Hello All,

I love that Skyrim shows the smithing animation when you craft something, unfortunatly it is only shown in the background and is obstructed by the crafting menu.

I was wondering if it would be possible to create a mod to play the smithing/grinding/tanning animation for a set amount of time after you select to craft an item at the forge/grindstone/tanning rack - maybe 20-30 seconds or so (without the crafting screen obstructing the view). After you character's animation runs for the set amount of time, the weapon/armor/whatever would be added to your inventory.

The above seems (to me) like it might be similar to how an existing mod works - See You Sleep. Which hopefully points to it being possible to do.

Another option might be having it work like another existing mod - Dovakin Relaxes. Perhaps when a power is used on the forge/grindstone/tanning rack it plays the appropriate animation for a set amount of time or until canceled.

Anyway, if anyone would have any ideas how to best go about this, I would appreciate it. I am a novice at the CK, but willing to learn.

Or, if it is something easy/quick for the advanced CK user to do and someone would like to do volunteer to do it, that would be wonderful as well.

Thanks,
Brian

It should definitely be possible. I had a similar feature in an alchemy mod (currently on the back burner) where the player character was be forced to run the alchemy workstation animation for a while after they closed the crafting menu. It was a matter of checking how much had been crafted, if any, and then calculating the appropriate time to run the animation based on the amount of crafted items and temporarily disabling the player controls.

It is possible, but might be difficult. Furniture and animations are a tricky beast. You'll need to do the following:

1) Define Story Manager nodes to catch the crafting event
2) Script the forge such that you can either drive the player with AI for a short time while they use the forge (not recommended, may cause strange teleportation glitches later), or try calling PlayerRef.MoveTo(Forge), which may make them play the "using" animation without pulling up the crafting menu (recommended). This is how See You Sleep makes you lie down in a bed; PlayerRef.MoveTo(BedRef)
3) A script to in general take care of timing concerns, flags, call Game.DisablePlayerControls(), followed by Game.EnablePlayerControls(). This is my go-to method for kicking the player out of any menu function.