Topic: Can you create your own speedster?

[seraglio]

 

I love speedsters, they are my favorite class of character. I've learned a number of different tricks over the years for making them, but wondered if I might have missed something. I've always wanted to create a speedster that covers a lot of ground quickly, without necessarily increasing speed (and thus power) of other animations. What I'm asking is has anyone found a way, in keyframes, in the mesh, or otherwise to control the distance covered by a single step? I was hoping this was the function of Bip01 Footsteps in the mesh, but my tests haven't showed that changing this does anything at all.

One reason I ask is because of the mesh shrinking effect. For anyone who hasn't encountered this... if you take a giant mesh, like a Celestial, and try to shrink it in NifSkope with anything but the handle node (like scene root), the resulting mesh has its keyframes "sped up". You can use this to kinda create pseudo speeders, by shrinking a normal mesh in scene root, then increasing the size to normal on the handle. It makes it move funny though, and doesn't increase its movement rate, just the rate its legs move.  But it shows you can somewhat control movement rates outside of just keyframes, so I'm wondering if there are some other techniques that I don't know. I really want a character that can speed around the map effortlessley without any other functions (like turning on.off something from a menu, or  activating a power).

[BentonGrey]

So, short answer is "kind of."  If you build a character in, there is a box on the character tab called "Move Radius."  The higher the number, the more space covered during a move.  I use it for creating giant characters.  You can see examples in my MA mod, with Giant Man.  In theory, that might do what you're looking for.  I haven't tried it on non-giant meshes.

[daglob]

The FFX add on has some "speedy" attributes that will let you move quickly across the map. There are also some speedster keyframes that you may not have discovered yet (since they were at NPI).

[seraglio]

Ive looked at the move radius. I noticed T-rex and other giants had larger numbers than one. I thought it just scaled the movement for larger models(so their legs dont move too much), but I've never really tried to max it. I know I created a "tornado" and had it at like 5 and didn't notice it being faster. Ill try 50 and see what happens. Thanks for reminding me of this.

Daglob if you're referring to "speed force" and "natural teleporter" powers I think C4, maybe introduced into a later version of FFX? Bottom line you can't attack with speed over 10. And you have to click a menu to get speed back to 10(9). Thats exactly what I want to avoid by modifying something else, like the mesh or animations, rather than the FF code or netimmerse. Interesting fact, in FFvTR, you can scale speed(or any stat) as high as you want.

What I am really a novice with is Meshing and animations. I have't really even gotten into Blender yet, though I know the basics of Nifskope, changing contacts, changing adding light refl, all that published jazz. I've exhausted the limit of my imagination on the coding FFX side, I'm now looking to learn what I can mess up on the mesh/animation side to push the envelope of whats possible.

[seraglio]

Maybe some mesher can help me with this. Or at least I can give a better idea of what I'm looking for.

There is a mesh I have called CK_no_holster_no_bracer. Checkmate Knight I think. It has 7 ranged gun animations. On a few of the later animations the model steps back, turns the gun to the side(gangsta style) and fires. By unhiding the bounding box I learned this mesh behaves differently than some other meshes that also move around(I think). When this mesh "steps back", the bounding box the enemy targets goes with it. If you are fighting a slower, melee opponent, this mesh can be made nearly untouchable. If you continually cycle the ranged attack (hit C), and the hero you made is pretty fast, its possible it can kill the opponent while the AI is just constantly chasing around the moving bounding box. Some other animations do this as well, while some seem to have "fixed" bounding boxes (only the Bip01 or whatever moves, the bounding box is fixed, so you see a melee attacker attacking where you were, not where you are).

The point here is some meshes, just by how they are, regardless of powers, FFX, number and speed of contacts etc, are superior in raw terms of creating a hero on them. I'm sure others have had similar experiences and observations. Some may just "move" better/faster. I'm hoping to identify these meshes, and see if using blender and or Nifskope I can add some of these mesh or animation specific properties/features to existing meshes to create my dream characters.  My dream is to create a speedster that can run from far away, hit a baddie, and run away again, all without turning on off any slow menus. Another way to do this would be my above example in reverse; imagine a mesh that runs up, hits a target and bounces back like a yo-yo, its bounding box never having moved. There are dodge animations (Tommyboys quicksilver_tf) that do similar things with dodge animations, but not melee.

Hopefuly thats a little clearer? What I'm looking for is probably not out there, but maybe in discussion I can learn how to do it or adapt something close.

[Cybertronian]

The FFX add on has some "speedy" attributes that will let you move quickly across the map. There are also some speedster keyframes that you may not have discovered yet (since they were at NPI).

If you need those keyframes, let me know. I downloaded them for use with The Flash (Barry and Wally) and also borrowed a few when I built Saturn's keyframe set.
(Copying keyframes move-by-move is an arduous process and I wouldn't do it again unless I had a lot of patience to spare. That being said, I've done it at least twice.)