This is my attempt to provide more documentation on the subject of skeletons and how to expand the potential on them for modding. I'm doing this in a relatively unorthodox manner so bear with me.
Introduction:
By default the only type of skeletons we have are for humans. What does this mean? This means that on it's own we can't add new models to horses or elephants or bring in custom skeletons all together. Skeletons are paramount in fantasy mods or even other big scale mods. You need them as a base for new animations and models. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide insight on the matter and just help people out. Now I have to give a good amount of credit to GrudgeNL who was very helpful and provided insight that ultimately led to this breakthrough. So the way I'm formatting this tutorial is into two examples, Dwarves and Horses.
What you will need:
3ds Max (I use 2013 64 Bit)
Motionbuilder (I use 2013 64 Bit)
Hex Editor(I use HXD)
Ultimate Unwrap(For existing skeletons, although I might upload those ones so people won't need UU3D)
Notepad or Wordpad
BOB
Example 1: Dwarves
Now I know what some of you are thinking, you don't need to have a separate skeleton for different sized "humans" because you can do that already in PFM. Well I believe that this can add more flexibility animation wise or if nothing else it's a great way to get your feet wet with this stuff. I say that because this is the easier of the two examples in many ways. First off I want you to go to Raw_data/variantmeshes/variantmodels and create a new folder called dwarf, go inside the dwarf folder and add a new folder called tex. Then go back into variantmodels, go into the rules.bob file in notepad and add this to the bottom.
[+RigidModelV2]
<Files> = .../*dwarf/...
AnimationType = dwarf
Then copy that rules.bob file and place it in the new dwarf folder. Open up that aformentioned file, delete everything in it and add this line/.
[+RigidModelV2]
<Files> = dwarve.CS2
AnimationType = dwarf
Texturefolder = VariantMeshes\_VariantModels\dwarf\tex\_
TextureSubFolder =
What you've just done is made it so that whatever model has our new dwarf skeleton needs to be saved to that new dwarf folder. Please note that you'll need to change name under <Files> when it's a new model name. Next up we need to go to raw_data/animations/skeletons. What our dwarf skeleton is going to be is a smaller human skeleton so we are going to keep the same bone names. Copy the rome_man_game.bone_table file and place it in another folder, rename it to dwarf and bring it back into the previous folder. Also it wouldn't hurt to open up the dwarf bone table and change the name in it fro rome_man_game to dwarf as well. Now we will be going into Max and Motionbuilder so expect screenshots now, 
Open up the example max file of the body armor lorica squamata, also see my previous tutorial here to make sure you have that ready to go:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...-Up-and-Helmet
Now select everything in the max file and scale it down as see in the pictures below. Then we'll going to use the Send It To Motionbuilder button to make our lives easier here. We won't be doing much in Motionbuilder other then just raw exporting, the only thing you'll have to do is delete these components from the motionbuilder file from the bottom left.
3dsMaxCamera
3dsMaxCamera.Target
Then go into file, custom, export, CA Cs2 batch and export into raw_data/animations/skeleton as dwarf.cs2 Now go back into Max and export your smaller model into our new dwarf folder as dwarve.cs2 If all goes well you should be able to process this through BOB with no problems. I'm going to add the second example later once I know people are not having too many problems with this first example. Trust me we'll be getting more complicated in the next one for horses. Here's some common solutions to some error meesages in BOB you might get. I'll repost this information after the second example too.
Common Errors and Solutions:
1. If you get an error that mentions something about translation that means that position of the skeleton cs2 and the model cs2 aren't in the exact same spot, either fix the model or repeat the motionbuilder thing so the skeleton matches the model instead.
2. If you get an error mentioning mismatched bone names or something that means that the names of bones in the cs2 file are not the same, go over the names and try and find any differences and correct them, you might have ot go back and try again if you can't figure it out.
Okay that's all for now! I'll update this post with the second example later. If you have any questions let me know!
How to bring an external skeleton into Rome 2
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