"Proper" khajit and argonian bodyshapes/animations

[Semtex]

Centaur - you mean something like that? :tongue: Its only idea, not realy model, horse body is only "static" part, not connected to skeleton.

 

IMHO - almost impossible...

Or at least extremely difficult - This requires a completely rebuild skeleton and completely new animations for the lower body.

Or... Or ... The front legs mounted as normal legs and rear legs mounted to the skeleton "pelvis" bone and advanced animation for rear legs to do as tail animation... Very dificult

Edited May 2, 2011 by Semtex

[schijnn]

Centaur - IMHO - almost impossible...

 

Not impossible, as it exists: The Oblivion Centaur Project. I even have a couple screenshots of my centaur character up on the imageshare here.

[MarkInMKUK]

Hi Schjinn - nice to see you here!

 

I hadn't seen the Centaur Project when I made the comment above - nice to see someone else "pushing the boundaries" like the lads (and lasses) who already posted comments.

 

I spotted from your link that you have "invisible" equippable greaves and boots - maybe the techniques that Drake and Razorpony are using could be relevant to your own work. If you needed a "lower body" clothing style, how about using something from the horse armour mod instead of greaves, and maybe one of those coloured ornate tabard covers used when jousting in place of skirt/trousers?

[AndyDaMage]

I thoguht I'd jump in with my two cents.....esspecially seeing I have had a long term in investment with this problem. I'll also just point out I didnt read all the posts here, so I may say things over that have already been said. :)

 

The biggest problem with these is that the body mesh is in the clothing nif, rather then as it was in morrowind, seperated. Two and a half years back I looked for a solution to this, and I did find one, however OBSE was not a state where it was possible ot implement it yet. I did do some round about hacking on it though, and came up with these:

http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1258151528/gallery_108_44_16140.jpg

http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1258151528/gallery_108_44_90993.jpg

http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1258151528/gallery_108_44_89120.jpg

 

At the point I had to run a pyffi script that gerenated the items for me outside of the game, however that is no longer the case. With NifSE now, I can remove the skin part of meshes on the fly with OBSE scripts now, meaning that you can essentially make a custom body mesh underneath, then replace the items that normally have the skin showing. This way on the item part of meshes will show up.

 

Its not a foolproof system, I still have the problem that the cloned items arent recognised as the originals, and the custom body would have to fit inside the original body mesh, but it is a workable system. There were still a lot of bugs, suck as hand dont shows up when the custom is body is put in the tail slot etc....but I had 80% good work arounds for it.

 

Hoever I have learnt more since i last worked on this. With a combanation of removing the skin, and changing the skeleton you could make it larger then normal. Its all fairly tricky, but very possible.

 

 

 

Onto the next Issue, adjusting the Player skeleton for a custom race. Is this possible? sort of....

 

At the moment we have a single command called SetPlayerSkeletonPath. This OBSE command (and no you wont find it in the OBSE doc yet) will let you change the third person skeleton path for the player. It has some specific things when using it (must be done when in first person view etc) but it works great. Im still bugging scruggys to find a way to change the first person skeleton aswell, but for the moment you can only change the first person skeleton on the fly.

 

For the Centaur Project I have an extra plugin that must be activated only when you play as a centaur. This plugin has one edit, it changes the gamesetting for the first person skeleton. At the moment this is the only way to change the first skeleton. The bonus about changing the path for the skeleton is that it also changes the path for the animations, so whatever animations you put with the skeleton are the ones that are found by the game. In the case of idle anims, these arent effected by the skeleton path change.

 

 

 

Other stuff I have learnt:

Never delete a bone from the skeleton, that jsut asking for weird issues. When I created my centaurs I still have all the original bones for the human legs in my new skeleton, i just put them un a dummy bone and gave it a scale of 0.0001. This mean that centaurs can still equip and use all items from the game even if they are boots and greaves, they simply do not appear to render on the centaur. This also lets the centaur where clothing such as robes, when it reached the waist it simply dissappears.

 

In the long run I'll make alternate meshes for the centaurs so that armor/clothing shows up on the horse half (pic), but this works well as a backup as it doesnt restrict what the player can use.

 

 

 

 

Hope what I wrote is relevent :)

[Semtex]

Oops ... I did not know this yet, thanks.

Some people are simply - brilliant.

[MarkInMKUK]

Hi Da Mage

 

If you browse up a bit, you'll see Drake has been doing some work with a per-race skeleton setup, for his Anthro Dragon race.

[MarkInMKUK]

To all the clever people out there: a couple of questions to provoke thought...

 

Is it possible with OBSE/whatever to change the underlying head mesh on a "per-race and gender" basis? Example where this could be used - Ren's Mystic Elf race uses a separate mesh type for male and female, but has to do this with two separate races. Could this be done so that the male/female selection in the character generator swapped the head mesh, and could this also work for npc's?

 

Could the character generator be altered/extended to allow selection of different texture sets - for example to choose between two or three different Khajiit fur patterns? The selected texture would not only change the head texture, but select the matching body texture automatically.

[Telyn]

Regarding centaurs, I have long wondered why in modern depictions they are never proportioned as the Greeks proportioned them. Kentauroi were originally considered to have two bodies and were thus proportioned accordingly rather than what we see today where the human body springs from a horse neck rather than the withers, and tends to look sort of...odd, because the two bodies don't visually balance with one another. Here is an example of how the ancients envisioned centaurs, and I think the smaller horse body in proportion with the human body is actually more pleasing and believable as an human/animal. What's interesting about it, although the forelegs are very stylized and delicate as per equine illustrations of the time, is it puts equal emphasis on the human and horse natures, rather than the horse overwhelming the human. http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/O12.2.html

 

@MarkInMKUK I've never been sure myself why it wouldn't be possible to do this, but presumably there must be some reason, because nobody seems to be doing it. Looking forward to finding out why it cannot be done. I hope it will help me understand better what the limits are.

 

Still really looking forward to better beast races. I like the personalities of Khajiit and Argonians but I tend not to play them much because they seem too halfheartedly differentiated from humans in the vanilla game. I'd actually like to see elves look less like humans also, but that's not as immersion breaking.

[schijnn]

Hi Schjinn - nice to see you here!

 

I hadn't seen the Centaur Project when I made the comment above - nice to see someone else "pushing the boundaries" like the lads (and lasses) who already posted comments.

 

I spotted from your link that you have "invisible" equippable greaves and boots - maybe the techniques that Drake and Razorpony are using could be relevant to your own work. If you needed a "lower body" clothing style, how about using something from the horse armour mod instead of greaves, and maybe one of those coloured ornate tabard covers used when jousting in place of skirt/trousers?

 

Heh, that's not my work. The only modding I can do is swapping textures around, or editing the stats of races or equipment in the CS. I was just pointing out that centaurs *are* possible in Oblivion. (Kind of a pain to actually play at this point, though.)

[MarkInMKUK]

Hi Schjinn - in that case, thanks for pointing it out and getting Da Mage looking at our thread - the more the merrier!

 

Personally I have all the modding skills of a retarded sewer rat, but I am good at asking "can it be done" and "what if..." in a way that other people seem to be inspired by - I guess I'll stick with that for now and just enjoy what other people do based o0n those ideas and questions.