#existing head

[modding-dao]

Tutorial - Turning A Head Into A Preset

Pre-Reqs:

Install the head morphs from the Core and Single Player Game Resource Files (link)

Have a basic understanding of how to load, edit, and export a head morph (link)

Embiggen: To view larger versions of the images below, see here.

Character presets are head morphs that will show up on the "Preset" slider bar in the character creator. There are several reasons why you might want to make one; the two most common are that you might want to play through as if one of the canon NPCs had become the warden, or you might want to create a custom warden in the toolset (where you have much greater control over appearance) and then get it into the game.

In this case we're going to take an existing head morph and turn it into a playable character preset. Let's go with Shianni, the city elf. The first step is to locate her among the head morphs files. The earliest place she can be found in the game is the City Elf origin, so that's the logical place to check first. And there she is:

We need to load her file, then do a File -> Save As, close the tab, and reload it from the new location before we're able to edit it. Once that's done, go to the "Export Settings" tab in the Object Inspector.

There's just a single setting there, with a true/false setting. By default it is false, and the toolset will export heads to MOR format, which is the in-game head morph format. We want to change this setting to true instead, which tells it to export to MOP, the format for character preset heads. Once it is true, then right-click on the head and "Post to Local".

The final step is done outside of the toolset. We need to navigate to the directory the head morph was exported to - packages/core/override/toolsetexport - and find the MOP file with Shianni in the filename:

And then we need to rename it to match the file naming convention for character presets, which is as follows:

a single letter prefix to indicate the race of the preset - d, e or h for dwarf, elf or human

a single letter prefix to indicate the sex of the preset - f or m

the character pre-set code "_cps_p"

a two-digit suffix which indicates which character preset slot the preset is to appear in, from 01 to 08

So for Shianni's file, we want to change the name to ef_cps_p0? were ? is a number from 1 to 8. I've already got a few presets in use in my toolset, so I'll set her to one I haven't used yet, and make her the sixth preset:

And finally, I go in-game, start a new campaign, and go to any of the places where I can make an elven female (the game will not care if I make Shianni a Dalish or mage elf instead of a city one). Drag the preset slider over, and there she is:

Last Modifed: April 3, 2013

[modding-dao]

Tutorial - Editing An Existing Head Morph

Pre-Reqs: Install the head morphs from the Core and Single Player Game Resource Files (link) Embiggen: To view larger versions of the images below, see here.

One of the easiest modifications to make to the game is to edit an existing head morph.

We will begin by loading one of the existing head morph files downloaded and installed earlier. Click on File -> Open and then navigate to where you unzipped the head morphs earlier. You'll see a bunch of subdirectories, as follows:

Most heads are organized into folders based on what section of the game we first encounter that character in, and/or which major quest line that they're a part of. Usually this is fairly intuitive, but there are a handful of characters who were originally created for one area and then ended up elsewhere, or who show up in multiple parts of the game and may require a little hunting to find.

We'll start with an easy to locate head. All of our followers are in the Global subdirectory. Let's edit Alistair!

When we first open his file, you'll note that there's a red bar underneath his tab in the preview window, letting us know we can't currently edit him. See how all the entries in the Object Inspector are also greyed out and uneditable. All of the head morph files have been set to Read Only by default so that we don't accidentally overwrite them; so we'll always have the unmodified head MRH files available.

What we need to do is do a File -> Save As and save this head elsewhere. Put it somewhere you can easily relocate it, and don't change the filename. For example, any time I work on a head morph I save it in a named subdirectory of my D:\Dragon Age\Faces directory.

Once you've saved it, the bar will turn green but the Object Inspector entries will still be greyed out; we still can't edit him. Right-click on the tab, close it, then File -> Open and open the file from its new location. The editor will now have a green bar and the Object Inspector entries will be active. We're now ready to begin editing his appearance.

Let's go to the "Part Selection" tab in the Object Inspector, where we can make a couple of very minor changes. This is where we can change things like eye colour, hair colour, facial hair colour, hair style, etc.

Click on the like marked "Hair". You'll see that a square with three dots on it appears at the end of the line:

This indicates that we can bring up a menu of choices. Click on the three dots; the game will pop open a file dialog that lists all available hairs. The file names are pretty arcane; we can either try randomly to find one we like, or look at the Morph page of the toolset wiki to see previews of each (link).

I've now selected a different hair for Alistair:

Let's also give him some extra stubble. Drag down the slider at the right side of the Object Inspector until the goatee/soul patch/moustache/pork chops options appear. He already has values in the first two, let's also give him some of the others. We can either drag the slider bar back and forth to set values, or click where the numbers are and type in values manually. The higher the value, the more opaque (darker) the stubble will be.

Click on File -> Save. We're now ready to export our modified Alistair to the game. To do so, right-click within the preview window and select "Post to Local".

The editor will automatically put the head in our packages/core/override/toolsetexport directory, with the right filename to replace the default Alistair head (hm_genfl_alistair.mor). The Log Window will report back to us about this to let us know where it put it, and that the export was successful.

And then the last thing left to do is to load the game and admire modified Alistair in all his glory!

Note: To get rid of the modified Alistair, go to your packages/core/override/toolsetexport directory and delete the hm_genfl_alistair.mor file

Tip: When modifying a head, you can have both the game and the toolset open. Every time you reload the game, it will reload the heads as well, so for fast testing iterations you can put yourself by the character you're modifying, do a quick save, and then do a reload after each time that you post the edited head to local. Especially useful when trying out custom hairs, which tend to show up in the editor as a blue polygonal mess instead of being properly textured.

Last Modified: April 2, 2013