A little FO4 Animation wishlist

[Shiagur]

As threaten- I mean, as promised, here are the additions to the animation import and export for Fallout 4 animations.
I'll also include what I've done for my import/export script as a reference.

1. Uncompressed option for animations that need precision. (That changes the animation type from spline compressed to uncompressed.)

2. Other compression options: I don't know what compression Pynifly uses, but Havok exports the animations with the settings in this picture by default:

The settings that come with the animation kit on Nexus have the rotation tolerance set to 0.000010, instead of 0.001000. (Which is also what I've been using)
I've also been asked to set the Quantization to 48-bit, instead of 40-bit, to fix slight weapon jitter in smaller movements.

3. Support for offsets. Those can be easily found in paired animations like kill moves. The offset is a 4x4 transformation matrix that is stored in "hkSimpleLocalFrame". In my rig, I set the object transforms of the armature object to those coordinates and keyframe them to preserve them when switching actions.

4. Support for motion data. Those can be found in third-person running and walking animations, as well as kill moves, and some furniture animations. Those are a bunch of uncompressed coordinates in "hkaDefaultAnimatedReferenceFrame". When exporting with Havok, the motion data is extracted from the Root bone, so I animated the Root bone in Blender with those coordinates as well.

5. Option for additive animations. That one is a bit harder to write about since there's painfully little information on it. I'm not sure what I should write about this, but according to Havok: "The first frame of the animation is subtracted from each frame of the entire animation."
   Examples would be some pip-boy animations like "pipboyChangeCat" or "MinigunTurretSweep" for the Vertibird minigun.

6. Support for partial animations that don't have every bone animated. Only a select few bones are animated for those. The aforementioned "pipboyChangeCat" is one such animation. It seems like those are mostly used for additive animations.

7. Support for the strange, unknown animation type that doesn't have a single block of animation data, but six, which are divided into static and dynamic translations, rotations, and scales. They also seem to have transformation types and offsets for every bone.
   No idea what all that means, but examples would be 1st Person idle and 1st Person additive animations for all the weapons.

I know I'm not really good at communicating my thoughts, so feel free to @Shiagur me on Discord, if you want me to clarify something, have any questions, or want to discuss anything with me.

[BadDogSkyrim]

For any of these enhancements, if you can point me at animations that do it already it's a big help. It's much easier when you have a reference to copy.

I've never dealt with paired animations, so that's all new ground to me. I imagine there's a way to sync the two up? Or something?

Motion data, ditto.

Additive animations we've actually seen--that seems to be how auxbone animations work in Skyrim. They animate a subset of the skeleton while another animation is playing on the whole skeleton. Sounds very like what your FO4 examples do.

I'll put these on the list.

[Shiagur]

Sure thing.
An additive animation is Meshes\Actors\Character\Animations\Furniture\MinigunTurret\MinigunTurretSweep.hkx

A partial additive animation is Meshes\Actors\Character\Animations\WPNFireAutoAdditive.hkx
(I have yet to see a partial animation that isn't also additive.)

An animation with motion data is Meshes\Actors\Character\Animations\MT\Neutral\RunForward.hkx

Two animations with motion data and offset are Meshes\Actors\Character\Animations\Paired\PairedKill1HMShortShank_Lead.hkx
and Meshes\Actors\Character\Animations\Paired\PairedKill1HMShortShank_Victim.hkx
(I have yet to see an animation with an offset but no motion data.)

Those strange animations that are split into static and dynamic transforms are any first-person weapon idle or *Add animations and come in regular and additive versions, like
Meshes\Actors\Character_1stPerson\Animations\44Pistol\WPNIdleReady.hkx (normal) and
Meshes\Actors\Character_1stPerson\Animations\44Pistol\WPNPitchDownReadyAdd.hkx (additive).

As far as I understand, motion data makes the character move around in the world, so unlike regular animations, when the animation finishes playing, the character stays where he stops and doesn't snap back to where he started.

Kill moves seem to all start at the same frame, but there are some annotations that are for syncing up animations (as far as I can tell)
And when a paired animation starts, the characters get snapped to the position in that offset matrix, which looks like this in Blender: