I really need to get a better movie editing tool than Windows Movie Maker : P

Well,  I am not really building cars since I just used the model found at Tranquility Lane. But I spent a full day’s work on making the skeleton for the car, rigging the pieces to that skeleton and then another day trying to get it to work in game. It was a nice learning experience. I must write some ideas down before I forget em, hence I am writing this post. Please read on if you’re interested.

Horses:

Fallout 3 lack support for mounts, so I have been studying how the horses for Oblivion were made. If I could figure out more about the horses in Oblivion, then perhaps I could find a way to mimic their behavior in Fallout. Illyism, a fellow modder for Project Valhalla, has also been trying to “crack the code” how they made them in Oblivion. Fruits of his labor can be seen here.

It seems that horses are just creatures. When player click on them, some hard coded script plays the getup animation and then makes the player control the horse. Basically we can mimic the controls with simple FOSE scripts, as seen in the Ridable Creatures and Car Mod, but what we can’t mimic is the behavior of the player on top of a horse.

Motorcycle:

I made a creature of the Motorcycle armor I had rigged earlier (copied rad roach files to a separate folder, added Motorcycle.nif file there and checked it from the Model list in the GECK). I combined riding script and this creature. The results were a ridable motorcycle creature.

After that I checked the “Tilt forward/backward” and “Tilt right/left” boxes in the GECK model list. Strangely enough, it worked in game aswell. At this point I had a motorcycle that I could ride and it tilted along the surface of ground it was driving on. Pretty sweet ain’t it? But even while the motorcycle did tilt along the ground, my character didn’t.

It is quite frustrating. Frustrating enough to make me post on the Bethesda forums about it. Unfortunately, no one there seems to know a work around or if they do they just spent their time scloding newbies on the forum.

In Oblivion, when you ride a horse your character’s legs always stay in place even if they the horse is going over tilted terrain. I just need to figure out how that is done technically and then implement this to Fallout 3.  But I don’t know how. Yet.. Frustrating indeed…

Cars:

I can’t rotated the actor but I could hide it inside a car. So, why not make a rideable car creature? Nah, my ego wouldn’t allow me to release such a basic mod, since there is already other mods that do it better. So I decided I would make a rideable car creature with wheels that rotate, turn and bounce along the terrain. Sounds a bit better and, more importantly, it’s a better challenge for me.

So I nicked the car model from Tranquility Lane, created skeleton for it, rigged it and somehow got it to work ingame. Quite buggy still. The wheels are still static for it since I haven’t had a chance to redo the animations for it yet. Also, I know that it is possible to make the wheels follow terrain by adding foot IK systems to them, but I just don’t know how yet. I have to do little more research on the subject.

to be continued…