Animations/Transparency in Cityart

[Freya]

Hello everyone,
I was wondering if it's possible to add some kind of animation to a building i in a cityart file (.nif file). I'm also wondering if it's possible to add transparency to some parts of the .nif file. Has anyone tried to do this successfully?

I recently tried all this stuff and got it to work fine with regular buildings but when adding these kind of effects to buildings in citysets nothing of it seemed to work. Am I doing something wrong or do I have to do something special with nifscope to get it to work?

 

[Chamaedrys]

Transparency is possible. Go to NiMaterialproperty and set the alpha value lower than 1.000 maybe 0.5 -> TATA a transparent nif

 

[Freya]

yes I've tried this and it seemed to be the obvious solution yet I couldn't get it to work. =(
I exchanged the old building with my new one in sceneviewer, set the alpha to 0.2 and added a new NiAlphaProperty where I enabled the alpha. Did I do anything wrong? Did I miss something?

 

[Chamaedrys]

I just tried it and all buildings became translucent. When I edit of one building the others get the same alpha value. I have no idea how to set different alpha values for the different buildings. Maybe you could use a big building instead?

 

[Freya]

I got the "whole nif transparency thing" to work too... and then I removed the NiMaterialProperty and NiAlphaProperty from one building and added new ones where I set the alpha to 0.4 (or whatever). This way I got one tranparent (and the rest solid) building to work in the viewer but not in the game and I can't see why it fail to work??

By using a big building, do you mean I could do a single building with transparency and use it as a part of the cityset by editing the xml?
for example;
<ArtRef Name="generic:myTransparentBuilding.nif">
<Attribute Class="Era">ERA_CLASSICAL,ERA_MEDIEVAL,ERA_RENAISSANCE</Attribute>
<Attribute Class="ArtStyle">ARTSTYLE_GRECO_ROMAN</Attribute>
<Attribute Class="Scalar">iBatchGroup:1</Attribute>
<Attribute Class="Rotation">0,180</Attribute>
</ArtRef>

 

[Freya]

Transparency is possible.

Does that mean that animations isn't?

 

[Chamaedrys]

Does that mean that animations isn't?

Animations are controlled by .kfm files. Unfortuneately, these files aren't mentioned in the cityLsystem.xml. So even if you have animations for your city set, there is no way to make the tell the game to use that animations.

btw: what sort of city are you working on? Maybe you could achieve the desired effect with a free city improvement?