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Demigryph knights with Theodore Bruckner's animations and a small reskin

Demigryph knights will now use their weapons in combat and stop being freeloaders.
This mod forces vanilla demigryphs to use reskinned Theodore Bruckner's skeleton and animations. The demigryph units should have the same or very similar behaviour to vanilla, this is mainly a visual adjustment.

They should look less as if they just rolled off the factory line. I also repainted some of the demigryph armor and demigryph coats (their beaks, feather and fur).

A demigryph knight will be assembled by the game from the following parts:

5 Demigryph coat colours,
4 Demigryph barding colors
4* Demigryph accessories (parchments, purity seals),
3 Knight helmets,
2 Knight crests,
2 Knight torsos (both with capes of Empire Generals),
2 Knight legs,
3 Knight shoulderpads (left and right sides independent from each other),
3 Knight weapons (normal variant has 3 lances, the halberd variant has 3 different halberds to choose from, Royal Altdorf Gryphites get to pick from both the 3 halberds and lances, both weapon types work the same way anyway),

which adds up to a number of variations I am too lazy to calculate. Theoretically, no 2 demigryphs in a unit should be the same. In practice the engine has a tendency to spit out 2 or 3 copies of the same in a unit.

*4 Demigryph accessories. In this reskin there are 4 places accessories will be attached, front left, front right, rear left, rear right. There are 3 possible accessories (parchment, triple purity seal, double purity seal). Only 3 of 4 places will have an accessory.
The game will first pick where to place the large parchment in any of 4 places.
Next, it will place a triple or double purity seal in the remaining 3 available places.
Next double or triple purity seals will be placed in one of the remaining 2 places.
So technically there should be (4*3*2 = 24) accessory combinations, but since it always begins with 1 of 4 possible variations and there is only 3 different accessory meshes it doesn't feel as varied.
I do not want to make more, the variantmeshdefinition file for the accessory slot is already way too large for me to manage comfortably.

I added the capes to distract the viewer from how the knights get tossed in their saddles like sacks of potatoes (their running cycle animations/riding skills are despicable). A cape in battle is a massive liability as your opponents can grab it and pull you off the mount. On the other hand, capes look cool. This forced me to remove that fish ornament next to the tailhole on the demigryph cheek pauldrons to reduce clipping.
I then pondered the demigryph posterior. Next, I increased the circumference of the tailhole. Sadly, the tail still clips with the armor in a lot of animation frames, I might need to widen that hole further.

I made the knights a bit bigger to better fit Theodore's skeleton and animations. My headcanon to explain this inconsistency is that to be a demigryph knight you need to eat your wheaties, thus they are a bit chonkier than their equestrian counterparts.

If anything edits textures of demigryphs and demigryph knights, then some weirdness will ensue. Same goes for any mods that use the knights (the riders themselves) for other on foot units.
The mod does edit land_units_tables to set the proper animations for the 3 demigryph units (lances, halberds, Royals). Also variants_tables was edited to set the scale better.
Therefore a submod will be needed if this mod is to be used in tandem with another one editing the same tables.

The mod is reusing CA's animations so obviously there will be clipping, stretching and unnatural bending. Just have a look at Bruckner riding Reaper in slow motion, all problems his animations have will now be inherited by the demigryphs.
He doesn't have a shield animation and his left arm is doing some weird back-and-forth motion during the running cycle so attaching shields to his left arm yields poor results. They will have to be shieldless.
In addition some of the meshes could use some small adjustments (the cape, shoulderpads, maybe resizing some body parts a bit), I might get to that in the future.
The RoR version (Royal Altdorf Gryphites) will look essentially the same as the normal version which is a downside.

For reasons unknown most monstrous cavalry only has the mount attacking, including the demigryphs. The riders are just there to look pretty. However, CA gave Theodore Bruckner animations that make it seem like he is actually using his lance during combat. He has a deadly repertoire of moves: a poke, a stab and a thrust (all during the normal claw swipes the demigryphs do). Now so do the normal demigryphs!
I really hoped CA would fix this by themselves but given that its been nearly a decade since the original demigryphs came out I lost hope. They did add Bruckner though, and thus made this mod possible. Therefore special thanks go to the undoubtedly underpaid and overworked CA employee(s) who made the animations for Theo.

If you don't like the different colored barding/armor of the demis you can edit the mod file with RPFM, I attached a screenshot showing the relevant .variantmeshdefinition file. Just remove one of the lines you don't like and save. The one I called "red" is just the standard faction color.
If you don't like different fur/feather color of the demis you can delete the relevant lines in emp_demigryph_body.variantmeshdefinition. The one I called "yellow" is the vanilla color.
As you can tell I'm not particularly good at modding so I'm not sure whether removing the only .rigid_model_v2 in a variantmeshdefinition file won't cause issues. If you encounter some issues just unsubsribe and resubscribe again to make steam download an unchanged version of the mod to try again.