Making Creatures with Blender 2.49

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Lord Berandas
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Making Creatures with Blender 2.49

Post by Lord Berandas »

Moved from the old ShotN forum.
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This tutorial covers all the basics and usual problems of creature animation and export for Morrowind.
It doesn't cover mesh and textures creation process.
Based on Blender 2.49.
There might be some unsolved issues in the tutorial, if something doesn't work as it's mentioned in the tutorial, please let me know. I have to find all the bugs.

Latest version can be found here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?p93w1fxaip3x1gw" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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Ald-Ma' Cyrod
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Post by Ald-Ma' Cyrod »

this is very useful, cheers. one thing im confused about with animating custom creatures is if there's a limited number of bones available. does't look like it with the spider creature from the pdf but the code patch has support for 'additional bones' and mentions that you have to name them a certain way. is that correct, or can I just have as many as I want and name them bip01 [whatever]?
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Lord Berandas
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Post by Lord Berandas »

I guess there is no naming convention for creature bones except the "Bip01" as a name of the whole armature object. Basically all my creatures have bones named just as "Tail" or "Tongue" and works all fine, also I believe there is no (usualy reachable?) limit of bones. I have no experience with creating new NPC skeletons. It would be probably better to follow the MCP naming conventions, so the NPC skeleton is compatible with everything. So in my case, I would use "Tongue (Bip01 Head)" for the tongue bone. At least that's how I understand that from the MCP readme.

MCP readme says this:

Code: Select all

The improved animation patch has support for new bones, but they have to be named correctly. The engine has three bone groups, lower body (root bone, base spine and legs), upper body (spine1 and above, right arm), and left arm (left clavicle and arm bones). For animations to work together a bone has to belong to one of these groups. The patch changes the bone checks from strict match to substring match, so you have to append to your bone's name, a bone from the group it will attach to.

Typical use would be: If you want a bone "CustomBone" to be part of the lower body group, name it "CustomBone (Bip01 Pelvis)", for upper body group "CustomBone (Bip01 Spine2)", for left arm group "CustomBone (Bip01 L UpperArm)".

A full list of acceptable non-conflicting bone names to add are (add Bip01 in front of them):
Lower body group - Pelvis, L Thigh, L Calf, L Foot, L Toe0, R Thigh, R Calf, R Foot, R Toe0, MRT, Tail
Upper body group - Spine1, Spine2, Neck, Head, R Clavicle, R UpperArm, R Forearm, R Hand, R Finger0, R Finger1, R Finger2, R Finger3, R Finger4, Weapon Bone
Left arm group - L Clavicle, L UpperArm, L Forearm, L Hand, L Finger0, L Finger1, L Finger2, L Finger3, L Finger4, Shield Bone

Try to name extra bones to the closest available bone for clearness and future use.

The list of animation names are unchanged, as they are referred to by numerical IDs in the engine. It's recommended to replace the sneak animations (there are 20 available) if you need custom animations for a single NPC, as these are unused for most NPCs.

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worsas
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Post by worsas »

Those limitations for bone amounts and the required bone names are only for npc skeletons. Either creatures that are intended to make use of the npc animation or ones that are supposed to be used for actual races. I don't know if you were thinking about making the minotaur a beast race. In that case, I'd recommend importing the skeleton of one of the beast races and rig the minotaur to it. If you do it this way you won't need to animate it aswell.

Alternatively you can consider using the skeleton of the existing minotaur. That way you would save yourself the need of creating an own animation queue, too. But you might need to play around with some importing settings to get the skeleton imported right. I had some issues with it, I remember.

..or you make an own skeleton from scratch without the intend of making it a race. Then you will only need to name the armature or the first bone bip01 as described in the tutorial. But for the rest bones there won't be a particular rule to stick to. But you will need to make the whole animation queue, of course.

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Ald-Ma' Cyrod
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Post by Ald-Ma' Cyrod »

cheers guys, that's cleared up a lot of confusion on my part :)

worsas, new skeleton is already made and needed animations from above pdf (idle, attack, walk etc.) are being made now. I just had to add an 'extra' bone for the leg anatomy and wanted to know if I could get away with it without using the MCP as a requirement. I didn't know creatures don't follow the same bone naming structure (or limitations) as the npcs, so ill just leave it as a creature
"Weird is relative." - S'Rathra

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