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I did a half-assed action for PS for DAO normal maps back in the day that can be used in conjunction with the nVidia plugin to recreate the Z. It will also work on TOR maps. https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage/mods/4019 I've never looked at it, so I couldn't say, but yeah it would be unlikely to be a very close match. That shouldn't prevent doing a port, but face skinning is always a pain in the ass.

Yeah. While it's been seriously looked into, and other games in the Aurora family can do it, and KOTOR does keep track of the time of day, it would take some startling, groundbreaking new information for anything to come of this. Or a ridiculous amount of scripting that no sane person is going to do. It is, however, possible to make new weather systems via particle emitters. I don't know if they can be integrated in modules as they are in K2 - I'm guessing no - but we can easily mimic the effects by copying the emitter settings. And this isn't even really a porting issue, as both games are capable of the same feats in this regard. I think the only thing K1 is actually missing is textures for the rain and snow, which are a paltry few pixels anyway. What concerns me is stuff like the facial bones, eyes, mouth setup, and shape of the neck. Not concerned that anything will be fundamentally incompatible but concerned that things will be subtly different enough from KOTOR to make the re-jiggery a huge pain. Ah, I figured there was nothing truly arcane about it. I just remembered the different channels being used for different things and made a mental note that one would have to figure out which is which and the proper conversion process. But one seems to have figured that out already. That sounds simple enough. Could probably be done with a Photoshop macro if there isn't a plug-in for it already.

No. Porting is related to assets. Dynamic day/night cycles are an engine feature, one that Odyssey doesn't support. There was thread some time back about trying to fake it via scripting a switch between different versions of the same module with different baked lighting, but it's an idea doomed to fail - too much effort involved (if it would even work at all). The same as any other skinned mesh, pretty much. The only difference is they split the mesh and the skeleton out into separate files. There's nothing special about the normal maps.They use the standard approach of storing X in the A and Y in the G channels (Z is calculated at runtime), then use the R and B channels to store various masks like emissive.