You won't be able to use existing animations. Animations are unique to the rigs as far as the engine is concerned, there is no IK or mocap information. You'd either have to rig the model to an existing skeleton or do the animations from scratch. But if you get yourself a copy of motionbuilder, pickup a kinect for cheap you can make your own basic mocap that you can then refine.
That should be fun.
EDIT
Also, you can animate in anyway you want. ActorX only exports a frame by frame position of the bones, so IK information is lost. But you can use it to animate no problem. The original rigs that you get with KF have IK targets for moment. They used standard CAT rigs.
When i tried using default animations, i was using the original KF armature. I rigged the Female Fleshpound over the original Fleshpound Armature.
The animations broke.
Then i tried the same thing with the bullpup. Imported the skeleton, Slightly modified the gun and exported it into the SDK.
The animations broke.
I even tried importing and exporting the clot's PSK without even touching it.
The animations broke.
I was able to make a simple walking cycle for the Female Fleshpound and exported it into the SDK, replacing the Clot and it's walking animation.
It worked (well, up until i shot it, it died and the game crashed to desktop
)
What i take from this is that blender's exported armatures (regardless of their origin) are not compatible with the .psa animations already existing in the game, despite using the exact same armature, bone names, scale and location. It probably has to do with the way rotations and positions are stored or something. Might even have to do with the difference between lefthanded and righthanded coordinates in blender and the sdk.
Apparently, what i CAN do is make a working animations for newly created models.
So, i can't make new models for characters, weapons and specimens unless i make all the animations from scratch (or i find someone with 3Dstudio willing to export my models into the SDK)
I'll probably start a new thread on the modding section. I think it's time i start gather a team or ask around for the how-to's on making a mutator, makeing the materials and stuff.
Currently, i need to learn out how to do the following.
> How to add the female fleshpound via mutator [possibly make a mutator that replaces all specimens with FMFP for testing purposes]
> How to add materials to the game and assign them to the various parts [ 3 material textures total]
> How to code the animations into the game
> How to make the walk+attack animation. For what i can see in the SDK, there aren't any, which means the game is probably merging the walking animations on the legs with the attack animation on the upper body.
> How to make the ragdolls corpse
> How to add the head hitbox
> How to make the dismemberment effects
> How to code the female fleshpound to make her a functional specimen