Alvar007

Thank you both for the information. I actually saw that thread before opening this one, and I think it's an interesting idea to do. But making an animation takes me ages, so I don't see myself doing 20 or 30 custom anims, at least not for now. I have other things in my priority list first, but I may come back to this in the future. I can do the renaming thing tho, but I need to understand it first: What do you mean all the creature/ monster anims? Do I have to rename also the ones from the other creature models? I didn't touch those at all for this. Also how do I know the names I have to change to? There are some F modeltypes such as the Dark Jedi that uses a supermodel because they are humans but other such as the Wookies have their own supermodel. So each model have their own anims even though they are all F modeltypes. But the Selkath do not have any supermodel and all their anims are inside the model so how do I figure this out?

Ok so I just tried this and indeed it breaks most of their animations, only the default talking one works (the one where they scratch their lobe thingy). But it actually reads the TALK_FORCEFUL animation now, I did a quick test animation, called it tlkforce and selected it in the .dlg and it works. Still don't know how to fix the rest of them tho, or if it's actually fixable. Also, do you know why I can't get the mouth movements in a custom module? I specify the VO_ResRef in the .dlg file and the sound but it doesn't work. I even tried with the vanilla values but no luck. I remember I had this problem back when I first modded the game with humans but I got it to work with a "global" sound file which was not in any of the modules folders inside streamwaves, such as n_gmtwilek_coml2.wav. But I can't get it to work with the selkath for some reason, not even with their own sounds.

Ok so I took your advice guys and I tried making the animation following the TALK_FORCEFUL animation from S_Male02, which is kind of the angry talk animation. But before I did anything I wanted to test out if I could a new slot for the model so I called it tlkforce which is what the game uses to match the TALK_FORCEFUL animation. But for some reason the game doesn't recognize it, whenever I try playing it the model just uses the default talking animation. If I try to do the same with an existing animation (I remove it first and try to play it) the game tries for a second but switches to the idle animation (notice I say idle but before it was the default talking one, not the same). This tells me that the game knows there is this animation but it can't find it. Whereas the previous case the game just doesn't even search for it. It's like it's not hardcoded into the game to look for the INT_TALK_FORCEFUL constant in the selkath model. So there is no choice but to replace an existing one. After looking at all of them the least used one is the usecomp animation (I think it's only used when you are sentenced to death in the trial and the guy in the computer turns the ray cell on. But let's be honest, you have to be really bad or do it on purpose to get that ending so it's not a big deal). The problem is that it's a fireforget animation, not a looping one. Meaning that when it's done the model will return to the idle animation. The looping version of the animation it's not on the model unfortunately and I can't use it. Anyway, here's the animation: And here's how it looks in Blender: For some reason I can't get the mouth movements in my test, but I tried it with vanilla NPCs and it works perfectly. The only downside to this is that all entries in the .dlg files you posted would have to be updated with USE_COMPUTER_NOLOOP instead of TALK_FORCEFUL in the animation field, in case you are still interested. What do you think?

Wow, these are definitely worthy of an animation! I will give it a go this week. Do you want it to be a variant of a normal talking animation or an emotion one like sad, angry, etc?

That would be great, thanks!

Ok, I took a look at it but it seems the selkath only play the normal animation all the time during the conversations without calling the other one in any of the nodes. So if I wanted to do a mod to make them play the alternate animation from time to time, would I have to replace all the dialogs in the game?

Thanks! So if I understand correctly, the selkath have an unused slot animation for talking and you want me to make one? If so, when does it play? Because the TALK_NORMAL animation would be overriding it right? Anyway, I might look into it later this week if I have the time.

Thank you so much!

Hello there, I'm kind of new here with this being my first post but I have had this account for some years now and I also did some modding to this game back in summer 2015. Now I have been messing around with the new tools and I was interested in KotorBlender to create new animations since that's the program I recently learned for modding Jedi Academy as well and I am quite comfortable with it now. So my intention was to create new facial animations but I wasn't sure of the capabilities this plugin offered. I was quite glad when I found out that it has been recently updated and it fully supports animations as well as other models properties. But when I imported a head I was quite surprised to see that the bones in this game are not really bones like Jedi Academy for example but objects that act like such. Thus, I couldn't attach them to the mesh to see how it deformed when trying to create an animation. So I tried creating a temporary bone rig in blender that you could use and attach each bone to each object so that when you move a bone the object also moves. This may seem like it's working on paper but I had so much trouble with transforms that I almost gave up. They are a real pain in the ass. First I tried animating the bones and the objects apparently move with them but in reality they are not changing their transforms. So I tried to copy and paste them from the bones and it seemed to work in the program but in game the face was a total mess. This was because the objects were taking the absolute transforms of the bones that were in a different position that the objects are. What appears to be working in the program has nothing to do with the game and viceversa. So I just parented them and even though the objects would jump to a weird location their transforms would remain untouched as you can see in a test animation I made here: So now how do I transfer the bone movements to the objects? I tried a thing in blender called Delta transforms. This are like offset transforms that only take into consideration the relative location and rotation of an object. This was very useful in a parent/child scenario like this because now I had the original objects location/rotation + the relative transforms of the bones. Unfortunately when I tried it in game it did nothing, probably because the plugin only reads the absolute transforms, the delta transforms are stored in a different field. So I couldn't use this approach. Can the KotorBlender plugin be updated to support delta transforms? It would be really useful and nobody would have to do what I'm about to say for it to work. I needed to somehow transfer those delta transforms to the absolute transforms so that the plugin could read them. There is a function in blender called "all transforms to deltas" that transfers all the absolute transforms to the delta fields and left the absolute ones to zero which is exactly the opposite of what I need. I need to transfer this absolute+relative transforms that I have in the delta fields to the absolute fields. Luckily I found a script that did exactly this but I had to this for every single keyframe which is extremely exhausting and time-consuming. If someone here knows how to code on python can you do a script that does this automatically? It wouldn't be that bad then. So after thousands headaches I finally got it to work in-game: You can also see that the model has those wrongly shaded faces around the jaw. Anybody knows how to fix that? I saw other people having the same issue but I'm not sure how to fix it. I decompiled and compiled the model with MDLOps 1.0.0 since MDLEdit was giving a lot of problems. The point of all these is that you can make a facial animation with a dummy mesh so you can see how it looks without having to load it every single time in game. But I don't know if this is a worth approach with all these problems, if you solve one of those two though then it really is at least for me. I just wanted to share this knowledge to people who may be interested in this or don't know the extension of this plugin. Now I just need to learn animated cameras for the machinima I'm trying to make, does anyone have any tips/tools/tutorials that I could use? Would be really appreciated. Sorry for the long post. And thanks for keeping this community alive!