Normally animation mods either overwrite all NPC animations, or use a specialanims .esp, or make use of MAO or some other method to change NPCs to use or ignore them. But with Blockhead, you can change animations specific to the player or NPCs based on race, gender or anything else, without changing skeletons or overwriting anything. However, this can take a bit of tedious copying and renaming. This tool does all that for you!

Installation:

Extract either of the .bat files in the archive to anywhere that has the correct path \meshes\characters\_male\ to the animations you want to use.

This means that if you have some folder (e.g. "data") with the "meshes" folder inside it, and animations (.kf files) at a path "meshes\characters\_male" (or the SpecialAnims folder within _male), then put the Blockheadizer files in that "data" folder. This could be the oblivion game data folder, but I don't recommend this as it's harder to check what you're doing, or uninstall your animations manually. Better is to extract an animation mod somewhere outside your game data folder, then put Blockheadizer.bat and/or Blockheadizer-specialanims.bat next to that animation mod's "meshes" folder.

If that's confusing, here's an example: Say I download an idle pose replacer. Instead of using OBMM or BAIN to install it like normal, I should extract the pose replacer mod where it is (e.g. my downloads folder), open up the folder, then move Blockheadizer.bat so it sits inside the extracted folder, next to "meshes". If your animation mod doesn't come with a "meshes" folder and instead just has loose .kf files... then you need to rearrange it to the correct structure, which should be easy enough if you were capable of installing the mod without Blockheadizer.

Note that if you run Blockheadizer.bat from your Oblivion data folder, then it will Blockheadize ALL animations you have installed in either the animations or SpecialAnims folder, which is probably not what you want.


Usage:

You should use Blockheadizer-specialanims.bat if you are using a mod that uses an .esp file to change player-specific animations (and puts animations in a SpecialAnims directory within _male). Note that Blockheadizer currently doesn't work right with animation mods that already use Blockhead, or that have non-vanilla animation names! It'll just make an unnecessary mess of those. For normal "replacer" type animation mods, you only need Blockheadizer.bat.

Once the appropriate Blockheadizer.bat file is in the right place as described above, double click it to run it. It runs in a command line screen, but should be easy enough to understand.
First you will be asked if you want to affect only the player. This should be self-explanatory. Type "y" or "n". If you answer "y" here, the Blockheadizer will run and exit, and to make further changes to the mod you should run it again.

Assuming you answered "n" to that previous question, it will then ask you which race to affect. You can answer "all", or put in the name of a race - this is the title as it appears in the game, NOT construction set. Here are the correct values for vanilla races:

Argonian, Breton, Dark Elf, Dark Seducer, Dremora, Golden Saint, High Elf, Imperial, Khajiit, Orc, Redguard, Wood Elf

...but, if you know the game ID name of a modded race you can use that too.

Next you can choose the gender. You can enter "all" here as well, but not if entered "all" to race. That's all the options, and once it's run and exited you should see a folder next to Blockheadizer called "Blockheadized". In here should be a folder: /meshes/characters/_male/specialanims, containing renamed copies of the animations from the original mod. If you like, you can check over the various .kf files in here, and delete or rename any that you don't want to use.

Now you've effectively created an animation mod, and you're ready to install it.


Using the result:

Treat the resulting "Blockheadized" folder like you would any normal mod for installation. That means you can copy its contents to your oblivion folder (manual installation) or use OBMM or BAIN (better installation). It should not overwrite ANY files at all, except for animations that already use Blockhead to change the ones you're editing! Once the files are installed, it should work straight away without any .esps, assuming you've installed OBSE and Blockhead correctly. You can uninstall existing mods that use the same animations, if you want.

Note that Blockhead has priority over all other methods of changing animations outside of OBSE. Meaning that if you use an .esp to give your player a unique walking animation, for instance, and then use this tool to install different ones, then the Blockhead ones will take effect. If you use Mayu's Animation Overhaul to install a bunch of player-only animations, then use this tool to give all members of a certain race or gender unique animations, then they will all have the new Blockhead ones regardless of MAO, and so will the player (if appropriate).


Advanced Usage:

Initially, the "all" race criteria only affects vanilla races. To make it work with custom races (for instance, to provide animations to all males including mystic elf NPCs that you might have) you should edit the .bat with a text editor. Find this:
copy /y %%f "%pout%\%%~nf_BLKD_PERRACE_Argonian_%g%.kf"
copy /y %%f "%pout%\%%~nf_BLKD_PERRACE_Breton_%g%.kf"
copy /y %%f "%pout%\%%~nf_BLKD_PERRACE_Dark Elf_%g%.kf"
copy /y %%f "%pout%\%%~nf_BLKD_PERRACE_Dark Seducer_%g%.kf"
...and so on, and after those lines add this:
copy /y %%f "%pout%\%%~nf_BLKD_PERRACE_[name of custom race]_%g%.kf"
where [name of custom race] is the name the race uses in the game. Don't omit the quotes.

I like to make use of this tool to give animations lots more options for installation. If you're a mod creator or just a finicky mod user, you can use the Blockheadizer with one set of options, rename the resulting folder and then run again, do this however many times, and you can zip up all the result folders together to make a BAIN-compatible installation package. You could give it an OBMM script too, if you know how to make those. This can then be provided to users or given as an offering to your favourite animation mod creator.

Changing animations based only on race, gender and player status might be too limited for you. Blockhead does in fact provide a more general criterion for asssigning animations, but it requires you to know the formID of the individual and the mod they originated from. Read the documentation that comes with Blockhead to find out more on this. If you want a sophisticated automation of animation assigning that makes use of the NPC-specific function, for instance to assign animations to classes or factions... you'll have to make that yourself.


Bugs and Issues:

Firstly, this tool is made to work with mods that either replace vanilla 3rd-person animations, or put them in the specialanims folder for use by an .esp. It will be unable to Blockheadize any animations in nonstandard folders, and may cause odd things to happen when Blockheadizing animations that have non-vanilla names, that is anything that adds animations can't "do" in the vanilla game. It also doesn't work with existing Blockhead animation mods. Probably it will just generate a whole bunch of unnecessary files, but worst case it might break something. Best to check thoroughly that the target directory only has the files you want to be copying before you run it.

These "unsupported" mods will work perfectly well along with animations created by this tool, but this tool shouldn't be used to change them.

That said, there aren't a lot of things to go wrong with this tool. All it does is copy files and rename them to something that probably won't already exist. Unexpected behaviour beyond that is the fault of Blockhead, which as far as I know is perfectly stable.

Blockhead (and hence this utility) can't do anything with first-person animations, by the way, so don't try.

Oh, also, this is essentially a tool for personal use. As a result, it has no error handling or other such cleverness at all. I claim no responsibility for anything it causes to go wrong - I've told you how to avoid that - and if the tool itself is broken, I may or may not fix it, but please tell me anyway.

Uninstallation:

The only file given here is a pair of .bat scripts that do nothing unless you run them, so you can delete them easily if you're done with it. However, deleting the animations produced by this mod can be tricky unless you used OBMM or BAIN to install them after running Blockheadizer. As with installations of ALL mods, it's best to backup the relevant folders beforehand - data\meshes\characters\_male\specialanims in this case.


Conflicts and Compatibility:

The best thing about using Blockhead for animations is that it's compatible with just about anything, and does only what you'd expect. It works absolutely fine with anything that relies on nonstandard skeletons, including MAO, BBB, Deadly Reflex or whatever, so long as the skeleton is located in the standard folder.

All NPCs, vanilla or modded, will work with this, unless you're wanting to affect a specific custom race that you don't know about.

No files will be overwritten by this tool unless you already used Blockhead for them. I'm not sure how Blockhead plays with other mods that change animations using OBSE, but I'd assume that they behave reasonably unless they affect the exact same situation.