Creating animation for Morrowind (2023)

[BK201]

Greetings everyone.

I want to know what are the current ways to create animations for Morrowind, at the moment (2023)?

In 2011, I got interested in Morrowind, made mods for it, and even tried to make animations. I used 3Ds Max 5 and TES Exporter to do this. I exported the animation to a .kf file, and connected it to Morrowind using the AnimKit program by LizTail. Animations worked great, but there was one big BUT, the process of creating animations in 3Ds Max 5, which came out in 2002, it is pain and suffering! Even then, the current versions of 3DMax, Maya, Blender and other programs, had functionality that greatly facilitated and accelerated the process of creating animation, but the whole problem was how to export animation from these programs in Morrowind. Tried 3D Max 2012 + NifTools, but no matter what settings are set when exporting animation, it did not work in Morrowind

It's been a long time, what has changed? Perhaps there are new exporters that can export animation for Morrowind?

Or is it still the only way to create animations for Morrowind is 3Ds Max 5 + TES Exporter?

[Mordicus]

Most of the recent animations for Morrowind have been created with Blender.
I.e., a recent work-on-progress seen on OpenMW:
viewtopic.php?p=72852#p72852

But there were many plugins created or updated for 3dsmax, for different versions of 3dsmax, most of them by the Niftool team.
Their last plugin (one of the latest, MaxPlugins 3.7.2) was made for 3D Studio Max 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and gmax 1.2.
https://github.com/niftools/max_nif_plugin/tree/develop

There were several endeavours to update the plugin for newer versions of 3dsmax (would need to search the web to find them back).
At least there was a MaxPlugins 3.7.3 released somewhere (I kept a copy).

For a while, a few modders have also used a compatible Nif plugin made for another game, FFVT3R (Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich), since it was using the same version of Netimmerse/Gamebryo than Morrowind, so fully compatible with it. The plugin (FFEexporter) was for 3ds max 5. Link:
https://www.moddb.com/games/freedom-for ... ter-studio

When Skyrim came out, a modder named TheFigment have updated the 3DS Max Nif Plugin for 3ds Max versions 64/32 (8,9, 2008,2009,2010, 2011, 2012) several times to v3.8.0 (last update in 2015), but it was mainly for Skyrim, not sure if the compatibility with Morrowind is broken or not. It's unlikely, but no one may have tried thoroughly. Link:
https://github.com/figment/max_nif_plugin/releases

However, here may be the best place to start (the most updated link & tools for Morrowind & 3dsmax in 2022!):

3ds max 5 quick setup for Morrowind NIF export-import
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mod ... escription

Notes for Modmakers - English version (beta 1.0) - pages about animation are still in Russian, untranslated, so you'll need Google Translate.
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/51916
There is a tutorial to install plugins, import/export NIF with 3dsmax. The verdict is:
3dsmax 5.1 remains the most convenient for Morrowind import/export and it supports at least 3 versions of plugins for Morrowind nif files:
- official plugins from Bethesda (Tesexporter)
- unofficial plugins from Niftools.
- FFEexporter.
3dsmax 5 itself is "high fault tolerance", has a lightweight engine, and it can still run under recent 64x OS with the network licence mode.

3ds max 2009 would also be an option. It's only compatible with the unofficial Niftool plugin (quote: "perhaps the latest optimal version is 3.7.3.25311"), no official plugin work on it, but it has several valuable features to work with skeleton animation and especially for skin wrap.

Hope it helps!