame that if Bethesda is going to release things like the GECK they don't also release whatever authoring tools they use to make the content.

The reason there are very few tutorials on the NifTools website is its a general tool not aimed at any one game and any tutorial They/I/anyone build would only apply for that game and maybe games in direct descension from a game engine perspective -> Oblivion to Fo3 for instance.

You can not go from say CivIV to FO3 because the differences are so great the entire file would need to be redone and the fact that the Node Types used in CivIV are not all present and useable for FO3 so even a direct conversion would not work without middlewear (3DSMax) to convert it and from that point all your doing it making sure everything is good post export also a game specific tutorial.



Tring to create any new Creatures 100% In NifSkope would be nearly impossible as its not designed as a Modeler -> you can not really Skin models with it -> you can not truely UV Layout -> or set up any Dismemberment Partitions -> what 3T mentioned about using the Animation Mount Wrapper requires that the animations already exist (in his case the oblivion creatures anims) to be even useful.

This absolutely requires a proper Modeling Program if not just for the retension of sanity.



Not all blocks work for all games, you have to learn which blocks are usable by which game your wanting to make make/alter assets for.



Restricting Variables would just cause NifSkope to be un-useable by some games modders as not every game use the same values to the same purpose for each block type hence teh nessessity for freedom and the requirement for modders to learn whats required and what each variable/block does on a per game basis.



NifSkope really is not meant to replace a Modeling Program its designed to be Middlewear and has limited functionality to any other end like Copy/Paste/Delete and slight alterations(like assigning new textures), your not going to want to bother tring to create or animate anything from scratch in NifSkope, its great as what it does and mindnumbing tedious for anything it was not designed to do.



This is not an issue with NifSKope -> when you set your animation keys in Max you did not set them to Linear and thus you get ease in and ease out rotation -> BTW the Default Interpolation Type in Max is Smooth which equates to Heavy Ease In and Out -> the reason is that is the best Interpolation Type for Organic Actor Animations -> not so good for Inorganic.



Beth can not release this exporters because they are tied into the Havok and Facegen Plugins to which they do not own the rights to release publically -> and then stripping all of that out of thier exporter would take forever and then leave us with an Exporter with less functionality then we get from NifTools, it would be better is they released all of the game engine specifications because then we could make the NifTools exporters better without restrictions.