EDIT:



Okay, this is a revival of one of my long standing WIPsnow that I knw what Im doing with animations and meshes, and i hope now I can get this working. The idea for a centaur race has been around for as long as oblivion modding, but of late (as in the last year or 2) has been dorment.

The Oblivion Centaur Project

Authors:
Da Mage - Leader and Main Modder
PacificMorrowind - Pyffi and Blender Expert
Koniption - All-Round helper

With Credit to:
amorilia - For helping PacificMorrowind make his PyFFI scripts and developing PyFFI
Andrew Maneri - Oblivion Mount Project Animation Warper (OMPAW)
TalkieToaster & Reneer: Showing me that you can put in empty bones to scale other bones without editing animations
SaidanStorm - His knowledge of the oblivion animation system and helping me getting my animations working.

Seriously, without all the help I've gotten from these people this project would never had made it through. :goodjob:


From the offical forums a topic made by http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=632128&hl=centaur:



I have restarted this project after a general concensus for merging the human and horse animationsinstead of copying the human animations (which was getting messy). The animations are way more realistic looking now, but it will force me to replace more of the game's animations, hence will make this uncompatiable with animation replacers until a patch is made.

Since PacificMorrowind has started learning python and creating some PyFFI scripts, I have been to make these animations alot faster then I used to, however due to the lack of certain horse animations (strafing etc) Ill have to custom make a few, which will take time.

Animations Completed:
Idle
WalkBackward
WalkForward
WalkFastForward
SneakIdle


So to some progress...which is what everyone wants to see:

EDIT: All of this is OUTDATED now, a redesign is in progress.

Picture:
http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1253369854/gallery_108_44_216695.jpg

Video of walking forward animation (yes I am aware that the horse part isnt rigged very well)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R-kkf0Ycjk - Walking, idle and sneak idle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxg0UVCqCrA - Walking, Running and Cast on Self

Looks good so far. A couple of suggestions though:

You might want to revise the walking animation. If you look at vids of the way four-legged animals walk, the fore and rear legs move opposite each other, not in sync with each other as they are in the test animation.
For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_gait

Also, the human torso seems rather high. You might want to consider lowering it a little bit. Maybe just have the stomach area and chest above the horse body rather than going all the way down to the waist. That would make the centaur look a little stockier and tougher. It might clip with armor though, but I wonder if you can add the rear part of the horse armor.

Keep up the good work. Looks promising.

Yeah, I realise the legs are a bit wierd so far (but i can adjust the back legs later). I might have to rethink some parts again to get the legs right with the animations (more bones etc)...ill think on it.

One thing is for this to work, i cannot adjust anything but the horse body, and animations for the back legs (not without adding more bones), so i can make the horse part taller (and possiblely longer) but cannot lower the human part. should still be able to get the same effect.

WOW

Seconded. :drool:

It looks nice. Maybe you can add some versions that go with Slofs better horses? (crosses fingers) Those would work awesomely in a mod I may start working on.

As long as AlienSlof is happy then it would be quite possible...though the astectics like that really are easy to change compared to the rest.

Also I must give a thanks to Urendi Maleldil, I think you just saved me what could have been trouble later on as I have added in more bones now in order to make it possible for the animations to be be made better later (where as previously I only could adjust the animations for the back legs). Adding them now means It wont cause issues later.

Wow,it will be great,if you can fix the legs!

I'll definitely start a new game with a centaur!

That's extremely impressive, but the proportions are all wrong. The horse part is too small and the whole thing is too short. Would it be possible to change the crouch animations so the human half stoops down, in order to get through doorways? If not, the best thing is probably to make the whole character taller (look at Orcs in MMM's resized races) while scaling the human part down slightly.

Didnt you read what i wrote earlier:


Anything if I have to ajust the top half then you cannot where a cuirass with, so that makes this sort of pointless. As, i cannot change the animations for the upper half as that would effect all actors. The best i can do is make the horse part bigger (through the mesh) and use a race scaler (which effects both halfs) to make it bigger/smaller. I did not fit the torso to the horse, i downsized the horse to fit the torso, as that is what has to happen, as I cannot change the location of the torso without losing the ability to equip anything. Thats oblivion modding.

The only course of actions (and one I have acted on once and am considering again) is to make the horse part bigger and longer.

My immediate thought when seeing the centaur is that the "human" part should be significantly hairier than it is now. Watch the Chronicles of Narnia movies for inspiration on what I mean by that. Also, when you change the skin tone in the chargen race menu, will that also change the "horse" part's color? If you could figure that out, even if it means only being able to change the "horse" part, it would really be preferable for more variety in the race. Other than that and the previously stated note on the height ratio, I really like where this is going. I hope I helped with more constructive criticism; I'm assuming that's what you're looking for.

textures are still a long way off in development, but they can do everying that you suggest. It may be possible to get the horse part at the bottom changing, but i think the better way to do it (because having it change with the player skin wont have as much colour range) is to just have a menu where you choose what colour you want. I could do a combanation of the two.

Yeah, the reason Ive posting is looking for some input (which has helped so far).

I was just wondering how well these creatures can fit in thin hallways or cave passages? Otherwise I totally GIVE MY ENDORsemanT...

Nice to see somebody finally has created a Centaur, So keep up the good work.

I actually like that way that looks. Even if they are short, this is oblivion after all and you can only do so much, without having to make all new animations etc.

Which is what DaMage is trying to avoid has that is what stopped the first centaur project in the first place.

And Why can't a Oblivion Centaur just be short like the size of normal races but with pony torso. Being Short has it advantages they will not get stuck on things and will be able to fit through doors after all.

This may go outside "lore" but It is better than not having them at all I say.

So keep up the good work DaMage..

Corepc

Looks pretty darn cool I cant wait for the completed works Any possability of using this to create Satyr's as well?

Awesome.

I always like mods that add creatures seen in previous TES games, and this was probably one of the hardest to bring back. Thanks for working on this!


Centaurs appeared in http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Monsters. In the book series "A Dance In Fire", they are described as living together with wood elves in peace.

Looks very nice! Still one more suggestion: horses cannot walk straight to the side, since it is physically impossible for them to walk completely sideways like yours. They can only walk sideways while going a little forward (same for backwards). Also realize that walking backwards for a horse is a thing taught to them by humans, since naturally they will never go backwards due to their lack of speed in that manouver.

For the rest, though, it looks very promising, would never have expected less of you!

Well I will be doing the sideways animations, as it makes the game a bit hard if you cannot run sideways....and it would stuff up the controls somewhat...


The only halt on this project right now is finding out some infomation on a near undocumented animation called a NiBSplineCompTransformInterpolator, i cannot figure out how to change the translation on one like with a normal animation....

If anyone can help then I can use the proper horse animations for the ones available, which look alot better then the human ones....

If no-one helps me soon, then I will have to just continue with the human animations.

Wow, this is amazing! What you have looks really great so far.
The animation for sidewards walking looks a little bit weird, but then horses don't usually do that anyway, so it's alright.
In response to what Floating Jet says: I don't think that the sidewards walking should be removed, because you can simply choose to not do it (or only in combination with moving forward/backward), and you won't notice it on NPCs. And walking backwards may be something horses were taught to do, but since centaurs have close-to-human intelligence, it's probable that they figured it out on their own.


I think he was talking about the size of the centaurs, because according to lore they are quite big (if I remember correctly). However, it would be no problem to have some bigger versions out in the woods.

NIBSplineCompTransformInterpolator

First to test, I added a forward.kf animation to the horse skeleton, so I could see the changes I made to the animations.

To make the Translation take effect, you must make the "Translation Offset" a "zero" and not "65535".

So do that, then change the translation on the X, Y, and Z axis to what you want. You won't see any changes just yet, though. Then change the "Translation Multiplier" to start out with, to a large number like "100" (the larger the number in the multiplier, the more pronounced he translation edits will be). Leave the "Translation Bias" at "zero" for now, but you can fiddle with it later to get different results along with "Translation Multiplier" tweaks.

You do the same routine to edit the rotation and scale, I believe.

Now, the effects won't show up until you save the file in Nifskope. So save the Nif, and without even exiting out of Nifskope, you'll see the update in the render screen. So keep tweaking and saving until you get the result you want.

I just fiddled with this interpolator for the first time today, so I don't know much beyond what I found out and told you just now. I changed the horse's pelvis bone translation using the above method to a Z axis tweak of 3000, a multiplier of 100, and a bias of 0, then I saved and noticed it did indeed work. The horse went up and forward a lot. I played the forward animation on the horse and the horse kind of did a circular animation around where the pelvis bone's origin originally was, and some other weirdness.

Koniption

When I meant don't sidestep or backward step, I meant that they do not do it naturally, since it is an animal of prey, and thus needs to be fast, and backwards or sideways are not fast. I did look at sideways and backwards motion and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikqOM2PCR6M is one of sideways, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJGEzI3aIc is a long video of one of the world's best horse riders at this time doing some sideways action and general amazing horse gaits. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSA0vOeY74w is a movie of a horse backing up.

Also, I would like to help, but simply don't have any experience with animations/texturing/editing races...

IDK if it's been said already but the jumping anim looks kinda weird for a horse, i think you should make it a bit more similar to the jump on regular horses only better cause they can't jump very high or in place. and i judgeing by the first comment on the page i has been stated that the sideways anim is also kina weird sorry i i'm just repeating other

This looks nice. I probably wouldn't want to play a centaur, but I definitely think this would be amazing for some people.

Wow. oo: I'm constantly amazed at the things other modders put out. I will definitely download this when it's done. Keep up the good work. I do have some questions:

1. Are you going to make Centaur versions of each race?

2. What racial abilities and stat boosts can we expect?

3. Will there be a version you can ride? (it would be cool to have a mount that can fight while being ridden)

4. Will there be Centaur settlements?

5. Will there be any Centaurs in the Legion? (they would be good for wilderness patrols)

6. Will there be any hunter/adventurer Centaurs in the wilderness?