Hi all, it’s been a while. Nice to see some old names about still and a lot of new ones too.
Back at it again after a long hiatus. I decided to have another crack at a facelift mod for the game. My last one was some time ago now, 10 years since I started it, so it will be fun to see how far my 3d skills have come.
Mod is up on both the nexus and here on the vault: Character Facelift 2022
So far I have:
6 human female heads, replacing and non replacing versions
6 male half orc heads
Bevil
Shandra Jerro
All children replaced, heads and bodies
I am working on female half orcs now, in the process of converting the phenotype from the half orc female one to the human one. I can’t stand the proportions of the original, it’s all wrong. Rather than an appearance.2da edit I am doing it the long way and renaming/converting every single armor/body part from HHF to OOF. That will mean no conflicts with other mods that use appearance.2da mods. Just to keep it simple to use my mod. There are over 200 model parts that need renaming, I am about 60 in so far. Thank heavens for MDBConfig, still, it’s slow tedious work… It will be worth it though as I will be able to make much less disproportionate female half orcs.
I will post updates of what I am working on here, feel free to chime in
Well that was a total waste of 2 days. Turns out, I can’t just rename all the HHF armor parts to OOF, it shows up fine in game but the animations are all off. Pick up a weapon and it’s on the outside of a distorted hand. What a downer, I really wanted to replace the disgusting female orc body. It doesn’t look built, obese or even just chunky, it’s disproportionate in the most unflattering way. I even tried renaming the animation GR2 files to match the human parts but it seems they won’t work without changing the name of the base node for each of the 300+ animations. I am not patient enough to do that.
So I am left with 2 choices, just use the original OOF body and make ugly heads that match it or use a 2da edit. A 2da edit would mean I need to redo my male heads too though…
Anyone have any ideas? I would really like to have cooler looking half orc females, the males are fine, brutish and big but all the female half orc reference I have been seeing is much nicer than the travesty we have in the game right now.
Here’s where I’m at, had to scale and adjust the model to the horrible half orc female body. I will have to adjust every single helmet in the game as well as all the hairs to compensate for giving her an actual neck but it’s worth it. Still hate it but it’s better at least.
At this point I may just have to edit every single one of the 39 body armors in the game to make them proportionate… There was 0 effort put into these, there are literal holes in some of the models, this one pictured included. Around the arms you can see right through the model.
OK, I think that’s the first of the body models done, not doing textures or anything, just fixing proportions and making it possible to have heads that don’t look like trolls instead of half orcs
Great work and very much appreciated. She does look much better.
I’m wondering if you are familiar with nwn2fixes, “A compilation of fixes for official campaign content, by various authors.” Nwn2fixes is intended to make true “fixes”.
Included are a very few armors and helms that have been reworked in one way or another.
It would be great to have compatibility with any fixed stock armors you make. I’m not sure there would be conflicts.
I based the changes on various minifigs and other D&D art. Naturally, I went with something easy to do. I would love to do full on high poly sculpts with bulging muscles, tendons and veins but that would mean a week or more on each model for a race I don’t really even play. I settled on fixing the proportions and getting them more in line with the reference material I was able to find (a lot of WoW reference tends to creep in there).
I am doing my best to keep my mod as compatible with others as I can but more than I am already doing (fixing almost 40 armors instead of a simple appearance.2da edit), is unlikely. There are countless mods available for this game, I can’t possibly accommodate them all. I have tried to keep my file structures, textures and models as easy to work on as possible so mod authors are free to tweak and change things to their heart’s content. If someone doesn’t like my tweaked armors they are free to delete the “Armor Fix” folder I will put them all in
Thanks for the link, there only appears to be one OOF model in the mod, I will make sure to fix the same issue it corrects in my pack
I won’t be doing this for any of the other races, I just couldn’t bring myself release a head pack for the disproportionate, half assed female half orc bodies. There was very little effort put into making them. I can quite literally see where they used the scale tool to scale them up rather than make considered tweaks and changes in line with a concept. The scale armor the fighter starts with is a prime example, it’s posterior begins half way up it’s spine and protrudes far enough to need it’s own area code It just looks bad, like an amateur made it in 5 mins.
Sorry about the rant, I spent 2 days trying to do a simpler fix. This race has been frustrating me from the start. Last time around it was exactly where I burned out. I tried in vain for over a month to make something I was satisfied with and eventually just got burned out and gave up.
The chest bulge is in the texture, the model itself is much flatter. I guess she has beaten out the chest area to make it more comfortable. I try to consider these things when making my fixes. The “unclothed” body needs to fit inside all the armors I edit.
13 out of 38 armors tweaked. Time for bed. Hopefully I can get through the rest tomorrow and finally get the heads properly started. This one is only about 20% done.
To summarize, you’d like the half-orc females to use the same body as the human females. In that case, you’re right, renaming the model and the skeleton inside will not work, as the bones are not the same (different length, orientation, probably weighting on the vertices as well).
The good news is you don’t need to do anything for the armor accessories, “only” helmets, boots, gloves and bodies are concerned.
Basically, what needs to be done is to import the human mesh in your 3D software, delete the p_hhf_skel skeleton, import the p_oof_skel skeleton and reskin the mesh on p_oof_skel (I don’t know however how much work is necessary as far as vertex weighting is required).
Another option could be to change p_oo? in appearance.2da to p_hh?, except for hair and head columns, but that means male half-orcs will also use the human body (unless you change p_oo? to p_oom at line 5 and add a new line for half-orc female, in which case you’ll need to change all the corresponding blueprints to use this new appearance). Plus the heads will probably need to be reworked too, so they fit with the slender new body.
Hide, leather, scale and plate armors all done. They are far from ideal but a far cry better than what was there.
So many of the models were broken, holes around seams, vertices floating in the middle of nowhere… The models added in the expansion are so much better. I suspect they ran into a time crunch with the vanilla game and just rushed the original models out. I can see where they just grabbed edge loops, randomly scaled them up and then hit export. The expansion armors are much more purposeful and better proportioned (still wrong for my heads) and a lot easier to work on.
A 2da edit would be the quickest and easiest solution but it would also break compatibility with a swathe of other mods. My goal is to keep my mod as compatible (in broad terms) as possible. So no 2da edits or other changes common in other mods.
Reskinning the human models to the orc skeleton would be a total nightmare and require I edit the models anyway as the hand, leg and head positions would all need to be lined up for weapons etc.
What I am doing now is at least fairly quick, I know my way around 3dsmax well enough to knock them out fairly quickly with the changes I need. My heads will be less ogre/trollish and lean a bit more human. IMO, well within the lore. Opinions vary though. If anyone doesn’t like it, they are free to edit my mod or just not use it at all. I can’t accommodate everyone sadly.
By the way, will this New Facelift Mod be an addition to the existing one, or a replacement? I think I had to renumber a few of the heads and hair models to use as many as possible of Krighaur’s, Faces of Neverwinter, Races of Faêrun, Xaltar’s packs
The goal eventually is for it to replace my old mod. That said, I have decided to move on to the races I didn’t do last time and at least try to cover those. That way if I do throw in the towel before I am done a combination of the 2 mods should cover most things.
I have no idea what head IDs are in use by other mods nor do I have the time and patience to dissect them all unfortunately. For my non replacing heads I simply went with adding 22 (the year I started this mod) and then the head number. As for the replacing ones, those will naturally conflict with my other mod.
One thing I could use some help with, I have lost all my old saves which makes testing NPCs pretty tough. Shandra Jerro has 2 models it turns out, one pre companion model and then the companion one. I totally missed the pre companion model because I couldn’t load up a save at her farm to test.
If anyone has a collection of save files they could share that would be great
As with 4760, it’s the same for me. I’ve had to renumber everything, but it’s quite easy with MDBCloner as I too have so many nice heads to choose from now. I want them all.
If anyone knows a free numbering range do let me know. It’s easy enough for me to change in my next update.
The half orcs, as of this moment, are just replacing versions. I couldn’t find any half orc mods in my searches that were anything more than reskins. If there is a need for non replacing versions though, I can accommodate easily enough though my altered armors will not work with the original heads.
I don’t believe we can know that… Just like 4760, I have downloaded or received most heads that are available on Discord, Modgames and the vault, and even gotten a few custom ones from 4760, Rashi and Naku35, so therefore I’ve had to renumber stuff. For people who have only downloaded what’s on the vault your numbers should be ok…I think. And as I said, it’s no biggie renumbering things. It’s easily done with MDBCloner.
It just looks bad, like an amateur made it in 5 mins.
