Skyrim Modding Part6 : Navmesh

Navmesh

The NavMesh in creationkit was actually quite easy to work with, though some problems occurred on the way. Navmesh is a plane that is put on top of your ground to show where the AI can walk, and is often shown as a red overlay in the scene. It was easy to create it in the interior scene, as the ground was flat. I simply clicked the generate navmesh button, and with some tuned settings it projected itself down on the ground. There were some problems around the doors, and the puppets had some trouble getting into the different rooms. It was fixable with one very impressive feature in CreationKit, that allowed me to merge and edit the faces and vertexes of the navmesh, and tweak the small hallways so it got big enough for the AI to walk through.

It was alot more problems with  the navmesh on the exterior scene, as I did not want to screw up the already laid navmesh out there. I had a really complicated entrance with a gigantic stairway to the door, and getting the navmesh to fit on top of it simply would not happen, so I took the easy way out and added a much kinder entrance

Skyrim modding Part 5 : Interior

Interior:

The staff shouldn't just be handed to you. It should feel epic,  and it needed some sort of quest you must complete to obtain it. I made up a short story about a puppet king who had lost control over one of the puppets, and just before he died, managed to write a few notes about how to stop the puppet. In order to forever seal the puppet, you had to create a staff with his essence that could control him.  I am generally not too fond of quest markers that just leads the way for you, so I wrote the "quest" down in a book that is easily found in the first room. I also scaled the book up to be sure that the player didn't miss it. The book basically tells you to find the ingredients , kill the puppet, take his heart, and then craft the staff. Simple. 

The layout of the building, the so called Puppet Palace, was then built accordingly. You enter the building and pops into a hallway with a locked door at the end. The hallway is placed there to give time for the mind to soak in the atmosphere. As you open the next door, you enter a large hall, with a statue of the Puppet King in the middle. To really show that this is the Puppet King, I added a few worshiping puppet statues in front of the statue. You have the vision of four rooms. The room where the player obtain the quest is located at the middle back wall, with a strong torch burning on the outside. In that room, the player has everything he needs to understand and fulfill the quest. The book with quest, a key that opens up more of the area, some ingredients, and the puppetSewingStation where he can craft the staff. 

The key opens up two doors. leaving the last area, the basement where Puppet is, still locked. The now-open rooms are closer than the basement, to make the player go to them first. In there, he battles some mini-puppets, who do not pose a big threat, as this is just to build up the tension before going down to face the Puppet who killed the puppet King. You obtain a new key and some ingredients, placed in a chest to make sure that the player is able to easily get them and not just walk by, forgetting to loot the minipuppet if they were on some of the many  NPC's.  Also, having it in the chest makes the item feel more important than some random loot. 

With the new key, the player can enter the Basement. And nothing good ever happens in the basement. 

The basement is built for a bossfight, and this is where you are going to fight Puppet. The room is huge, filled with pillars, and a huge grave in the middle. The only lightsources is a dramatic point light in the middle of the room, giving off some fierce shadows.  To stop the player from kiting the boss out,the door behind is automatically closed until one of them are dead. Thus concludes the interior.

Skyrim Modding part 4 : Puppet

The Puppet staff is complete, and I can now apply abilities to the staff. As I mentioned earlier, the staff's main ability is to control a small puppet. I looked into how the other staffs handle their conjure abilities, especially the conjure familiar staff, so I could see what files I needed for my puppet to work. I basically needed a staff that instead of conjuring a familiar, conjures my puppet.

I created a weapon(staff), attached an Enchanting, and had that use the magic effect Summon Puppet. The associated item for the magic effect is our NPC(puppet), which then again is using a custom race.

Since I am going to have a Biped, I found it easier to make it summon a  human. That will also give me all the animations I need. So I created my own race, PuppetRace, and attached puppet parts as armor. When I fire the staff, it conjures a little puppet, ready to do my bidding.

Now, the minion is ready, and its up for balancing. I also want to have a sort of questline and an interior scene for the player to pick up the puppetstaff and this fantastic ability. Stay tuned.

Skyrim modding part3 : Staff

The puppet is tied up at the end of the stick, and is ready to get some awesome abilities
This is how the staff turned out

Still having trouble with a seamless import/export in NifSkope, but the general idea is to have your nif, look exactly like the original nif.

Skyrim modding Part2 : Custom models

To learn how to use the creation kit. The first model to be inserted was a beautiful purple test "sword". Magnificent! The weapon was as good as the value, zero. However, a custom weapon is ingame and that is enough to celebrate.

Skyrim modding part1 : Info

One of the things that made the past Elder scrolls games so good, was the mods that made the user experience live longer.  Bethesda has seen the potential in mods, and has included something called creation kit, an editor from where your possibilities are almost endless.

Creation Kit lets you build your own level from scratch, placing enemies, change stats, import custom meshes etc. The most troublesome part is getting your own custom meshes for weapons and armor in the game, but once you get the hang of that, it is an easy thing getting your own, personal weapon in the game.

 The thing is when I play Skyrim, I stop after a couple of minutes because I want more than there is. I want a staff, a puppet staff, that can control a little powerful puppet. A puppet that still has character and protects you from harm. Using the creation kit, I want to create that weapon, and apply a balanced stat so it is possible to play as you normally would do, but with your favourite weapon.

So how do I get it in the game? I followed some of the tutorials from SoMuchMonsters.com , a really neat site with lots of tutorials for sculpting and modding. With that said, this is what you need for getting your custom weapon in Skyrim, copy pasted from one of the tutorials there.


Prereq:
Nifskope 1.1 or later (http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2683 )
Nif.xml up to date ( https://github.com/throttlekitty/nifxml )
Niftools 3.7 or later ( http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3196#p21708 )
Fallout Archive Manager (http://www.fileplanet.com/196180/download/Fallout-3---Archive-Utility- )
Nvidia DDS plugin for Photoshop ( http://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop )


When you are creating textures, know that Skyrim is using the alphachannel for various stuff.

the _d is the diffuse texture, this can have a transparencymap in the alpha.
the _n is the normalmap, can have a specularmask in the alpha.
the _ en is the rgb mask for the enviornment map, used for fake reflections.
the _g is for glow?

Kinect Mocap Results

Kinect Motion Capture

I tested both Brekel and IPIsoft to capture my movements with Kinect. Brekel has a really cool fucntion where you can get live mocap in MotionBuilder, and hook those movements up to your own mesh. 

However, the easier way was to use IPIsoft, a motioncapture program that lets you first record a movie, either with playstation cameraes or 1-2 kinects, and then let it track you with a biped skeleton. The program also lets you save it as a BVH file, a file that can easily be imported into max CAT rigs, which is what I use. 

Brekel

Save out the BVH file from IPIsoft and load it into your Catrig. I used a standard biped for testing purposes. Make sure to check that everything is mapped correctly. Also change the scale of the imported mocap to match your CATrig.

The result were, as expected, shaky. As you get more cameras, the motion capture will be better, and the shakyness can be cleaned up afterwards. Max has the reduce key function which can smooth out the keys on the curves, allthough a more ideal form is to clean them in MotionBuilder. 

The mocap is in this uncleaned state is not very pretty, however, the mocap can be useful as a 3d reference, maybe for a really cool dance. For using it as a reference in CAT, select the layer with the mocapped animation and activate "Display Layer Transform Gizmo". By activating it, you can easily "trace" the mocap and also copy keyposes from the reference. 

I will write a part 2 if I get to do some more testing. Maybe a progress on cleaning up, or if I get another Kinect, compare the quality. For now I must say that, allthough the mocap got very shaky, it is definetly a cheap method for getting some quick reference up and running.

Kinect Mocap 3ds max

I am not usually very fond of mocap animations due to the fact that they always seem to hit the uncanny valley for my part. The soulless motion of the maincharacter in Resident Evil Degeneration ( link) is a good example of what I mean. The animation is realistic, however, I feel nothing when I watch it. It might have something to do with the small details such as face animation etc, however, the run itself is so normal and smooth to me that I don't even notice it. I guess it depends on what you want to have in your game or movie. Maybe you don't want to have an interesting animation, since you don't want the audience to be distracted, and that is fine. However, if all animation is so plain and realistic that you don't even pay attention to it, I will be bored, even though the protagonist is a superbuffed viking smashing huge armies to dust with a thousand pounds big tuna.

 I do know it is very possible to tweak that animation to something with alot more feeling to it. And I know there are some very good mocap animators that create awesome animation with a mountain of feeling to it. There are many pros for using motion capture in a game production pipeline, and I do understand why big studios are using it. It is very fast to get something working, and the animation itself is, especially on walkcycles, very good if you aim for realism. The equipment also gets better and better every year. Combined with some keyframe animation, I do believe the feeling that I talked about earlier can be acheived. And lastly, it is very handy to have a mocap file as a reference for your keyframe animation.

During the past few years, motion capture has gone from being super expensive and hard to come by, to something that is affordable by the normal taxpayer. What used to only be utilized by big studios, is now usable by everyone. To really point that out, I will later create mocap data using a Kinect that we bought today, and import them into a CAT character in 3ds max. I haven't really mocapped by myself before, so  definitely some fun ahead ;)

Welcome to my humble blog!