I have been teaching myself to 3D model using 3ds Max for a while now, and moved on to learning how to animate. However, every tutorial I can find has to do with animating actors - I can find zero information on how to work with activators.

What i am trying to do right now is add a closing animation to the secret fireplace door added for the castle tile set by the Dawnguard DLC (meshes\dlc01\dungeons\castle\animated\fireplace\cassmhallfireplaceex01.nif). I created the animation, but I am having serious trouble trying to export it. I'm using the 3ds Max Nif Importer-Exporter plugins for 3ds Max 2012 found on http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/5622/?. I have tried http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/15238/? tutorial without luck. When I compare my exported close.kf to the functional one converted from a .hkx file (open.kf), I can clearly see that the exporting didn't work - opening the exported close.kf file using NifSkope shows that it has no nodes at all, whereas the open.kf has a NiControllerSequence node, as well as several subnodes. Simply copying over this node does not seem to make the custom close.kf functional. In fact, no matter what, hkx.cmd will not convert it.

I went ahead and tried manually editing all the data inside the custom close.kf to match the vanilla open.kf, which did allow hkxcmd to be able to convert it into a .hkx file, but the converted file still won't function, even after converted into a packed .hkx file.

Since there really is little to no documentation on how .nifs' nodes work, i.e. which ones control which things, what combinations of nodes and subnodes produce which kinds of effects, how much they can be edited locally in NifSkope, etc. I went ahead and tried fiddling with the nodes, trying to match the cassmhallfireplaceex01.nif file's nodes to that of a 2-state door-activator that I know works (in this case, the secret door from the Nordic dungeon tile set). Even with the nodes matching up 95%, I couldn't get the second animation (close) to play.

I even tried converting the behavior files for both the Nordic secret door and the secret fireplace door I was trying to edit into .xml files so I could read them with Notepad++. I tried some editing, and re-converting back into .hkx behavior files, which didn't seem to affect the .nif's one bit. I then tried deleting all the files in the folder with the cassmhallfireplaceex01.nif to see what would happen, and the animations still played in NifSkope, which lead me to believe that the behavior files are imported into the .nif, which means that editing them is out of the question, since I have no clue how/where they are stored.

In any event, I am forced to give up for now, due to lack of information and/or documentation on how something like this is done. If anyone has any idea how to go about doing this, I'd very much appreciate the help. Even just pointing me in the direction of a tutorial would be nice, as I said I really couldn't find one, and I did look for quite a while...