The Jinx Bento Centaur is arguable the most popular in Second Life, with a variety of 3rd party creators supporting with their wonderful creativity. Skins, tack, poses, animations, accessories are all available for each of the different sizes of centaur.
Sizes
The Jinx Bento Centaur now comes in 6 sizes. The Centaur (for standard sized avatars), the Cen-Lightaur and the ollytaur (also for standard sized avatars). The CenTEENYtaur and the Follytaur Teeny (for tinies, dinkies and kid avatars) and the CenPETItaur (for petite avatars). You can now also make the standard-sized centaur up to 20% larger with a *NEW RELEASE* Largaur deforming AO.
The standard sized Centaur, the Cen-Lightaur and the Follytaur work with most adult-sized mesh bodies and has been tested with Maitreya, Belleza: Venus, Freya, Isis, Jake, Slink: Physique and Hourglass, Signature: Gianni, Aesthetic, Absolute Creations: Adam. The Cen-Lightaur and Follytaur have also been tested with the Tweenster. The Follytaur also works with the Tweeneedoo (with some shape adaption).
**note** The Cen-Lightaur has been shown to deform when using Belleza Freya or Isis. To avoid this happening you can either use the version of you Freya or Isis that does not say bento after in in the folder (there are 2 versions) OR you can use the leg fix hud included in the Cen-Lightaur package.
The CenTEENYtaur and the Follytaur Teeny work with Dinkies and some kids bodies (tested with TD and ND/MD).
The CenPETItaur works with Petite avatars and has been tested with Yabusaka (version 3 is recommended) and Fallen Gods petites and Jinx Petit Ruth.
System Avatars are not Bento and therefore, whilst you can use the old system avatar, there is a caveat in that your hands will be splayed. To avoid this you can use this cool hud from M.O.R.
The Animation Overrider
The Centaurs come with their own AOs that control the horse part only. To animate your human part please continue to use your favourite human AO (priority 3 or 4) as well as the centaur AO. This is a deliberate choice in development to allow for greater variety and quality of animations for your centaur. Jinx does not make mocap animations and therefore you will get a greater quality of upper body movement by using your quality human AOs.
There are a number of different notecards available in the AO that will allow for differing amount of upper body control in the centaur AO. The normal notecard (which is the default) provides some upper body animation during the faster paces. This is because most human run animations will leave you looking like an arm waving loon when you’re a centaur. The alt human notecard frees up the entire upper body in all paces – useful for taking photos or for using weapons, holding things. The P6 notecard will control the upper body some more and will override any and all other animations.
You can purchase additional AO notecards, for example the pregnancy for the centaur comes with it’s own animations and notecard. You can copy these into your normal centaur AO to provide additional notecard options from the menu.
This video was made with the release of the Cen-Lightaur but many of the points are relevant to the other size centaurs as well.
This video was made when the centaur was released, there have been a few updates since then but the content of the video is largely still all relevant.