NPCs & AI: Khajiit Tail Issue Fix

[InsanitySorrow]

NPCs & AI: Khajiit Tail Issue Fix

When creating a new Beast Race NPC, IE either the Khajiit or the Argonian you may encounter an issue with the tail. This issue can be seen in both the CS and In-Game, what is this issue you ask?, Well a stretching of the tail, which can stretch the length of entire cells.

The reason for this is that when the developers setup the Races in the CS they gave the beast races the default skeleton which is used on the normal races.

Smarty Says: Silly devs pointed to the wrong skeleton path - Characters\_male\Skeleton.nif

So let's fix it

Step 1: Extracting Data

Okay so what you will need to do is Open up your Oblivion - Meshes.bsa in one of the Archive tools, Ie OBMM, TES4 Archive, BSA Commander ect. Now locate the Meshes\Characters\_male\ folder and inside it find the skeletonBeast.nif, extract this file.

Step 2: Fix the NPC

Now in the CS open your NPCs data screen, click the part where the Skeleton.Nif is labelled and point it to characters\_male\skeletonBeast.nif , which you have previously extracted from your BSA.

And that's it, save your change and the NPC will now be fixed , When you're done you can delete the extracted NIF file from your data folder. From now on the CS/Game will point to the file located in the BSA

Thanks to DarkRider for his suggestion.

[mALX]

Is there any difference in the AI package when using the skeletonBeast.nif ? For instance, will it have idle tail movements that are not available if your player character is currently using the human skeleton?

[DarkRider]

There was a modder developing tail animations and there have been rumors of tail animations for beast races in Skyrim, but as I recall there are no tail animations in vanilla Oblivion. Your skeleton choice will not effect AI in any way, the beast skeleton just has an extra node to show the tail where to sit and without it the tail stretches into eternity if you have a tail equipped on a human skeleton.

So the choice is simple, if your NPC has a tail you use the skeletonBeast.nif if your NPC does not have a tail, you use the regular human skeleton.nif. Doesn't add anything extra just prevents the tail stretch.

[mALX]

There was a modder developing tail animations and there have been rumors of tail animations for beast races in Skyrim, but as I recall there are no tail animations in vanilla Oblivion. Your skeleton choice will not effect AI in any way, the beast skeleton just has an extra node to show the tail where to sit and without it the tail stretches into eternity if you have a tail equipped on a human skeleton.

So the choice is simple, if your NPC has a tail you use the skeletonBeast.nif if your NPC does not have a tail, you use the regular human skeleton.nif. Doesn't add anything extra just prevents the tail stretch.

So my character must be already using the skeletonBeast.nif then, lol. Okay. I was assuming since there have been no mods to date that give the tail animation that it is an overwhelming skeleton changing task - which is why I started looking into the skeletons issue and found this post. But you said above that there is a modder working on them? (YEAH!)

I had been wondering why no one had modded tail movement for Khajiit and have haunted the boards at Nexus looking for them. The only thing I'd found so far was Drake the Dragons work on his Dragon character's tail animations, and I just noticed JazzJaRa has a vid out where he has animated the tail beautifully as an idle motion, but said he is having difficulties when the character is in motion. I am keeping my fingers crossed that he works out the bugs, this is a long awaited mod for Khajiit lovers!