How do you...

animate something like a centaur/mermaid (where bodyparts are hidden and an animal part is added on) in SL as there is no horse bvh/model to download and use?

Well in mermaids the tail can be made from the two legs of the avatar animated as if they were a single limb. In the centaur the front legs follow the animations of the human legs while the rear legs I believe are scripted to detect when the avatar is walking, standing etc and they are moved by animating the prims that make up those legs. If you see any creatures and want to see how the avatar underneath is animated try pressing ctrl-alt-shift-9 to toggle volume rendering. This removes all prims and will show you the human avatar underneath.

Thanks! That is a great tip on the crtl alt shift 9 thing

Ok another question if you (or someone else doesn't mind)...

I take it that you can only animate prims and not sculptys that are a single skin without swapping another sculpty into it's place?

Say you had a single horse sculpty. You can't make the legs move right? Compared to bringing in a horse body, legs etc.. in sculpty form or creating them ingame from prims yes?

What if you were trying to emulate Mr Fantastic and make just the finger on his hands stretch and the hand was a sculpty, would the fingers need to be separated to do that via script or not?

Thanks once again for all the help

Take a look at this thread.

/8/bb/189024/1.html

It seems possible to animate a sculpted prim. You probably wouldn't be moving the prim but rather morphing it into another shape. I haven't really seen this in SL so I can't tell you how it looks.

For the stretching finger on the hand you could use the above method I guess. You could also make a sculpted hand and a separate sculpted finger. Then you could just use a script to adjust the prim finger's position and length. There are always several ways to do things in SL.

There are prim animation scripts out there too. You basically move the prims and the script records the position of your prims and allows you to play back the movement you recorded. I forgot the names but you can search for 'prim animator' in slexchange.

Look for one called Puppeteer. Works beautifully! I bought the "private use" version to try it out. Liked it so much I bought the "reseller" version to use in some of my giant sized avatars.

Thank you. I love when I learn something new.