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Animated Weapon Enchants

Animated Weapon Enchants (A.W.E.)

Video demonstration is at : http://youtu.be/r95HhoxnjuU

Lots of people felt that Bethesda did a sloppy, halfway job on their weapon enchant shaders, so I put some work in and came up with these. Now fire dances across fire enchants, storms flashes across shock enchants, etc. I tried to keep with the general color scheme of Skyrim though ( red for health, white for frost, etc), but there are a couple that are sort of fun psychadelic lava lamps.

The idea is that all "standard" weapon enchants will have an animation so that you can go to your friendly enchanter table, throw an enchant on something, and it'll be animated. It's that simple. All I really did was take existing animation shaders, duplicate them, tweak them a little, and attach them to existing effects, so there's nothing really "new" that isn't already in the game in some fashion.

A few weapons have new unsheathe sounds too. If you don't like them, I think there are mods out there that will turn off all unsheathe sounds. If not, I might create an optional version later without any sounds (maybe). Also for your listening pleasure, I've uploaded a version with the original vanilla unsheathe sounds.

Just throw the file into your data directory, fire up Skyrim, and run to your nearest enchanting station to check it out. Note that some enchants (like magicka and stamina damage) look slightly different when in use when compared to what you see in the enchanting screen.


WHAT IT DOESN'T DO :

I didn't cover most of the Daedric Artifact weapons yet. Molag Bal has it because it's just a few "standard" enchants lumped into one item, but for example Dawnbreaker doesn't, nor does the Ebony Blade (yet).

For those of you with the dual enchantment perk, you can't combine animations. You still get both enchants, it's just that these are effectively "skins" for weapons, and you can't combine multiple skins. Apparently the enchant with the highest gold value will display, so for example banish will always trump a paralyze enchant, etc.

Particle shaders : To make a long story short, these are only skins - they don't drop particles or have any kind of effect that leaves the weapon. For example Chillrend has a nifty effect that drops a frosty mist around it, but that's because it's an .nif file that emits that mist effect from a point in space, not on the actual blade. Here's the problem with it : it works great on glass swords, but if you apply it to say a dagger or a two-handed weapon, it looks off. I wanted to create a "one size fits all weapons" mod, not re-work the entire array of weapons. This way, it should also work with custom weapons ("should" being the operative word).

If however you want your character to have some fun particle effects, try my other mod, Glowtastic : http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=12253

VERSION HISTORY :
1.0 - Release
1.14 - Less-obtrusive Soul Trap effect

CONFLICTS :

I created new animations, so there shouldn't be any conflicts there, BUT I just attached them to the "standard" effects, which means that if you have mods that change those effects, probably won't get the animation. So for example if you have a mod that changes the fire damage on contact effect or the soul trap effect, you probably won't see the animations for those enchants.

BUGS :

For whatever reason, sometimes when loading a game where you're dual wielding, the weapon in your left hand doesn't display an effect until you re-equip it. I have absolutely no idea what causes this. I've only seen it happen a handful of times, so if anyone can reproduce it and give me more information (other than "it happened to me"), I'll look into it.


CREDITS :

Bethesda, for making a great game with so much room for modding.
Syndharos, for the initial idea.
The modding community, for the excellent work, imagination, and skill. You make this great game MAGNIFICENT!