Arcane University: Animation
Before you start reading: There are two methods of animating meshes. One is used for characters rigged on skeletons, and the other is mainly using Nifskope settings for environmental assets like books or doors or chests.
- Instructions for adding hinge animations with Nifskope is given in the article Nifskope Hinge Constraints.
- Instructions for altering skeletons to fit existing animations to a custom skinned mesh is given in the article Editing Animation Skeletons.
The Animation of skeleton-rigged meshes is the art of making them move correctly with Skyrim animation files. Creating new animation files is challenging, but doable. More commonly, an existing animation file is being used on a new skeleton, that has mostly the same bone count and proportions.
General hints
- It is not recommended to place a lot of meshes in regions with a lot of movement, like armpits, tighs and so on as glitching (surfaces being visible where they should not) is more common to happen.
- Keep disconnected meshes at a minimum, as it will increase the effort to rig the mesh.
- Cover body parts that have different proportions (Argonian head, Khajit head, human head) to cut work for unique variants.
- Prefer booleans to insert meshes to avoid complex clipping.
- The quality assurance of your work must happen with the animations loaded. Expect that you have to go back and iterate on the movement a few times.
- The left thigh of humans moves more than the right.
3DS Max
Click here for the main 3DS Max page.
Here you can see a tutorial of animating a skeleton for FO4, which uses the same engine as Skyrim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-NkbrmG5po
Maya
Click here for the main Maya page.
Outfit Studio
Click here for the main Outfit Studio page. Rigging within Outfit Studio is documented on the page Rigging in Outfit Studio.
Blender
Click here for the main Blender page. Rigging Tools within Blender is documented on these pages:
Nifskope
Click here for the main NifSkope page.
- You have to enable each of these boxes in BSDismemberSkinInstance or NiSkinInstance of every skinned mesh:
- Partitions: BodyPartList
- Part Flag: PF_Editor_Visible, PFStartNetBoneSet BSPartFlag
- Body Part: SBP_32_Body BSDismemberBodyPartType
- Partitions: BodyPartList
