I read through all the posts regarding the Havok import tool for hours and tried to figure out how to get a flawless skeleton (nif) into 3ds max 2010. Even the max-files provided by some modders won’t work for me (XPMS gives me a flickering arm at least; CHSBHC gives me clumsy hands as the fingers are shortened and the hand enlarged). The only one which is working perfectly is that one made by Saidenstorm. Everything perfect here but it has no briast bones for BBP or TBBP . I tried to restretch and rescale the bones of imported skeletons with the bone tools of max and even Reset XForm. Unfortunately this does not really do the trick: the root positions don’t change and the fingers stay too short for example.

I cannot get one thing out of my head. Saidenstorm wrote he recreates the whole imported skeleton with max bones and nubs. I think that is the real deal so I got started. Unfortunately I am very unsure how to handle some things:

I create a bone with nub and use the align-tool (alt-a) to align the position of the bone root. Then I use the nub and align it to the tip (root of the next bone). After that I create a new nub and so on…

• The local orientation of the created max bones differs from the orientation of the imported skeleton. How do I handle the orientation alignment here?
  
• As the skeleton.nif is more a collection of root-points with lines between them, the last bones of some chains are not displayed (fingertips, toes). How do I recreate those?
  
• What about the nodes (weapon, shield, animobject etc). Do they need some special care?

Please help.