Adding animations to BI 1.6 (succesfully)

[shrimpy]

For The Tutorial Please Visit Here

If you wish to view it here:

I've seen a lot of animation guides floating around that are either don't work or hard to follow, hopefully this tutorial will help you gain some level of functionality in your animations in BI 1.6. It is important to follow these steps in order and not jump ahead from prior knowledge

1. Take the attached rar and extract it to your acivision/rome total war/BI/Data/Animations folder

2. Go to the acivision/rome total war/BI/Data/Animations folder and Run the AnimEditor program, hit N for new animations set.

3. Read through the list and decide which skeleton you want your new skeleton to be based on, choose the one most similar to what your making, be sure to pick the proper speed. Type your choice and hit enter, for example "fs_swordsman"

4. Decide the name of your new set, and type in in, for example "fs_axeman"

5. Wait for it to stop processing, you can now exit out of anim editor and run extract anims. Let this run through, and close it.

6. Your new anim set is now created, go to civision/rome total war/BI/Data/Animations/data/animations/"Your new anim name". You should see all of the vanilla animations in there, you can now edit them at your leasure.

7. When your done editing your anims you can run Pack animations back in your animations folder.

Further Modification: If you wish to modify your existing set you can simply go back to step 6, and if you want to add another animations set go back to step 2. BE SURE TO COMPLETE ALL STEPS BEFORE GOING BACK TO ADD/MODIFY. You can now link to your animations in description model battle. If you are doing this for a mod and not for your own purposes you'll want to only take these 4 files, animations.dat, animations.idx, skeletons.dat, skeletons.idx, this will minimize file size.

Please excuse me if I've made a critical error, should work as this is what I do myself. In the future I hope to make an overview of what all those random animation names mean, and a guide to making and modifying animations in max to produce good looking results with minimal skill,
The Shrimp

[Ciaran S]

Sorry for digging this up from the vaults (so I don´t know if you actually read this), but I only recently got to use this tool. and it´s simply fantastic, shrimp

I´ve just got one question: If I want to add a skeleton from another animation pack (let´s say the two-handed swordsman from BI) to the RTW animation pack, how do I go about it? My guess is the following:
1) Extract the skeletons of the pack you want to add the skelleton to.
2) Extract the skeletons from the pack in which the skelleton you want to use in your pack is.
3) Copy the skelleton fs_*skelletonthatyouwant* file from the second folder into the first
4) run "pack skelletons"

Right? Or did I miss something? Do I need to unpack the animations as well (use "extract animations")?

[♔atthias♔]

marked this as a tutorial