I figured out how to scale different body parts of an NPC, with armor and clothing scaling with the bigger and smaller body parts.
I'm not sure if this has been done before, or if anyone already knows about this, but I havn't seen anyone do this before.

Here's a screenshot of an argonian with larger arms, wider body and chest, and a smaller head.

http://i647.photobucket.com/albums/uu195/mark507_album/screenies/MGEScreenshot22.jpg
http://i647.photobucket.com/albums/uu195/mark507_album/screenies/MGEScreenshot21-1.jpg

You should be able to see the scaling effect in the screenshot. However the effect is quite subtle with that argonian, so if you want I can whip up a more drastically scaled one.. As you can see the armor scaled correctly.
I'm using no new body parts at all.

What I've done is imported base_animKnA into max, and added scale animations to different parts of it. Then I attached the animations to an argonian and there's the results.
I haven't tested the method fully yet, though it seems to work fine with that example.

edit: The possible effects are limited, but it's interesting none the less.

Dude, I give you 10/10 for that!!! :goodjob: This is really amazing and if funktionality of the characters remains ok, meaning can they still fight normally and so on, than this has really much potential. Also an easy way to make new biped creatures. Just change the physis and put a new animated head on it. I'm in love with this!!! :wub:


TheDaywalker :rock:

That is some great ingenuity!
Good thinking.

Now the argonian Big Head can actually a have a BIG head.

fat Npcs?

I have thought of it...

that could make the Npcs and the world more realistic

Dude, this could be used to give different NPCs different body types. That would be freakin sweet, if old people were sometimes bent and scrawny, or you saw the occasional potbellied barbarian, or if tavern wenches could be a little more busty...

wow this is awesome, this way one could prevent from all PCs having the exact same body! I mean, I hardly doubt it that all of Morrowind people works out to look fit forever lol.

Hopefully the same technique works with BB. However, are you changing the mesh that the entire race will use, or is just the one NPC affected?

Well, if those are both just Argonians, it would seem individual NPCs. *fingers crossed*

He didn't change the mesh just the animation, and I think you can have an npc with it's own animation that no other npc has.

Oh please let this mean I can finally have a petite character - I love the seamlessness of BB - just feel over encumbered all the time

Correct, open an NPC and you'll see the add animation button, I used that to add the animation. It is used on individual NPC's, so this can be used to make some characters fat, and others thin, without the need for new races. And best of all their clothes and armor will get fatter and thinner too! ^_^
Though tbh I actually looked into this so I could make these races: http://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/?p=conceptart§ion=15262 http://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/?p=conceptart§ion=15266 for personal use or for the argonia project, though I thought I should post up what I found out so someone else can do something more important with the information (but I still might make a few of these scaled animations as a resource).

@Illuminiel: You could affect the PC with this, though you would have to set it up like you used to have to setup oshiel's animation in the CS.

@TheDayWalker: the argonian in the screenshot worked perfectly except whenever he walked he would fall for a fraction of a second then continue walking. It's not that big of a problem, and it should be fixable with some tweaking. Edit: it's fixed now
The drawback with this is that they obviously wont use animation packs.
However I don't think this is that much of a problem though as other than oshiel's, the only other animation replacement that may come out soonish is the walking animations I'm working on, in which case I could just make them compatible.

If this works, it would be one of the BEST additions I have seen in a long time... although, I'm amazed how much I've seen just very lately! A couple of years ago, I was trying to figure out how to make Orcs bulkier w/o the squishy/stretchy effect, and of course, I wished at the time we could have fat NPCs or short NPCs, skinny vs. muscular, etc. If this works... it will be amazing!

Please... carry on the work! :celebration:

-Coroth

Oh yes, and can we please see some more screenshots? Those were very dark and hard to make out. Can you compare two naked Argonians so we can see teh difference w/o the armor? Thanks Dirnae!

I'm very glad you discovered this Dirnae and thought to share your findings with all of us! :foodndrink:

Is the scaling of the animation something that could be done with NifSkope, or another program besides max (for those of us without)?

Those screenshots were more of a 'hey, this works!' kinda thing.
I'm remaking that animation at the moment though so I guess I can post a couple screenies when it's done.

Yes, it's a simple scale animation with 2 keys at the start and end of the animation, both with the same value, it should be possible in Nifskope and definitely blender. However I've been using mostly non-uniform scaling animations which I wouldn't have a clue of how to make in Nifskope. So you'll have to get someone else to explain how to do it.

edit: this definitely has some limitations, I'll do further testing, but it seems some bones must not be non uniform scaled, while with other bones it is fine. I think I know of a workaround but it will be very hard to do through blender.

I wonder if it's possible at character creation to add a question regarding weight or height - isn't the player originally set to Dunmer male as default - until the guard asks where you're from? And then your hands are set to male in first person until you do your first save. So potentially you could get your animation added at character creation .Though I suspect that is hard coded into the game. perhpas one of the OpenMW projects might be able to add that?

In any case it's a really cool discovery you've made

Aww... no exciting new updates? Definitely keeping my eyes on this one.

I don't think so, because you'd have to have multiple animations applied to the player and then pick one based on the questions.

May be able to do it in the form of several small plugins, and you grab the relevant one to your character before you start the new game?

I'm wondering if this can be used to fix the issues with player height/weight not being at 1*. If you set all races to height/weight of 1, then added animations to scale them, would it fix these problems?

*Normally, when height is not 1, arrow trajectory is thrown off. When weight is too far from 1, Trueflame's fire effect goes out ahead of or behind the sword.

Wow this is some breakthrough, well done mate, and you weren't even trying! Is it applicable to Fallout?

Nice work man.There's a lot of talented people on these forums.

You could probably fix it, though you would have to slog through all the NPC's adding the animations, and mod added NPC's would look wierd.



It should work for pretty much anything, just don't go overboard with non-uniform scales, they'll screw up your animations (I thought changing the controller would work, but I haven't been able to find one which makes it scale correctly yet).

I've been taking a small break from animating to do some modeling, I find animating becomes more annoying than enjoyable if I try to do too much at once.
I'll see if I can make a couple more scale animations next week, though no promises, k?

Couldn't it just be applied with the animation tool from Liztail? And then hope people use it as a standard in the future.

Massively awesome. The uniformly well-toned bodies of Morrowind have been bugging me since I started playing.

I have serious doubts about the use of LizTail's kit:
1. I wonder whether scale keys are supported. Usually only linear bone rotation and root bone translation are used for MW animations.
2. Merge kfs, probably will result in reset of body shape during certain (not scaled) animation sequences.

The trick of the proposed method is based on modification of ALL (base animation, first and last frames) attached to an NPC/NPC "Player" animation sequences applicable in MW.
Advantage of this method is great and obvious: no need to redo numerous skinned clothes and armor. However, it requires considerable amount of work for tweaking individual bones (non-uniform scaling keys) using huge animation files (I heard that Blender is even not able to load base_anim.nif (ca. 5000 frames); in Max this is a real nightmare).

I guess "arrows problem" is related to the way MW game engine "understands" object (NPC) collision volume and is not related to animation of "secondary" bones (not root bone translations = position of collision structure, e.g. "Bounding Box" or something else).

Any breakthroughs on this?