On the nexus forums, I've been busy.

I've decided that for my first major mod I want to add some more Dragon types into the world.

Nothing silly.

Just a Wyrm type (flightless, 4 legs, 'Tank' class essentially).

And a Slitherer type (very fast, don't have legs or fly, deadly with magic and stealth.)

And also Leviathans (underwater slitherers essentially.)

So I've made the model for the Wyrm and are working on the Slitherer, but I would like to know this.

How exactly do I set up a new creature type in the actor list?

How do I pick and choose the animations for it and its ilk?

Can I accomplish it by duplicating the Dragon race and pointing the skeleton, mesh and textures to my new ones?

You also need the entire Behavior Graph (all of the files -> Profile.hkx, Character.hkx and Behavior.hkxs').

You also need EVERY animation that the Graph expects to be present, well to be present.

You also have to do the Animations -> Action to Event mapping, so the game knows what in game action maps to which behavior anim event.

....

So I have to include all of the Flight animations as well?

That'll look a bit odd when my Wyrm suddenly scoots off into the sky.

But okay.

You have to include ALL animations expected to be present or the game will crash but that does not mean you have to enable flight or even go through the trouble of defining the flight action mapping.

for all of the left over animations I have no plan to use I just put in a dummy.hkx files that controls nothing but the "NPC Root [Root]" node as its the root node for every actor and does absolutely nothing for 1 frame as to keep the files as small and bloat free as possible, it can also be copied and pasted to infinity for all future actors.

Okay then. I think I have made a huge problem for myself.

I have Blender 2.6, I don't use Blender 2.9 because the UI is just too different for me.

I decided that I would export the base model as a OBJ and do all the changing in Blender, so I did that, and even managed to get the vanilla texture layout to work with the new model.

I was happy and all until I discovered that OBJs only hold physical mesh data (number of Vertices, stuff lke that) and the UV layout.

So that means when I put it into Nifskope I'm going to have to essentially build it from scratch.

Which I'm not sure how to do.

I am thinking that it might be quicker and easier to start over except this time I keep it as a NIF and edit it in 2.49 Blender.

Can I accomplish this by duplicating the Dragon race so that it has all of the neccessary sounds, anims, and stuff, but then change the mesh and texture to fit my new Wyrm?

I will experiment on this and see what happens.