I've looked around for this and still haven't found one.
I'm replaying the trilogy for the first time with mods and I am really hoping that someone can point me to a mod that has fixed FemShep's walking animation so it doesn't look like she's about to get into an imaginary gunfight at high noon. If such a mod exists?
There are no animation mods for any of the Mass Effects afaik 
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I've looked around for this and still haven't found one.
I'm replaying the trilogy for the first time with mods and I am really hoping that someone can point me to a mod that has fixed FemShep's walking animation so it doesn't look like she's about to get into an imaginary gunfight at high noon. If such a mod exists?
I was just looking into animations and trying to fix them this weekend. It appears to be virtually impossible (so far). First, some animations are hidden away and cannot be found easily (I've been trying to find the Rannoch animations where Tali walks to the cliff after all the fighting and she takes off her mask and breaths the air. For the life of me I cannot find that animation anywhere). I was also working with another to try and edit the starbrat's animations so he could be replaced by something else - I can export and fire up the animations in various apps (milkshape3d, 3ds Max, Blender) but there's no way to edit them. Not even UDK will let you edit them, apparently.
Short of creating new animations from scratch (I MAY go that route and TRY it eventually) and putting them in, I don't see any way to make those changes. Besides seeing a need to change any femshep walk/run animations to be more female-like, I'd LOVE to change the walk animations for females in the Citadel bar mission (with Brooks). They all walk like dudes in skirts instead of women.
Just not really sure it's possible with the tools available.
It would be really interesting to try inserting a random animation as a proof of concept. That would open a new field of modding.
@Getorex:
AFAIK, UDK has no animation editing tools. At least whenever I used it, I made all my animations in 3Ds Max and imported them, to use them in e.g. a matinee.
It's weird though, that you can import the animations into 3Ds Max but can't edit them. I would have thought that, once in there, they would be just like any other. I never tried to edit extracted animations from the game though. I only tried to load straight into UDK, which for me worked with some animations but not all. I never found out what determines if they work or not.
Well, unless you were able to convert it into hex that could be copy-pasted into a pcc file there is no app or function for importing psa animations, only exporting them. You would THINK that if you can export something you should be able to reverse the process and import but apparently it's not the case (or we would also be able to mesh mod ME2 and ME1 AND be able to animation mod any of the games too).
@Getorex:
AFAIK, UDK has no animation editing tools. At least whenever I used it, I made all my animations in 3Ds Max and imported them, to use them in e.g. a matinee.
It's weird though, that you can import the animations into 3Ds Max but can't edit them. I would have thought that, once in there, they would be just like any other. I never tried to edit extracted animations from the game though. I only tried to load straight into UDK, which for me worked with some animations but not all. I never found out what determines if they work or not.
Yeah. I've also found that SOME animations don't even work with the character they work with in the game when they are out of the game.
I've been unable to successfully run any animation on any psk model directly exported from ME3Explorer, Blender, or 3ds Max.
I CAN run, for instance, a short romance scene animation for Ashley in 3ds Max on an Ashley model that is in 3ds format or a Liara model in 3ds format, even the starbrat model in 3ds format runs. If I try and run a starbrat animation from a dream sequence on the starbrat or any other model, no matter what format it is, it twists the mesh into knots and tosses them around like wet noodles.
I imported some of my ME3 models into the new Unreal 4 dev kit and THEY imported well but when I try to run that starbrat animation on any of them...tossed like wet noodles all over the place again (just for your info there is no compatibility AT ALL between UDK and Unreal 4. 4 will NOT import upk files or psk files. It will only accept in fbx).
I've loaded psa files repeatedly into 3ds Max and Blender an in no case can I find any way to edit them (they generally don't work well, if at all, in Blender so far but others have been able to get them to work(ish) - I'm just not knowledgeable enough yet to know how).
Ok, that's interesting. It may be difficult to run the starkid animations especially with other models since they seem to have slightly differently organized bones (at least that's what sansuni mentioned on the me3explorer boards). As you say, it's odd that some of them don't even work with the characters that they were intended to run with in the game though. Really not sure what's going on there since WV did have a pretty comprehensive research topic where it looked like he had completely retro-engineered animation formats. Maybe some of them have some special flag or whatever, that messes up all the offsets after it during the extraction process from the game. At least that's the only thing I can imagine, that would screw them up like this.
Ok, that's interesting. It may be difficult to run the starkid animations especially with other models since they seem to have slightly differently organized bones (at least that's what sansuni mentioned on the me3explorer boards). As you say, it's odd that some of them don't even work with the characters that they were intended to run with in the game though. Really not sure what's going on there since WV did have a pretty comprehensive research topic where it looked like he had completely retro-engineered animation formats. Maybe some of them have some special flag or whatever, that messes up all the offsets after it during the extraction process from the game. At least that's the only thing I can imagine, that would screw them up like this.
Yeah, I was working with sansuni to try and find out why he would get bizarrely compacted characters when an "adult" was run in the starkid slot in the game. I thought there might be a bone scaling setting in the animation so wanted to edit the animation to check and change it if it was there or, as it turns out, since they are not apparently editable, that his desire to change the character was impossible. Turned out to be a setting in another spot in the pcc so it is now moot BUT it brought up the issue of utter inability to edit/change psa files (for some reason). That, and the annoying issue of animations that are in the game being cryptically hidden all over the place, including inside files you wouldn't expect to find them - and how some seem invisible to the Animation Explorer part of ME3Explorer.
I wonder how the Mass Effect team kept all of this straight when developing if all these files are scattered all over the place? I'm not sure I understand all of it, but this sounds extremely convoluted.
I know, from what I understand of modding in Skyrim, that animations in that game require the ability to edit scripts. Is that universal? Might the lack of access to the scripts for the ME games be part of the problem when trying to alter animations? Or do we have access to those and I'm just uninformed?
Also, I suppose it'd be crazy to ask what programs I'd need to try to mess around with this myself?
(ps Thanks for the discussion, at least. Its very enlightening.)
It wouldn't have been much of a problem for the developers because the organization of single objects like animations in the files does not have to be the same as their organization in the Unreal Engine 3 Development Kit (UDK). Basically, the devs have a giant database with categorized and (ideally) nicely ordered and labeled assets for the game (animations, meshes, textures, materials and whatnot). Within the UDK, they then build the levels for the game. Once they compile the data ("bake" the levels) into the game files, the engine will automatically create the most memory efficient file structure for the game (compromising between memory limits for single levels - which may require duplicating assets and saving them in level files themselves - and assets in global files which are always in memory but allow for one asset to be used in multiple levels without duplication). Since we are trying to work our way back from the baked files to the actual assets, to us, they seem randomly distributed while originally - in the editor the devs used - they were nicely ordered.
So much for the background. As for tools: Most importantly, you'd need ME3Explorer to access the game files. You'd also need a 3D modeling program, such as 3DsMax or Blender and UDK for Unreal 3 to open/convert some assets. Also, you'd need some of the plug-ins and tools from Gildor's page for some format conversions and such. Most of this stuff is free for non-profit projects. That and reading quite a few pages of text on the me3explorer forums, on Gildor's page and in all sorts of UDK tutorials should get you started. All the info ls out there, waiting to be googled. 
I can look into it then. Thank you for all that explanation.
Do we happen to know which 3D program the devs used? Or does it matter for these purposes?
I can look into it then. Thank you for all that explanation.
Do we happen to know which 3D program the devs used? Or does it matter for these purposes?
Indeed, thanks MrFob. That helped my understanding a lot. I thought the whole thing an unholy mess from fevered dev minds but it is just an unholy mess made by the UDK optimization process.
Not sure the actual modeling program used is all that important. Once a model or model and animation is encoded in a portable file format (psk, psa, or fbx is favored now as better (I think fbx can include both mesh AND animation information within it - it is what Unreal 4 recognizes). The main problem isn't so much from modeling software to UDK, it is between/within modeling software. That said, I would expect they either used 3ds or Maya. Once I learned the ropes, I found I preferred blender BUT 3ds with Gildor's plugins is definitely more solid in the psk/psa front. Fbx is more easily exchanged between softwares though.
Note: if you go Blender and try fbx (I've used fbx from Blender to get into Unreal 4 and UDK) you need to learn a few quirks. On export you select -Y Forward, Z up or your imported model in UDK/Unreal 4 will be lying down on the ground and no easy way to correct it. You also set your smoothing groups to either faces or normals (I haven't yet figured out which tends to be best). It will then be OK in UDK. Blender has the benefit of being free rather than costing an arm and a leg (or needing to be...acquired by other means) like 3ds or Maya.
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