Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

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EnCarlson
Posts: 3
Joined: 11 Aug 2014, 05:50

Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

Post by EnCarlson »

I've been trying to get the default morrowind npc/player animations into blender, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to do it. The nif tools for blender don't support importing morrowind .kf or .nif animations, and nifskope won't export the animations to either .obj or .dae. Even noesis can't read morrowind's animations. I've looked high and low, but all the tutorials I could find only deal with exporting animations from blender into morrowind and never the other way around. Does anyone here know how to get the player animations into blender?
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Faelian
Posts: 25
Joined: 11 Jul 2013, 15:37

Re: Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

Post by Faelian »

You just import it, like every other file. Note that it probably only works on blender 2.49b (the newer versions of the plugins don't support everything as far as I am aware)
You need to import the combined .NIF file (not .KF, not the small .NIF with just geo) and note that it will take a while and it might seem as if Blender crashed. Just wait a few minutes and it should work just fine.
EnCarlson
Posts: 3
Joined: 11 Aug 2014, 05:50

Re: Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

Post by EnCarlson »

Ok, I was trying to import xbase_anim.nif and xbase_anim.kf instead of base_anim.nif. Importing that mostly works. Import takes about an hour. Animations are there, but all the bones for the clothing are rotated 90 along both the x-axis and y-axis from the main skeleton. In the rest pose, the clothing bones are standing upright like the first frame of the idle animation while the main skeleton is t-posing in the horizontal. The result is that while the main skeleton plays the animations correctly, the clothing bones are floating out in all directions. I can't really experiment with import options as it takes so long just to import the model, do you know if is there some setting I need to check to fix this?
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MiroslavXO
Posts: 107
Joined: 13 Feb 2016, 01:07

Re: Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

Post by MiroslavXO »

One hour? In Maya/Max it takes about 15 sec. I think that only in Max everything works correctly (at least when I was messing with these stuff, because they used Max 4 for animations).
So maybe import the scene in Max and then send it to Blender 2.49b (using older version of .fbx) then save it as native Blender file.
And don't use .obj to export animation, it will not work.
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Faelian
Posts: 25
Joined: 11 Jul 2013, 15:37

Re: Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

Post by Faelian »

MiroslavXO wrote: 05 Oct 2017, 08:12 One hour? In Maya/Max it takes about 15 sec. I think that only in Max everything works correctly (at least when I was messing with these stuff, because they used Max 4 for animations).
Maya? I don't recall Maya being able to import anything directly from Morrowind without a crap ton of workarounds.
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MiroslavXO
Posts: 107
Joined: 13 Feb 2016, 01:07

Re: Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

Post by MiroslavXO »

Yeah, you can import/export models easy, but for animation I had to import everything in Max first, and then link it with Maya to animate, then update Max scene so I can export, and so on.
So I guess the same principle can be done for Blender users. But as you say it is a messy workflow, not recommend.
crassell
Posts: 49
Joined: 26 Aug 2017, 21:10

Re: Exporting Morrowind's player animations to Blender

Post by crassell »

EnCarlson wrote: 04 Oct 2017, 22:47 I've been trying to get the default morrowind npc/player animations into blender, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to do it. The nif tools for blender don't support importing morrowind .kf or .nif animations, and nifskope won't export the animations to either .obj or .dae. Even noesis can't read morrowind's animations. I've looked high and low, but all the tutorials I could find only deal with exporting animations from blender into morrowind and never the other way around. Does anyone here know how to get the player animations into blender?
The import for me in blender 2.49b works fine. That being said i've done most of my importing on just a test creature mesh + animation (nixhound.nif) but the approach should be the same. From there you can save as a .blend, start the latest blender, and load up the model there. The problem at that point is you have to modify in latest blender, save in a mode that is compatible for 2.49b, and open back in 2.49b to export to nif again. Also, kf files do not load and I chose only the base .nif file which includes mesh and animation (nif import gives some error about non-oblivion kf files).

For export from blender to morrowind, I'm currently working on supporting the native OSG format for animations in blender. I'm hoping this will be less than a month in effort.
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