Quick Tips #2 - Posing game characters for art reference (Patreon)

Do you love cool armor? Do you hate figuring out how that cool armor looks in anything other than an idle A-pose? This quick tip is for you.

The Creation Kit for Skyrim can be used to preview animations on characters and creatures. This is perfect for setting up your characters in cool poses to figure out basic anatomy, foreshortening, and perspective. 

First, open up the Creation Kit/Construction Set and find the NPC list under Actors>Actor>actor in the Object window (you can break it further down by type or race). Next, click View>Preview Window in the tool bar at the top to bring up the Preview Window. With the preview window open, scroll through your NPC list until you find what you're looking for (your specific NPC that you want to draw, someone wearing the armor you like, etc.)

By default, they'll be A-posed and awkwardly zoomed. You'll want to rotate the camera first to move the camera first to get a good view. Middle mouse button pans, scroll wheel scrolls, and left mouse button rotates. Right clicking brings up the preview movement preferences - you might want to turn some of those speeds down to give you more control. 

Next, the fun part - animations! The bottom left corner of the preview window has a big list of every humanoid animation in Skyrim, from your usual walks and attacks to custom ones like Astrid's intro sit or Nocturnal's dramatic float. Press "resume" to begin and stop playing the selected animation. You can use the Animation Speed box above to turn the speed down so that you can catch it at the perfect moment. 

Find the right animation, pose the camera, and take a screenshot for an easy, more-or-less anatomically correct character reference. Definitely a more efficient way to go than trying to google for a perfect pose! A few caveats:

While this is definitely helpful reference for anatomy and clothing perspective, it's not perfect. This is a videogame, after all. Cloth isn't going to bunch up or respect gravity like it should (Aela's chainmail skirt up there is a good example).  Sometimes things will clip into each other instead of distorting or moving out of the way. The preview window also doesn't display any object that's not part of the character, so your cool sword attack move isn't going to show a sword, for example. 

This method also works to varying degrees in previous Bethesda titles. 

In Morrowind, the preview window will only let you preview creatures (which include Almalexia/Vivec/Dagoth Ur). Cycle through the animations by using the red double arrows at the top of the screen. Camera navigation happens with the arrow keys. 

In Oblivion, you're able to preview both NPCs and creatures, but not assign them animations. So it's pretty useless, really. I'm not sure how it works in FO3 or FO4, as I don't currently have those installed. If anyone finds out, please let me know and I'll edit this post!