This tutorial is for all of you constantly wanting to make Head mods. Read closely and pay attention. This will cover K1 & K2. There are minor differences in the 2 games for this type of mod.
Part 1: First thing you will need the following tools.
Kotor Tool
Mdlops
Image manipulation program(GIMP, Photoshop, etc.)
Now decide which version of KOTOR you are making the Head for. For the Tutorial main portion we will assume KOTOR 2:TSL.
You will need to choose which head you are going to work with. All of the existing player heads can be considered the easiest to work with in KOTOR 2. So lets assume for this Tutorial we are working with Male Caucasian number 4.
We will need to extract the following files.
PMHC04.tga(There are 2 other variants for Darkside Transition. These are not important at this moment.)
PMHC04.mdl
PMHC04.mdx
Appearance.2da
Heads.2da
Portraits.2da
Make all of your changes to the TGA that you want. Choose a new model number for your head when you save your changes. Lets choose to save this as PMHC24.tga.
Rename your 2 model files respectively the same PMHC24.mdl & mdx.
Part 2: In Kotor Tool open your appearance.2da, portraits.2da, and heads.2da. It is easist to have all 3 open for this next portion.
In Appearance.2da locate the 3 lines dedicated to our example model. They should be labeled as followes.
P_MAL_C_L_04
P_MAL_C_M_04
P_MAL_C_S_04
or very close to this. Copy each of these 3 lines to the bottom of your 2da file. Change the appearance line number entry to match the proper row number for your new rows. Change the 04 in the label name to 24 for the character model.
Switch to Heads.2da. You should find 1 row for player head PMHC04. Copy this row to the bottom. Change your row number and change all of your entries to PMHC24 don't worry about the D2 stuff unless you have made 2 seperate darkside transition textures.
Switch to portraits.2da. Do not locate the portrait based on the texture number. The reason is Obsidian changed there minds about some heads and neglected changing there portrait numbers to match properly with all of the heads. Instead look up the line number of your appearance entry in the respective columns that matches the row number for your original appearance. Copy this row to the bottom of the 2da file change the row number and all of the number references to match our PMHC24.
Return to appearance.2da change the head entry in there 2 your new heads.2da entry. You can leave the other entry alone or change it to the number that matches PMHC04 your choice.
Return to portraits change the following 3 entries to match your appearance.2da file.
appearance = P_MAL_C_M_24
appearance_l = P_MAL_C_L_24
appearance_s = P_MAL_C_S_24
Save your 3 2da files your done with them.
All of the above changes are all that is required and needed for Kotor 2: TSL. The reason is Obsidian setup Heads.2da to accept texture overides for the Head models.
However in Kotor 1 you will need to add the following step to your routine.
Part 3: Open mdlops and open your new model PMHC24.mdl click read and write. Then click renamer change all entries of PMHC04 to PMHC24. Save this change and locate the new mdl & mdx files mdlops created. These new files should be named something like PMHC24.k1.bin.mdl & mdx remove all of the excess k1.bin junk after deleting the original mdl & mdx files and you will have your new models.
The reason we do this in K1 but not in K2 is Bioware required each head model to use it's own texture while Obsidian changed the system to allow overiding in the 2da file.
Great tutorial Darkkender. This will help many people out, including myself. Thumb's up!
:thumbsup:
Yeah, Great job. I've been wanting to make a new head for a while now but thought it might be a little hard.(and I hate 2da editing) but it looks pretty simple with this tutorial. Thanks for writing it!
Very nice tutorial, I'm not one for making heads, but I sure do like using new ones, so have a go at all you re-skinners out there.
Well, I'm having a problem. I have not followed the tutorial exactly, but have done all necessary steps. Instead of reskinning a new head, i wanted to use gendar's head from kotor 1. Both the texture and model files come with tsl. So, I renamed the model files PMHB20, and kept the texture as it was (N_GendarH01). Actually, I probably didn't even need the texture for Gendar's head. I then copied the 3 lines for sm, med, and lg and made them read "P_MAL_B_SML_20", and the same for the other 2 except for med and lrg. Then for default head I just entered the row that gendar's head already had so i don't need to edit heads.2da. I believe this is all I should have to do, but no new head shows up when I select new game. Does anyone see something I'm doing wrong?
I'm always bad at following tutorials... :(
Did you do the portraits.2da edit? I bet you didn't. The game will let you get by without a portrait and just give you a white picture if you don't have a new one. However the portraits.2da edit is required to create the selectable character as one of the fields in it defines which appearance.2da entries are selectable pc's.
I would recommend changing the name of the texture file and creating a new heads.2da entry as well when you skip some of these steps you leave yourself wide open for glitches. If everything uses the same naming convention there is a greater likelyhood of catching where something got messed up at. Also while the NPC from K1 may be in K2 if you reuse a head entry for him you take the chance of having a headless NPC somewhere as his head may be being used by another NPC that we are not immediatley aware of.
FYI we write these tutorials to provide clear and accurate instructions on what to do. If you skip a instruction set your asking for it to not work.
Originally posted by Darkkender
Did you do the portraits.2da edit? I bet you didn't. The game will let you get by without a portrait and just give you a white picture if you don't have a new one. However the portraits.2da edit is required to create the selectable character as one of the fields in it defines which appearance.2da entries are selectable pc's.
Well, that I did not. I figured that I would do that after once I get the head in game so I could take a screenshot of it. I had no idea that it was required. Thanks for your help Darkkender.
Very good tutorial Darkkender :thumbsup:
I'm sure this will help a lot of people :D
I'll add one word of warning to those of you that will attempt to utilize the "funkier" heads to make them selectable.
I've observed that when editing the .mdl file(s) for a new character in many cases the entry your editing will be shorter/longer than what your renaming. I've had luck with changing names like: n_darraala which is 10 characters to ....PMHH04. I was having issues till I noticed that some of the old names were being left in as I was doing a "replace" so to avoid that I simply "find" one entry I"m looking for then go from entry to entry and paste my new one over making sure to "..." adjust the odd parts of the original character name left over.
For example Kreia although having a "head" file has a few "different" entries in her .mdl. I replaced them all and noticed it left many "strings" of her old name...hence game crash.
Just noticed that and thought It might help.
________________________________________
I'd also suggest rather than doing 5 heads at once editing everything and then trying to use them. Do one at a time that way you see the problem with each head when it arises.
DM
I tried to follow these steps, but when I go to select the head at the start game screen the entire head is missing.
I am trying to extract the Bastila head to play with as my PC character in Kotor1 so that she will have the original texture and I will have a different texture. I followed the directions exactly as the tutorial showed, but when I got to this part, this is what I had trouble with:
Return to portraits change the following 3 entries to match your appearance.2da file.
appearance = P_MAL_C_M_24
appearance_l = P_MAL_C_L_24
appearance_s = P_MAL_C_S_24
I did not see the appearance column where I would put P_MAL_C_M_24. I did find and replace the appearance_l and appearance_s. I'm going back in to look at it again and I still cannot find this column. Is this something obvious I'm missing, or is it different since it's Kotor1 and not Kotor2?
If I can find out what I'm doing wrong and the head is still missing, I'll try going through the steps again and documenting exactly what I'm doing so maybe someone could show me what I'm messing up hehe.
Thanks to anyone who can help me with this :)
I did not see the appearance column where I would put P_MAL_C_M_24. DK meant appearancenumber.
And just to be clear, remember you're not actually putting in the text "P_MAL_C_M_24" but rather, the row number in appearance.2da whose label is "P_MAL_C_M_24". (Maybe that's what you said and I just read it funny.)
Yep, I'd done that part incorrectly. Thanks TK! :)
However, now I have another problem....
When I try to make a new character, a male head is showing up instead of Bastila's :lol: I thought I made sure everything was F instead of M but I must have done something wrong somewhere *smacks forehead* I'm going to go through the steps one at a time again and see if I can catch what I did wrong :p
I just realized something.
I was using lines 130-132 in the appearance.2da (the P_FEM_C_SML_04, P_FEM_C_MED_04, and P_FEM_C_LRG_04 lines) to copy and move to the bottom of the appearance.2da. Bastila only has one line, which is number 4. Her line has a lot of things that are different from the PC lines. For example, her Normal head number is 1, the PC is 39. Her modela is P_BastilaBA, the PC's is PFBAS, PFBAM and PFBAL. For the actual textures and models I used the ones I extracted for Bastila.
But is it going to be messed up since there is only 1 line for Bastila and 3 lines for PC characters that are different from each other? Can I use the PC lines for a Bastila look or is this causing the problem of the male head showing up?
You could use one appearance line for all 3 size classes. In TSL there is not a size difference, But in KotOR there is. However it will still work fine by just useing one line for either game, you just have to remeber to make the portriats.2da reference the same number for all three sizes.
Editing this again to update:
I tried using Bastila's appearance line #4 and no head showed up at the character select screen.
So I used the lines 130-132 to create the three additional lines at the bottom. These were making it look like she had a huge cape of red hair coming out of her head. So I changed the modela column to P_BastilaBA, and the modelb column to P_BastilaBB for all three entries.
I can now select Bastila's head as a PC character, but the texture I custom made for her is not showing up. She has the original brown hair and light blue eyes. What needs to be changed so my texture file shows up? It's named PFHC24.tga.
Wow. :drop2: That's great stuff! I'll really have to get into the modding business now!
...That is, once I get my new computer online.
Editing this again to update:
I tried using Bastila's appearance line #4 and no head showed up at the character select screen.
So I used the lines 130-132 to create the three additional lines at the bottom. These were making it look like she had a huge cape of red hair coming out of her head. So I changed the modela column to P_BastilaBA, and the modelb column to P_BastilaBB for all three entries.
I can now select Bastila's head as a PC character, but the texture I custom made for her is not showing up. She has the original brown hair and light blue eyes. What needs to be changed so my texture file shows up? It's named PFHC24.tga.
Okay make sure you have a seperate heads.2da entry for your new appearance. In your heads.2da entries you will want to make sure the texture being pointed at is the one you have named above. Now I'm unsure if you are modding K1 or K2. If your modding K1 you may want to open the model file up in mdlops and use the renamer button. When you get the renamer screen up make sure to only rename the entries that look exactley like the head texture entries in the heads.2da file and no other entry. Click rename and mdlops will create 2 new model files for you one mdl one mdx with some extra tags in there something like "-bin-k1" take these models and place them in overide and delete the excess junk that I noted above. This should help you out a bit.
I am so confused lol.
Darkkender, I had everything exactly the way you wrote it out (in the original post and the post above this). I cannot figure out what I'm doing wrong. After saving a gazillion times now I can't find the files that allowed me to choose Bastila but had the old texture (brown hair, light blue eyes). All I could get it to do is pull up Bastila that was obviously using my red hair texture, but looked like a cape coming out of her head.
I tried using everything on the Bastila line #4 as the three entries at the bottom but the extra head did not show up. I tried using the 3 lines from PFHC04 and that's when I got the weird cape head. I've seriously tried at least 15 different variations to see if any of the options would fix the problem. I am so frustrated about this rofl.
Is there anyone knowledgeable about this who might be able to walk me through this step by step in email or even an instant messenger? These instructions are set up for player heads to be extracted, not for NPC heads..so I must be doing something wrong that I'm not catching. I could take some screenshots of my finished files and post them if that would help.
Oh and BTW, this is for Kotor1 :)
Tell you what Anastase if you could PM me a link with the files you have for this I'll look it over and see if I can't be of some better assistance.
I wouldn't use mdlops to rename head textures it is much safer to use a hex editor. I would deffinately try to hex edit them than anthing else right now.
First off thanks for the updated tutorial Dark, its extremely helpful. Second I'm pretty sure I've followed all the steps correctly. Modified my three separate 2da's, I've made new textures and portraits and named them all accordingly as well as renaming the models I'm using to match. I just can't see anything wrong with my entries in any of the 2da's yet when I go to select the new character he's missing his head. His portrait is there...but no head...anybody have any ideas?
Oh and as far as I know its not the same problem as Anastase's, at least I don't think so, like I said I've been staring at my 2da's for hours and I can't see anything wrong.
First off thanks for the updated tutorial Dark, its extremely helpful. Second I'm pretty sure I've followed all the steps correctly. Modified my three separate 2da's, I've made new textures and portraits and named them all accordingly as well as renaming the models I'm using to match. I just can't see anything wrong with my entries in any of the 2da's yet when I go to select the new character he's missing his head. His portrait is there...but no head...anybody have any ideas?
Oh and as far as I know its not the same problem as Anastase's, at least I don't think so, like I said I've been staring at my 2da's for hours and I can't see anything wrong.
PM me an archive of the files that you modified and I'll see what the problem might be. If you don't include something in the archive thats needed I'll have to assume that this will be the cause so don't leave anything out. ;)
Whoops I missed the reply. Thank you Darkkender for offering so much assistance with this! :)
When you say pm you the files, do you mean link a place I upload them to? (Not sure where to do that). Or send them to you email? Sorry for more questions hehe :p
You can always upload it to pcgamemods. Just call it test or something and write that its for Darkkender.
T7 EDIT: You shouldn't do that, If I saw something up on pcgm like that, I would want it deleted immediatly. PCGM and sites like it are for public releases of completed mods, it is not anyone's personal webspace!
There are plenty of free web hosting sites thart you can upload files to and then send private links for the files via PM or even public mod releases.
We have a couple threads with these types of site listed but a good one would be Freewebs.com
Yeah I guess I shouldn't have done that, whoops. Anyways it was deleted. I'm in the process of making a freewebs site and posting it on there but I keep getting error messages and I don't have the time to deal with it tonight, but I'll let you know ASAP Dark, thanks.