On the Blink

Base Morrowind guars of all varieties (regular, pack, white) will now blink their eyes. Previously, they could not, and were fated to a life of perpetual dry and painful eyes. But no longer! Maybe they have some kind of invisible lubricating membrane that makes blinking unnecessary, but I offer up this mod nevertheless.

When a guar is struck, its eyes will flinch. When a guar is killed, or knocked out, its eyes will close - forever. When a guar is attacking, its eyes will remain open.
This already includes Stripes' Creature Casting Animation Patch textkeys.

This is not compatible with any mod that replaces guar models. If a mod includes new guar models, they will not blink. I could make some replacers for popular guars in other mods if requested, or smarties can use the assets in this mod to do it themselves!

Installation:
Dump the Data Files folder into your 'Morrowind' folder, agree to overwrite if prompted to do so.
There is no .esp, this only replaces meshes.

How it works:
The guar eye trishape has been copied, de-skinned from the guar's skeleton, and then reparented to a node tree which is parented to the guar's head bone.

Blinking animations, created in blender with shape keys (geomorphs,) have then been added to these new shapes. Without de-skinning them, the geomorph will not work.

The blinking trishape is nested in a NiBSAnimation node, and set to work independently of the guar's other animations.

A NiVisController switches the blinking eye mesh off during death, animation groups where the guar is hit, and during attacks, where blinking is unwise to do. Two other independent NiVisControllers turn on different copies of the model, with either no animation, or a clamped eye closing animation, for attacks and death+hit animations, respectively.

This means the guar's eyes will blink normally during idles, walking and running without interruption, but be wide open when attacking, and will close, forever, when it dies. You will no longer be haunted by the accusatory eyes of the guar you just slew. Rest in peace, little guar.

Now, admittedly, during testing there was an occasion where the guar died with its eyes open, but I haven't been able to replicate that single instance. At the end of the day, Morrowind is Morrowind. But, rest assured that this mod should work 99% of the time, most of the time.

Given that is handled with NiVisControllers, you may expect a small amount of janky transition between the blinking/flinching/open eye trishapes, but nothing too immersion breaking. Creatures do not benefit from blinking and talking textkeys like NPCs do, so this is the best I can do.

Credits

EJ-12 for personal assistance, in this case, regarding why Stripes' patched meshes were sometimes throwing up errors. Also, for maintaining the indispensible Notes of Morrowind Modding.

Greatness7: providing animation tips and tricks in the past, and making the .nif Blender plugin that made modding Morrowind a reality for me.

Stripes for creating Creature Casting Animation Patch, the casting notetrack placement I just took from his mod.

Morrowind Modding Community for all their years of archived information & willingness to offer help.


Credits: On the Blink for 4thUnknown's Guars

4thUnknown themselves for creating the original guar models for Skyrim & granting me permission to edit SaintBahamut's rerig. You can find their full body of work here: https://next.nexusmods.com/profile/4thUnknown/mods?gameId=1704

Their original Skyrim Morrowind Creatures SE mod here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/50435

And their patreon, here: https://www.patreon.com/4thunknown


SaintBahamut for porting these to Morrowind, and granting me permission to edit their work.