Is it necessary for creatures to have a turnleft \ turnright animation? Exactly which animations are "essential" for a creature. Also i've noticed that most Oblivion creatures are missing death animation ... whats the deal with that?

Also which animations need to be looped ... I know that Idle does ... but I could not find any details about the others.

Most creatures dont have a death animations cause when they die they just fall to the ground via havok.

If a creature is to move, a forward/back is needed, however the turning and strafing are optional. if you want them to attack you need a equip and unequip plus a handtohand attack animation. The most important are the idle animations. For bare basics...that about it, the with that the creature should be able to get around, and anything else can be added for extra, and making the process of going between stuff look better.

To find which need looping and which dont, best way is to just look at exsisting creature animations. Movements and idles are looped, most others are clamp.

Creature animations are still a largely unexplored area of Oblivion, so you'll likely have to do some experimentation to figure things out. In general, however, animations are very closely tied to game logic, so if you want your creature to do something, you'll have to provide an animation for it. It won't be able to attack without some sort of attack animation, or dodge without a dodging animation.

These animations are called by the engine when certain events occur, so if the engine calls for an animation and it isn't there, the game may continue but the creature won't perform the action called by the engine. For example, many of these animations are called when the game processes the creature's combat style during combat. If the combat style says there is a 10% chance of a block, and the engine determines that a block should occur, it will call for a block animation, and if it doesn't exist, the action will fail (though the game will probably keep on going). When designing your creature, keep this in mind and make sure that your combat style doesn't ask for any animations that you haven't provided.

I think the only animation that is really required is an idle, because the game needs some sort of animation to fall back on as a default. Just remember that your creature won't be able to move without at least a Forward animation. Not including a turn left or turn right animation may prevent your creature from turning, but it is possible that the game will simply rotate your creature forcefully, without an appropriate animation. The only way to know for sure is to test it yourself.

There is a good http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/AnimGroups of the different animation groups recognized by the game on the wiki.

Edit: I've also compiled some data on the subject http://www.truancyfactory.com/tutorials/animation.html.

Not sure how any of this is unknown considering I figured this out and published the Tutorials several years ago... :/ sad how easily information is just forgotten or lost.

http://sites.google.com/site/saidenstorm/oblivion3dsmaxcustomcreaturestutorial Lots of general information here as well as the Max specific stuff including all of the information that every other CC Tutorial writer copied/pasted and took credit for

Of general interest should be this http://sites.google.com/site/saidenstorm/part3animationsandactivesequencenames

yep, Idle will make the creature go in-game, but not do anything more then just stand there. The game turns characters via the engine, the animations do not have any kind of turning in them, they juse play when the game turns the actor, hence they are not 'required' they just make the turing look better.

@saidenstorm: I did read your tutorial ... however I could not find the things I asked there. (it seems that you have added them now ... so thank you )


However I had problems in understanding the "Animation State".

You write that to make the state as "Animate in Motion" ...

"expand Sequence Accumulation -> tic Accumulate Translations -> Tic X Axis -> Tic Y Axis (this will set it so on export the movement data is assigned to the Bip01 bone while the Z Axis and all rotational data goes to the Bip01 NonAccum bone, important for the proper export of animate in motion anims)"


But what exactly do I need to do for "Animate in Place" ... do I untick these two?

Something interesting I stumbled across a while back, is that if a creature is similar enough to an NPC (Skeletons, for example) or possibly another creature, you can simply copy-paste NPC animations into the appropriate creature folder.
For example, to make spellcasting Skeletons, I simply took an interesting Casttouch and Casttarget animation (Skeletons only have a Castself, which they use to summon other undead) and plopped 'em in. I used an animation replacer mod that replaced NPC casting animations with Lich animations, so I don't know if they were just a straight copy/paste from the Lich folder or if they were converted somehow, but they worked.

Not exactly 100% related to your question, but it just goes to show how versatile creature animations are.

It was there its just when Google Pages migrated to Google Sites for some reason it reverted -> All I had to do was open the page let it update from draft and save it, odd indeed considering I made those alterations months ago, maybe I forgot to apply the changes /shrug.



Animate In Motion just means that Root Node transforms are being applied IE: you animated the Bip01 node to move in Max/Blender -> Animate In Place is basically the opposite you do not animate the Bip01 node at all.

To get technical all sequences will allow you to use Animate In Motion(apply transforms to the Bip01 node) some will kick back errors but they will work ingame -> on the other hand not all of the sequences will allow for Animate In Place as they are required to be moving to function IE: forward, left, right.....etc -> all that that page truely lists are anims that the game engine expects to be Animated In Motion for correct functionality.



Animations are nothijng but a list of Controlled Nodes and the data on what to do with them -> their ability to be nearly interchangable is 100% due to the fact that Bethesda used the Max Biped when they created all of thier creatures and npcs -> so for the most part about 90% of all the controlled nodes names will be the same -> the funkyness of some of the anims applied to different actors is mostly in size and base rotational differences from thier bind pose, so feel free to move anims around to see if they are an ok match thier presence will not hurt the game in any way at all.

Do creatures need to have collision to be able to attack?

My creature is working fine in every way but it is not playing the attack animation ... I have made sure of nearly everything from bone priorities to adding "Hit" and "Attach" sequence tags. The only thing missing is the collision ... could that be the problem causer?

If not then are there any other minor details I need to be aware of to make attack animations work?

Do they have an equip animation for that type of attack? (im assuming that they are using hand to hand attack animations). so you need a handtohandequip animation.

I do have an equip (As well as an unequip animation) to which the Attach text key has been added.

I just wanted to notify that its working fine now ... it seems that the attack animation was too fast (something like 0.5 seconds) ... I changed the frequency to fit it in just over 1 second and it shows fine now.

One more question ... I did not make any havok for the creature since I have a death animation to play.

However when my creature dies I can not loot its corpse! Does that have to do with Havok ... is there a workaround for it?