Up until Bethesda’s announcement that it’ll be getting some robot army DLC next month and the yassification of its faces by Nvidia’s DLSS 5 tech, I’d not thought about seeing how Starfield’s modding scene is getting on for a little while. That’s now changed, because they’ve finally gotten seamless custom animations working.
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While there are plenty of Starfield mods which, for example, allow the player character to use existing animations usually limited to NPCs or can use the game’s script extender to play custom animations of a specific file type when the player inputs a console command, being able to integrate custom animations seamlessly into in-game movement looks like it’s only just gotten going thanks to new tools.
Using this toolset for Blender, dubbed Starfield Animation IO, long-time Fallout modder Neeher’s just made a first person running animation which shows the player’s hands flopping about. It might seem like a shrug-worthy, if neat, addition at a glance, but the reason it’s gotten my attention is that Neeher’s modding forte is adding custom weapons with animations all of their own to Fallout 4. They lent these talents to some of Fallout: London’s guns, and also used them to create perhaps my favourite Fallout 4 mod of all time, a pair of lethal finger guns.
Though, they make clear in the video up above that even getting this running animation working was “a lot of work” and there are still limitations that’ll have to be overcome to achieve more ambitious animation projects. “Obviously the idea that’s on everyone’s mind is ‘weapon mods are doable now’, like properly custom animated weapons,” Neeher said. “Admittedly, from what I can tell the tool developers haven’t said anything on it, from my end I don’t think it’s possible yet with this tool.
“You can animate the hands and arms around a weapon, no problem. You can do that, but you can’t mess with the weapon parts itself. So, like the trigger, the slide, the bolt, the magazine. You can’t animate [those] yet.” Aww. As if aware of my hankering for custom reloadage through the screen, the modder did end positively by declaring “this is only the first step”.
If that sort of tweaking becomes possible, Neeher sounds like they’d be up for making some custom weapons as unique as their popular select guns series or photon disruptor for Fallout 4. It’d be another reason for me to consider failing to resist the ever-present clarion call to mod up a Bethesda RPG again.
