Okay, I've been been building a number of meshes for a http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1277360810/gallery_108_44_35574.jpg(mostly chopping up exsisting meshes for my needs), and Im up to animating the gate. At the moment i want it pretty much the same as the gate for The Citadel (a crane that lifts the gate upward). I can make the gate bit move up and down, but Im having trouble further on with the wires(which use vertical texture translation) and I also want to copy over the particle effects (dirt falling etc), though they arent really as important.

So, the Citadel gate mesh is meshes\architecture\pentagon\crane01.nif, but looking through it I really cant figure out how the texture animations work, or how it makes the particle effects start and stop. Ive been looking around, but suprise, nobody seems to really know much about these.


Can anyone help explain how I would go about doing this?

Artisten makes a very good video tutorial on how to crate/manipulate animations using Blender and Nifskope, I found it excellent.

You can find it http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?showtopic=1051297 if interested.

Cheers,

Miax

Nup, thats object animation which I've already got (lifting the gate up and down). Im looking to animate the texture on the object (eg, move the texture up/down without the object moving).

the crane wires have a morph as well as a texture transform. there is no way you can actually edit those morphs afaik. I tried my damnest with that very nif to hack custom morphs into f3, exporting my own via civ4 plugin, I've done them for oblivion, but it's a different beast in F3. Saiden storm might have a way or something, but I dare say he'll basically say forget it.

if you can create the effect you are after with just texture transforms alone, it's a piece of cake. easiest solution would be just to find a object that has one and paste your nitristripe/shapedata over it. then edit away.

the p-sys is do able as well. I have had enough trouble with taking them out of their nif and into ones I've made, and found it way easier to paste my stuff into nifs containing the psys that I want to actually use. they are controlled on and off via the controller sequence that's playing. you can copy and paste them in and out of other nifs, but because they have that string index in the niheader, things get renamed and it stops working. if you are patient enough you can reset them up so they work again.

then you will have figure out how to get an anim sequence in there and to target those 2 types of anims, so you can control them. to get the sequence together will be the hardest part by far. might be easiest to to build this nif off a very basic animated nif, like a door. you could also think of using blender to animate proxy objects, so your sequence targets the right nodes, and export a kf, and attach the sequence via nifskope then edit it from there. but might not be that useful as the sequence will have to have custom nitransformdata anyway, so you may as well just do it all by hand in nifskope.

It'll be a pretty hefty amount of brain ache I know that's not very helpful, and confusing. there isn't really a tutorial that'll get you through this one. i

You need a texture controller, flip if you want the texture to change, transform if you want it to scroll etc. There's a relevant article on the Oblivion CS wiki here: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Basic_Animation_Tutorial However, it relies on you starting off with animation blocks from a starter package and altering them to fit, so I don't know how much of it'll be applicable to Fallout.

E: Ghogiel wall of text beat me. Yeah, this tutorial only outlines actual texture animations- not morphs. And it's from Oblivion, where nifs were a bit more forgiving.

flips have been removed from the engine. according to saiden. I have tested myself even. Would like to be proven wrong.
afaik, all texture anims in F3 are done by textures transforms

a morph aswell...I think i remember seeing something like that....what does that do anyway?

Looking at it and mocking with it in blender simple texture translation is all i need to make it look plausiable, so I'll copy my stuff over the other shapedata. Doing it that way didnt occur to me :rolleyes:


Looks the the best and fastest way to do all this is to just put all my stuff into a copy of the citadel gate and start editing, however how do I go about avioding losing all the info with those text strings. Bit annoying when i copy them that all the stuff copied will then be pointing to the wrong text strings and no doubt cuase headaches.

like facegen tri file animation states, just different format. a morph is like per vertex animation. it's like having a copy of the mesh but with some verts moved around, like a smile on a face for example, so you have a smiling morph state and a emotionless morph state. and the animation will blend and interpolate between the 2 states.


you don't. you just used to knowing what is going to pick up a string name. and having to go through every damn block making sure everything is identical :brokencomputer:

ahhh....okay, yep i dont need to do that.


DAmn about the text strings.....what a fiddly way to do things.....