[Tut] Animate with Blender and Nifscope

The I key inserts a keyframe into the timeline. ALT-I is to delete keyframes from the timeline. You need to make sure one of your windows is showing the timeline of course. If you have the default blender settings you can hit CTRL-right arrow a couple of times to bring up the animation view.

You can copy and paste or delete groups of keyframes in the Action Editor if you want. Also taking the time to learn how to use IPO Curves is good if you want to edit vanilla animations. I've watched a good video tutorial on that subject too.

I really recommend the super3boy YouTube tutorials on Blender animation. Watching those really got me started with it.

Start with this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAZFfLmbD2k

Video tutorials in general are so much better than reading PDFs. He has good ones on creating Armatures from scratch too.

I've had the problem with parts of the mesh disappearing when I've edited vanilla animations. Unfortunately, I can't remember how I fixed it right now... I think it might be a problem with the Blender export so try varying the settings.
 
that is unless you know how to get a rotation or a location to copy through several keyframes at once?
Click to expand...

The IPO Curves window is a good way to do this. You need to choose Pose mode in the IPO Curves window and then you can see the values for the different translations and rotations over time. It is easy to bulk edit points on the curve by using the same keys you use in the 3D view. B to select using a box, G to move, etc.
 
Something is wrong with my ipo curve. I have it open but unlike the info in the quote box i don't see curve stuff or anything. i can move with arrow keys but it wont delete or remove anything and edit mode doesnt appear as an option. see picture

You can delete keys in the Ipo Curve editor window. In there, you'll see the Ipo curves and you can delete keypoints on the curve by tabbing into edit mode and selecting the control points on the curve. Alternately, by pressing K, you can toggle into key view mode, where full keys (collections of key points on different Ipos) can be moved together or deleted/copied/etc. Keys appear as vertical yellow lines that can be selected with right click, moved with G and deleted with X.

Certain kinds of keys can also be deleted in the Action Editor. Take a look at that too. Deleting keys in the Action Editor should be self-explanatory.
Click to expand...
 
Yes, it's not obvious like a lot of things in Blender but you need to change the mode in the IPO Curves window to Pose - see attached image.
 

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got it thanks. i started working with animation editor after watching some tutorials. So I moved some arms. but for some reason they rotate the other way around before going to the position i set. any idea why it does that and how do i stop it? or tell it which way to go?
 
Try putting a few intermediate keyframes. When you have two positions the default behaviour is to calculate a Bezier curve between them. Sometimes this can result in weird figure-of-eight type movements. Adding more intermediate positions should help the curve follow the path you want.
 
thanks Deliverator for helping Ekmek :)

@ Ekmek
i still have problems while doing animation and i´m not really familiar with ipo curves manipulating - but it seems a powerful tool to avoid some special problems i had while trying to animate objects (eg: i have a very special 360 degree rotation trauma). So it seems for me that delivator was the better advisor.

Beside this, leaderhead animations have a lot of keyframes and also a lot of bones, doing minor changes is fine, making really new ones will cost "some" time. I also had the problem that sometimes - some time ago - the animation itself was not imported correct (it´s not necessary that you´re able to see the error, so it can be be but must not a problem), which also caused problems as i tried to change things. For example, better don´t ask how many keyframes i had to enter to avoid a very ugly 360 degree hand rotation in the Alexander animation.

I wish you luck, because i think you really have the patience to create a new lh animation :)
 
Thank you for the tutorial, The_Coyote! Unfortunately, I still could not solve my problem. I hope you can help me through it.

I play Fall from Heavens mod. While the art is breathtaking, there are several unit arts that won't show up in my laptop, probably because of my low-graphic and the arts are using shader. How can I remove the shader from the nif?

Thank you!
 
Removing a shader can be best done in nifscope, but there will be an disadvantage. The resulting non shader unit will cost more performance than the original shader unit


the steps you must do:
1.) open the nif in nifscope
2.) search for the NiTriShape (the mesh) in the nif, sometimes there will be more than one (or the meshes are NiTriStrips)
3.) look at the block details of the NiTriShape if the model has an shader applied. There are three important entries:
Has Shader: If set to yes the unit has a shader*
Shader name: here is the name of the shader
unknown interger: if the unit has a shader the value is -1, if there is no shader there is no entry

*) the game has one Non Shader setting here. But you will know if you see the shader name, in such as case you must do nothing. At least the shader is not your problem

4.) remove the unknown integer, remove the shader name and as last set Has shader to no (best to it in this order)
5.) go to the NiSkinInstance of the mesh and remove the NiSkinPartition (without doing this the unit will not work - there are two different SkinPartition in Civ4 - one for shader and one for nonshader units and a shader SkinPartition will not work for a non shader unit, unfortunally non shader SkinPartitions can´t be created [at my knowledge] and this is the reason why the units will cost more performance)
6.) Save the nif

Edit: if you need additional help, please post the questions in the nifscope tutorial thread. I think this will be the more suitable place for this topic
 
Is there an already compiled version of the latest nifskope for windows XP?

Also, I cant get the latest export script to run in blender. :( I am running blender 2.48a and python 2.5.

Alos, if anyone is ever having the 360 degree troubles, and cant figure it out, PM me, and send me the blend.. I've done lots of Blender animation. I can fix the IPO curve, and tell you what went wrong. :)
 
i´m still running an older version - was a bit distraced and hadn´t much time - a deadly combination for my civ4 modding, but iirc the lattest scripts were already for Blender 2.49 and a new python version (seems 2.6.x is needed and 2.5.x version are no longer enough and this caused your problems)

Followed the link in the nifskope forum for the lattest nifskope version - http://sourceforge.net/projects/niftools/files/nifskope/1.0.21/ - and the fourth file was the windows installer version
 
The_Coyote said:
i´m still running an older version - was a bit distraced and hadn´t much time - a deadly combination for my civ4 modding, but iirc the lattest scripts were already for Blender 2.49 and a new python version (seems 2.6.x is needed and 2.5.x version are no longer enough and this caused your problems)

Followed the link in the nifskope forum for the lattest nifskope version - http://sourceforge.net/projects/niftools/files/nifskope/1.0.21/ - and the fourth file was the windows installer version
Click to expand...

thank you and thank you.

I had to reset my python path in windows to python26, as described here in post 3
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7412&highlight=python+path

for anyone curious, this is old, so replace any "20"s with "26"s, or whatever the newest version of python happen to be in the future.
 
coyote & deliverator,

I'm working on animation where i clip out a few frames in the middle. BUT when i slid all the frames closer to remove the gap i wouldg et a blender warning in my console saying animation buffer out of range (106 of 1-85). the original animation had 106 animations and lowered the end to 85. but in game it would show fine except the LHwould disappear for a few seconds a pop back up (with the pleased animation since it goes from greeting to pleased).

so it had a weird gap. I then slid the last few frames out to the 100 - 103- and 106 positions so i don't get the warning but the LH still goes invisible for a brief second.

any idea what could be wrong? have you seen this before?
 
it´s a blender - skript thing. The problem are the text keys.

Select the "text editor" in the window select panel, in the "text editor" view select "Anim" (it should be in the second drop down from the left in the text editor menu panel). In this text file the animation text keys are stored and the actual end is set there to 106 [something like 106/end - general frame / text key].

Alter there the end entry (and if needed all other with a number over 85 - but i don´t think there will be others keys in leaderhead animations) and set the frame to 85. After this you should be able to export the animation.

i think here are some pictures of the text editor (the last three): http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/Blender/Oblivion_Character_Animation
 
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