Hawks of Cyrodiil

So. There aren't any hawks in Cyrodiil. (Or any birds, really.) This is really inconvenient when playing a ranger-type, because in most RPGs ranger-types either have wolves or hawks to do their bidding. Myself, I like to role-play nobility type characters -- and historically, the art of falconry was a very noble art, exclusively for the ruling classes. Sometimes, I hear the strains of birdsong in Oblivion -- possibly a mod, actually -- but where are they? Natural Environments adds some birds, the talented Mr Siika made some animated Vultures and Ravens, and the lovely Lady Li made some small Birds of Paradise -- but these are animated items, not creatures rigged to skeletons. The birds of Oblivion are missing, like the climix in a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie.

Luckily, if you think something is missing from Oblivion you can just make it and stick it in somewhere, so I basically made a bird mesh and rigged it to the imp skeleton. Miraculously enough, it worked. I'm amazed no one's tried this before (Er, have they?).

Link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29j6lPDDbCY

The video is dark and svcky and I move the camera too much, but you get the basic idea. I'd put up a better video but loading this one to YouTube took forever, and I don't want to do it again until I have more completed. Right now, the basic mesh is mostly done and weighted -- albeit minimally -- which proves to myself that I can get the job done. I WILL be changing a few things, such as the length of the faces that connect the wings to the bird body, and a few vertices in the wing center that cause shadowed pockets. Since only the wings are really moving, I can freely modify the bird body mesh make different types of bird.

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=8xM8CJisSK8

This is the second video made chronicling my progress. The mesh has a few tears in it, particularly at the tail area. You can see through the bird at one point in the video; also, while I left one of the imp wing bones on the mesh, I think I might remove it. It distorts badly and sometimes pulls away from the rest of the mesh. The bird looks less like a hawk and more like a very fat pigeon; I'll have to figure something out. I suppose I can make the body thinner, but I don't know if that will help the "hawk" effect any.

Ideally, I would like this mod to add wild hawks to the Oblivion landscape, and give the player to opportunity to tame one of their very own. Mmmm, falconry. Other birds are easily done once the hawk is finished, and since everything would have to be done for hawks anyway, to do it for other types of bird shouldn't be too big of an issue. Different bird types could be found in different areas, for instance.

I would like to know:

What species/types of birds would you like to see?
I'm thinking robins and hawks. I scrapped owls and parrots, since the hawk is giving me more issues than I expected (Please note, any raptor could be re-textured to the hawk mesh, and any songbird to the robin mesh.) I'm still tempted to try and make fancy-type birds of paradise, to be honest.

How should they be added to the game?
Placing spawn points seems like it would conflict with a lot of mods. I'm not sure how exactly to go about implementing a new creature type in Oblivion; if anyone has anything to say of the subject, or would like to help, I'm all ears. =D What types of AI should I give them? Should they be passive? Flee like real birds? Attack on sight like most of the wildlife in Oblivion?

Sooooo . . . . Would anyone else like to texture these things?
I'm working on it, but I never said I was any GOOD at it.

Nothing is set in stone. This post is as much of an idea forum as anything else. I'll be happy as a clam with just a hawk companion, but there's so much more that CAN be done with this. Any ideas? Think my mesh could be improved by (blank)? Think I should make awesome bloody death eagles cuz they'd be so rad? I'm pretty open. If anyone would like to help, I wouldn't mind putting a small team together to make this thing happen. =D More life in Cyrodiil, go! And well, if it turns out that there isn't any demand for my badly-animated birdies, I'll likely just make an aerie with a selection of birds to take as pets. ^_^

i think this is a great idea. birds were sorely missing in OB. i wonder if you can make the birds fly really high and sort of scout for you (detect life maybe?)

edit: wings still make them look like bats/imps tho

Very nifty little role-play device. I like it. =D That would be something to inject into the companion script, as I don't know how to do that without code, and all the birds wouldn't need that feature. I was already considering a "hunt" command, where they fly off and bring you back rat meat or small items or something. If implemented, then a "scout" command would result in the hawk flying off, coming back and basically casting a short-duration Detect Life on the player. I always found the 'Detect Life' spell graphics a bit annoying, personally, but oh well.

I need to figure out how to make them fly up, first; their current levitation is a result of the animation lifting them, not a setting of some kind. :huh: Oh, scripting, I always come back to you in the end.

A cool idea would be if you had many birds to have one land on your should by way of a special pauldron. When the user commands the bird to land, it could swoop in and the mesh change to have a bird sitting on the player's shoulder and vice versa for attacking. Just a thought though.

Those are looking pretty cool to me


I've never really looked that good at birds in RL tbh to make tons of requests here I suppose pretty much what you mentioned, and what you want to make for yourself is just fine, e.g. owls/parrots/other stuff you want


I think there are pretty much three ways to use creatures in Oblivion (or a mix of these ways):
1. Use them as summonable companions. That is, with the summoning spell as a quest reward or just given to the player for free when the mod is loaded. This wouldn't be too hard and shouldn't cause any incompatabilities. For the taming method to earn summoning them, you'll have to mix it with...

2. Put them in all kinds of areas hand-placed or in leveled lists. This would work just fine for wrye-bash users (which is probably the majority of people here anyway), but people who don't have wrye bash but do have some overhaul mod probably won't be able to use your mod, since they will be incompatible without bashed patches.

3. Making your own areas/dungeons/continents where you place them. This would prevent incompatabilies, but would take ages of work and pretty much be useless if your aim is to add birds to the normal Oblivion world.

I say you choose what you like best of these options (or maybe I forgot something )


I'm no good really at making textures from scrath myself, so can't help you here I can do simple retextures like turning a black bird into a white one, but I'm pretty sure you can manage that too yourself.

Errr... can we get cliffracers? :mohawk: :swear:

No, I keed, I keed! :slap:

I haven't seen the video yet, but I like the concept! Not sure if I would be a fan of the hawk on your shoulder thing, but birdlife in general is sorely missing from TES IV. Of course, I am guessing a FPS hit with many birds in the sky...

I like the idea of the bird coming to you, but not so much the pauldron. A real falconer would never train a hawk to land on their shoulder. If I WERE to try to do something like this, I would utilize not a pauldron but a falconer's gauntlet, because falconry is so cool. But then we'd be getting into idle animation work, and I've worked with idles before. They're a pain. If I had a player lifting-their-arm pose that was ready to use for a hawk-perching-gauntlet, I'd consider it, but alas, it's a bit far outside my skillset because such an idle does not already exist. Well, to my knowledge. :shrug: I'm not an animator, I just rigged the skeleton to use pre-existing Bethesda animations.



Thankfully, they aren't going to be in the sky. The possible "hunt" and "scout" commands for the trained hawk might require your pet bird to fly up and away -- theoretically, they could just fly away for a bit -- but in general all the birds will only hover above the ground like imps do. It'll be as much of an FPS hit as any other creature spawn.



Aww, that's it? le sigh. I guess I'll hand-place a bunch. Hawks around Bruma, Songbirds around Chorrol, Owls around Skingrad. Or something.

I think those are the three bird types I'm going to work with; I'll work on the meshes today, and with luck I'll be able to post a new video tonight some time.

EDIT: v v v v

I doubt they'd want to. You, sir, are vastly overestimating my texturing skills. XD However, if MMM wants to change/integrate these birds once they're done, then they will be free to do so. :laugh: This is going to be free to use with credit, so as long as I'm jammed into the readme somewhere, I'm totally cool with that.

This should be integrated into MMM !! Would you mind working with the MMM team there if you are creating some meshes etc.?

Okay, and would the block animation work? When the player blocks with a shield, the arm is pushed out a bit to the left, and then the bird could be sitting there and the play could still use a weapon.

Drekes

Like I said, it is extremely unlikely that I will do the whole falconer's glove bit. However, Oblivion can check to see if weapons and shields are equipped/drawn before using a certain idle animation, and scripting could ensure that a PC in combat would automatically un-equip the hawk-on-a-glove item. If the animations existed, it would be possible, but they don't.

In other news, I am busily texturing the hawk. Looks like the first one is going to be a variant of the American Red-Tailed Hawk, but I'll probably rename it to something more flavorful, like the Nibonay Rust-Tail or something. Suggestions for Cyrodillic bird names, anyone? (It's looking okay. Much less blocky with a texture on it, too. XD)

Sounds good, I think in conjunction with Minionz, this could be a lot of fun. I foresee a cloud of hawk swooping down and carrying away a goblin or something like that.

do real birds hover the way imps do? i think it myt look unrealistic and break immersion specialy if they stay flapping in one spot for some time. maybe make them move around all the time is more preferable to hovering in place since i think few birds can actually do that

That it might be. :unsure: I wouldn't know how to fix the AI well enough to make that happen, unfortunately.

Texture base completed, and it just illuminated a few more flaws in the mesh. Also, the birds look less like hawks and more like extremely fat pigeons. Doh! Ah well. Now that I've done the UV mapping once, I should be able to do a better job the second time around, and make a better texture. I posted a video of the progress made anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xM8CJisSK8

Summary will be added to the first post in a second.

just a sugestion;

Amaranthine said something about different birds that sparked an idea about song birds, hawks and owls. How perhaps there could be a songbird effect that could calm or charm npcs, hawks could do sweeping attacks that would make a hostile npc stumble (random depending on how high your, for example, luck attribute is), owls could give you night visionand or detect life(though i think a boost to your magicka would be kinda cool) and maybe add bats that could drain health from an enemy and give you half of what they take?

The SongBird charm/calm effect would really only require a sound file of soothin birds tweeting away. A random area effect spell while your weapons sheathed? You could probably get away with tampering with some of the butterflies you see fluttering aroudn the open world if you wanted something cute and visual. I cant imagine song birds actually coming too close to strangers though.

All the bats health drain efect would need is round black balls with two small wings darting (really fast) about an enemy npc with a some screeching. And ofcourse a drain health spell. maybe and area effect drain fatigue?

As soon as the sun sets you might get a message saying that the night owls are feeling generous and you will be granted their wisdm and/or protection. you wouldnt need to see an owl cept maybe if someone wanted to do an idle animation for during the night and a hawk idle anim for during the day.

personally i think this would all go great as a passive ability (I admit im smitten with applers passive birth sign mod)

I feel I have to point out that I have ZILCH modding experience and I wouldnt know where to begin with any of it and I will humbly shut up if I dont know what Im talking about

Mr_siika, one of the greatest Oblivion modders teased me more than a year ago with eagles.
If you manage this to a release, am yours forever! Godspeed!