dreamCloud

I'm just disappointed I spent so many hours making a series of blocking and riposte animations just to have them never fire because of some arbitrary condition I am missing somewhere. It also makes the encounters with the creatures fairly boring as all they do is attack.

https://cs.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=Cell_Reset Look at the differences between ECR and ICR resets which affects levelled lists. Also look into the PCB and ResetInterior commands to see if they might help.

Yep! They look and play absolutely fine in the Construction Set.

So I've made all the animations this creature would need to fight hand to hand. All of them fire except for the block animations. I've got the handtohandblockidle.kf, handtohandblockhit.kf, and handtohandblockattack.kf all ready to go. I double checked that they had the bone priorities similar to how vanilla humanoid NPC's have them for those animations. I also noticed they have a "Blend: 0" in the blockhit and blockattack and "Attack" text key in blockattack. I made sure to add those in the appropriate frames. I then tested those animations in the ck. It has them in the list, it has the proper animgroup listed for each one. I then went to the custom CombatStyle I made for the creature and made %chance to block at 100 and attack 0%... and it still only ever attacks and never blocks. Not sure why it is doing this?

Yeah I was afraid of that. Guess I'll just have to go back and do that for those models. I'll add that to a polishing pass later on.

Please let me know what you're trying to fix and if anything worked! That's how I set up my skeleton too. It's biped with a bunch of "branches" bones since it's a tree creature. But yeah I set up the idle manager to check if the creature is in a sleep package. It is then supposed to check if it is entering a bedroll and play the enter animation. This never happens for some reason even using vanilla bedrolls. And I double checked it is set up exactly like the sleep idle manager setups for the humanoid biped NPC's. At this point I'm frustrated enough to try anything else that might give a similar function, but if you do have an inkling as to how to fix it I am all ears (eyes?)!

Nice they did fix the attach kf in that fork! I can still see the same issue I was seeing in the OP with this fork though. How frustrating. I definitely remember a time where editing those material properties changed how the models looked in-game. Looks like I'll have to go back to Vertex Shading if I want to see that result... which is incredibly frustrating as that's a very long process.

So what my main reason for wanting to make new ones was because I have a custom creature I've been animating and I wanted to use the enter/idle/exit animations to do a "sleeping" animation for it where it enters a sleep if the player manages to de-aggro it and exits the sleep if they get detected by giving it a 24x7 sleep package in the AI and choosing furniture around a marker. So basically player enters area, sees a bunch of NPCs "sleeping" and can sneak around but if they get detected they all "wake up" and attack but if they use chameleon/invisibility/sneak/illusion magic they can de-aggro them and they'll go back to "sleep" but also I still wanted to have them have their standing idle. I made the animations and they play (at least by console command) but using the idle manager I can't get the NPC to actually use them as sleep animation replacers for the bedcrawl animation markers (furniture marker 4). I'm not sure if it's because the creature has to be the exact same biped armature as the human NPCs or what (the skeleton I made is very different so that's a no go there) but what happens is the NPC just walks up to any furniture that has the bedcrawl marker (vanilla bedrolls as a test) and then just stands there and does its normal standing idle instead of playing any of the new sleep animations. I was able to use the nifskope method to get some custom furniture for an NPC's home working ok at least but I really want to figure out a way to get my creature's enter/idle/exit anims to play and the sleep system in the idle manager was the best I could think of at the time. I might try a sitting marker or something, but again if it's because of the use of a non-biped skeleton then not sure what I could do. Giving them an animobject or just forcing an idle only plays the idle animation once or looped (however you set it up in nifskope) and Oblivion's animation graph doesn't support animations with loops inside of them like later games do. I could script them to play the enter before playing the idle and then forcing the exit animation to play but I'm REALLY trying to not lean too heavily on scripts. I've already got a few that drag down performance and trying to optimize them. There's the option of just having their main idle be the sleep, which does work as seen in the undead that spring up at you mods, but I can't enforce any advanced behavior like I can with a sleep schedule. Just not sure what direction to go in now.

Tried the new nifskope versions. Something interesting to note: the latest doesn't process attachkf spell for Oblivion animation files. Thought that was a weird bug. Anyways, for the dev9 I noticed that it shows the material coloring just fine in the file. Really not sure what's going on tbh.

I figured it out, but it's not fixable. What happened was I was using another armature imported as a guide for animation timings. Then I was using Constraints which apparently don't like to be exported. Even though I deleted that second armature and even tried deleting the constraints (all they did was hold the foot bones down so figured I could see if they'd float) prior to export, for some reason its bip01, bip01 nonaccum, and a few other bone rotations data got baked into the save and the feet still try to reach their Constraints which also somehow got twisted. That's why the bones spin around twisting the model with it. I tried fixing it several ways noted above and I even went into the .kf file and hand-edited all the quaternions to remove the extra rotations but that didn't work either. So I found another save I had made with the same armature (with an animation that had already exported correctly) and made sure all of its bones were in the proper position, keyframes cleared, and now I'm hand-copying all the keyframes' rotation data over from the other file one by one; after I baked its constraints (thankfully found someone who had made an old python script that could do that for me). What a pain in the butt! But at 1/4 done I did an export and it is animating properly in-game so now I just have to finish it.

Ok so I found out that for some reason the quaternion key values were being rotated 180 degrees as well in bip01. I went back and deleted all rotation/quaternion values from the animation's bip01 and re-exported. It still exports as -180 degrees for some reason but I fix the rotation in the .kf and the animation walks forwards instead of backwards now... but the rest of the model is still all distorted around. I then realized I made a rookie mistake by doing loc/rot/scale keys and keys on all sorts of bones that didn't need them. So I removed all extraneous keys and then removed all location and scale data from all keys (except the loc data from bip01 which is needed to move forward and the loc data from bip01pelvis which is needed to put weight on the legs and make up/down motion as the creature walks). Still shows up as completely distorted :/. Not sure what else to do at this point.

So I bought some creature models online and am using them for an Oblivion mod I am making. I'm ok at animating so figured if I followed the guide saved on the backup of the wiki I could whip up some custom skeletons and make some animations for them lickity split. WRONG! The first animation I made was just a regular idle. It looks ok. With just it the animation plays but flips the character model 90 degrees from where it is placed in the editor. No big deal I guess as it still properly faces the player and it shows no 90 degree rotation on the bip01 bone in the .kf file. I then made a walk loop animation for the Forward motion. This animation was made using empties as bone constraints to get the feet to stick to the 'floor' in Blender during the contact frames as old Blender 2.49b doesn't have the proper animation tools to do that (that I've found anyways). I used the exact same skeleton model and even the idle animation that was working before and cleared out the keyframes. But in-game the model's skinning is all over the place and the animation is moving backwards. When I looked at the .kf file it shows a rotation on bip01 of -180. I switched that to 0 but it remains the same issue. I tried flipping the entire armature model around in edit mode which plays the animation in the opposite direction, and even rotated and moved the empties around by hand so they could still act as constraints. Re-keyed the entire animation, exported, and... shows up exactly the same and still has a -180 degree rotation. I'm not sure exactly what I did wrong here and it's driving me insane. Video of the issue located here:

What are you looking for exactly? I'm kind of drowning in my own project but can whip a model up or two for you if I find some time.

It does. I was able to make some furniture markers using that NifSkope method. Not sure if they'll work until I get everything animated but we'll see I guess. I just wish I had something to create my own new ones rather than hacking together bits from the vanilla meshes.

Btw forgot to mention that either Blender 2.49b or 3DS 8 Max settings are ok. I have access to both, but way less experience with 3DS Max.

I've hit a few snags in animating some creatures I've been making. Unless I'm missing something (and PLEASE correct me if I am) Oblivion doesn't support animations that have a beginning and end and a loop in the middle. Even walk and run cycles I've seen all just go from 0 to end frame full speed without a ramp up or slow down. So I figured I would use furnitures since I can make 3 animations; an entrance animation, a 'sitting' animation (using the furniture) of the animation I actually want to play, and an exit animation in case you hit the NPC's and 'wake them up'. However, I don't know how to make the furniture markers at all and I'm wondering if anyone does? You can see them in the screenshot here:

Just wanted to update that I did some vigorous digging through dead forums with wayback machine and I came across a working link to this project that converts .spt files into text files that you can then edit (but there's TONS of parameters...): https://github.com/anahuj/spttools

So apparently Oblivion's SpeedTree files were made with SpeedTree 4.2. They are saved in the .spt file format. No other versions of SpeedTree support this format except as an import and convert option to the modern formats and those don't save back to the old .spt format according to the SpeedTree help forums and they don't sell any old versions any more either. There's an old demo version floating around but lacks the ability to save. So... is there any other way to access those files? I have some meshes I could use to update some of these trees (better trunks and branches for sure) but without a way to access the .spt files in any meaningful way there's no point. The only other thing I can think of is maybe just making static meshes of the trees I want and finding out a way to make their leaves the same billboard style as SpeedTree did. If I could do that for the 3 specific ones I want I could live with just that in some special locations, but I have no clue on how to accomplish that. Mods here exist that have done this before, but I've no clue how they accomplished it.

I mean yeah it's present in the game and isn't showing any missing mesh symbols or purple textures for missing textures so I'm fairly positive I got that part right . This is like my 100th model or so I've put in and just started noticing this issue. For some reason it just doesn't want to receive any of those material values, and now the problem is retroactive as well as I can't get it to work on previous things it was working on. As for vertex colors I mostly do that by hand in Blender. These are all generic textures I use across several models to prevent Oblivion doing so many draw calls in any given cell. So to give the models some hutzpah I vertex color in a lot of details that would be handled by Ambient Occlusion in modern games. You can see that on the model especially well on the rocks. But I don't like having to do that for every single piece of the models so I relied on the material shader to do some of the work as well but now that's not functioning. So, guess more troubleshooting in the future :/. I'll give some of those new nifskope editions a whirl in a bit too. Thanks for those links!

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here since this was working before for other models just fine. I often do a little dabbling with models in NifSkope to do color and luminance corrections on materials after I export and link up all the textures. Before I could adjust the Ambient/Diffuse/Spec/Emissive/Glossiness just fine to dial in and get things exactly how I wanted them to show up. Now it seems the only thing I can change is the emissive color and the alpha value. When I change the ambient, diffuse, or spec colors nothing gets applied even if the changes are drastic (like going all black or pink or something). What's weird is they look fine in NifSkope but in-game nothing ever changes any more when before it would. I checked the specular (alpha channel in the normal file) to make sure it wasn't overriding like it does when it's too strong and even just went without a spec map altogether (using a DXT1) and still the colors I select in NifSkope do nothing. Aside from changing material colors I'm still kind of a dunce with NifSkope so not sure what I did wrong here. Using NifSkope 2.0 Dev 7 and exporting files from XBlender 2.49b (using NIF Scripts 2.5.9, PyFFi 2.1.11). I haven't changed anything in my setup from when I was doing things before successfully. The only thing I can think of was I had an alpha error on export for one of the meshes so I removed the alpha on that particular mesh and re-enabled it after export, but it's not even the meshes I'm having a problem with (in the screencaps you can see I darkened the rafters under the roof and the top roof element, but in-game they show up super bright still).

That worked! Thank you!!! There were very few places I need grass in this quad anyways, so this works perfectly.

Thanks for the response! Not using the CSE but after several hours of frustration I figured out there seems to be a lot of 3-layers of things in the cell. Even when a certain texture looks predominant in an area there will be a few textures underneath it. What fixed it for me in some spots was going back over it with 2 non-grass textures then applying my final texture several times. But that was just for some spots. Other spots still have grass frustratingly. I have used the land edit method (pressing I) to replace other textures before. Since I was only editing one small part of a cell quad I didn't think to replace ALL of the grass textures in that cell's quad but that makes sense. I can just go back over those places with grass where I actually need it. I'll do that now!

So I keep having grass grow where I absolutely do not want it to. I am using some landscape textures I had made myself (and did not give them any grass chance as they are brick walkways) and they mostly seem ok but I'm noticing in areas that were heavy grass texture areas before they are still growing grass there and it doesn't matter how many times I paint over it they still show up and it's kind of driving me nuts. There has to be something I am missing here. I directly painted over the grass-enabled textures with my non-grass ones with 100% opacity if that helps.

Ahh they weren't links they were just tutos I had saved on my online drive since I couldn't find them any more. Oblivion tutorials are being lost left, right, and center these days to dead internet Looks like one of them is still here on the Nexus tho, guess I couldn't find it because I was looking for the tutorial website itself not a mod page ha: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/37209

Yeah I got you.