Here you can see the three bones which make up the spellfire arm sheath. In most of the animations they play just fine. I found out that the majority of the rotational mess up was due to how nwmax exports rotated objects. Still related to quat math, but the major issue was that the bones were rotated before animation frames began, which caused an offset equal to the values of each bone's rotation offset in relation to frame 0. Once I modified how the chain was set up, by baking the original rotation into the subsequent frames, and at the same time removing the original rotation, they play without as much jerking around. A great majority of the quat math error was then cleared up, but still, not all of it.
The major difficulty with this is in how animations are transitioned, and especially with those which are animroot-ed NOT to rootdummy, but to another body part. For instance, I mentioned yesterday about the arm subanimations for stances. If you have ever slow walked a character across a map by putting your mouse pointer in front of his foot, and then clicking to move, you will see the arms often move at 100% swing speed, while the legs move at some tiny fraction, like he's sneaking... yet at the same time doing the robot. This is really bad, and is a major reason why subanimations need to be done away with in the A_BA cycle list.
Like with skinned PC's, any time the engine calls on a stance/subanimation which has a different animroot, the transition times between the two portions of the model can go out of sync, including having your character's arms continue to swing while standing still. He really really likes to do the robot. This out of sync when viewed on the spellfire arm sheath is just as annoying, especially if the arm sheath keeps moving while you are doing something else.
The only way I have found to remove this issue is to reconstruct the A_BA cycle list and clone all leg movement animations to the similar waist-up animations. I've also found that by changing weapon types in the baseitems.2da, you can remove the over-the-shoulder stance for larger weapons, and that such was a requirement for this spellfire arm sheath.
So far, I'm testing this as a bow with some success. Initially I wanted it to shoot a projectile, or to have an alternate close combat burning hands spell look to it. As a bow, no matter what ammo type I give it, the item self-destructs on first use. I've even modified ammotypes and iprp ammotypes files to create additional ammo references so that it doesn't just shoot arrows and stones. I also tried giving it the unlimited ammo property with both old and new ammo types associated. Neither works to cure the self-destruct.
As a short sword, I can set the preferred attack range to a high number, however, any time I step back past 2m, the character will stop attacking, chase the target, and then start attacking again, as if he DOES NOT actually prefer 30m. He'll then start backstepping during combat rounds until he reaches 2m, rinse and repeat.
Setting the preferred attack distance under 2m, as are all physical combat weapons, keeps him in position as expected for close combat attack. Using the realist hands hack makes it look like he really is tossing a spell at people. However, since the sword weapon type is not ranged, no projectile comes out.
This all leads me to believe that I have to take a different approach. One idea is to equip the spellfire arm sheath as a wand, and then associate both long range and short range spells to it as click-to-fire attacks. In my unreleased 4E mod, I did this for the unlimited use magic missile all wizards can use from their chosen focus item. That kind of takes the 2da tinkering fun out of it.
The other idea is to keep the spellfire associated as a melee weapon, only allow it to lash out like burning hands, or some kind of spray shaped whip by using emitters, and then associate some click-to-cast spell properties on top of that for long range combat.
Examining the whip and flail systems in OC weapons, I see they didn't bother doing any animation cycles but the combat ones. That doesn't work for the arm sheath because I need the shape to conform to the body during all frames in which the weapon is visible. Strangely enough, that is every frame but casting frames, as during those frames, the object held in the hand is made invisible, or simply not drawn. What a bummer that was when I was unable to find a fix for that while making custom casting graphics.
To properly animate the arm sheath, I need to either 1) not use my custom animation cycles which come from my skinned PC's, and instead model the arm sheath directly off of the OC animations which are often based not at the rootdummy, or 2) not bother with releasing spellfire as a weapon for use with OC characters.
I originally built this structure and the functions which power it for the Jennica character I fear most of you will never actually see in a module. As the story goes, she lost an arm while fighting a beholder at level 1. She died by being turned to stone, but was brought back later, but only AFTER a gnome reshaped her a stone arm to replace the one he thought she lost by having it broken off by vandals (not exactly the case). The new arm was never quite right to her, and being a paladin of the gods of magic, she looked into alternative hands, many of which turned out to be pretty much magical Stark-tech. This is why I needed arm-sheath skins as equipable items in the hand slots. One of the hands functions as a wand. The other has a big ass sword attached to it with some mechanical action. Since she has a stump at the elbow most of the time, she doesn't have much in place of the hand and forearm models, but I cannot animate those at all, so I animate the weapon instead. Since my specific characters are entirely skinned (multiple skins), and don't use most of the stance-like subanimations, I don't have these animation transition problems with them.
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