Is Mayus Animation Overhaul the only way to have PC only animations? I usually recommend this to those that always ask for this type of thing, and I've never had a need for it before until now. I use a particular 2hand idle stance, and want only my character to use it. But is MAO the only way possible to do this? I really didn't want to use it if I didn't have to.

MAO is not hard to use.

this is for the player:

Meshes\characters\_male\

this for npcs:

Meshes\Mayu's Projects[M]\Animation Overhaul\Vanilla\

So if you installed BBB under mao, you'd have to drop the skeleton on the npc's folder as well as in the player folder.

But no, I dunno of another solution. =.\

There are other idle replacers that only impact the player...here are just a few examples from Nexus:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27344
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37144
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36981

I don't currently use any player idle replacers myself since I always tend to play in first person, although I did download them at some point just to check them out. Do a search for "idle" on Nexus - there are others.

No, MAO is just more popular.
Anyone else please correct me if I am wrong in this,
Adding animations to a player character only is done by placing the individual Kf files into a separate folder and creating an esp to cause the player character to use the animations from the folder. Placing individual Kf files into Meshes\characters\_male can cause all of the NPC's to use the added idles, because they will overwrite the vanilla animations. Amazing jump is an exception, because NPC's normally do not jump, but an idle pose made for a female character looks wrong when you talk to a male character.
I have used quite a few animation mods, but I never tried MAO because I was unwilling to risk skeleton replacement issues when I was adding and playing with animations.

Hmm, that first one sounds interesting. The other two don't sound like what I'm looking for. Second one sounds like just a replacer, third sounds like a menu driven idler, which isn't that great for combat.

The thing about MAO that has me worried is that I use UV as well. I don't want NPCs to lose those animations if I use MAO, which if I understand right, and I could be wrong here, that would cause NPCs not to use UV anims anymore.

Edit: Yeah, Bradleyh, that's another reason why I've been hesitatent to use it too.

Would you mind going into a little more in detail about using an esp to change the PC anim only. I understand the folder part, but the esp part I'm not sure about. I'm guessing there's an option in the CS to point PCs to use the specific anims in that special folder? If this is the case, I can just use my own esp and not fool with an overhaul.

The second one is player only too - it's not obvious from the Nexus description but it uses a separate directory for the animation files and has an esp that just touches the PC. There are others on Nexus beyond those - I just happen to have looked at those specifically.

I know this is how the mods I have tried accomplish animations for a player character, I have never done this myself, except by following instructions in the mod readmes to do what Nero_Blacfire is suggesting.

Hmm, thanks for the responses Stromgarde and bradleyh. I'll try to mess around with this some tonight and see if I can't figure this out then. Perhaps, I'll download that second one Strom suggested and pick it apart.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=36650

I tried those three mods out that Strom pointed out, and couldn't really understand how they worked. Probably due to my very limited understanding of how animations work. I may have to take this thread over to the CS section to figure it out.

Nero, I've seen that mod, and it's pretty much the same as MAO, only done in a much better way. It still fiddles with the skeletons and I really want to avoid that if I can.

Hmm, I am quite curious about these PC-only animation mods. Are they compatible with Deadly Reflex and such? I've seen some comments on that, but nothing that would either confirm or dismiss the incompatibility. :mellow:

Those mods work by setting SpecialAnims on the Player character. Open the mod in the CS and go to Actors->NPC and click on Player. There should be an Animation tab where you can set the SpecialAnims to use on the player. SpecialAnims should be stored in the "Data/Meshes/Characters/_male/SpecialAnims" folder. Note: you can't run multiple mods that set SpecialAnims on the player like this or it causes a conflict.




Any mods that use SpecialAnims to change the animations should be compatible. Deadly Reflex has IdleAnims that play using a script so it doesn't matter, or attack animations for every npc that don't work well with SpecialAnims anyway.

Thanks for the answer LD.

What about Bash Patching these mods?