KOTOR1 - Easy model replacement?

[DiscountWanderer 0]

So I'm looking for a bit of insight. I'm replaying KOTOR for the first time in years and thoroughly loving it, especially with some of the mods provided here. I got to Dantooine and met Juhani for the first time and I realized how much I dislike KOTOR1's Cathars (I know, lots of people complain).

Ultimately, what I'm trying to accomplish is swap her with either a Twi'lek or human model. I've already reverse engineered a mod to find out how textures work and put a custom twi'lek skin, albeit unsuccessfully, over her face. It stretching over the Cathar model looks rather entertaining. 

My question is, how does one swap the actual model that the textures map to? I've been playing with KOTOR tools, and tried a handful of things I thought would be successful, but alas, haven't had much luck. I'm not looking for a new mod, just the methods to swap out existing resources, if it is even possible. For example, if I wanted Juhani to look like Mission. Can a few files be renamed to Juhani's reference ID and call it a day? or is it more than that? Any tips and guidance is appreciated.

Thanks😎

[DarthParametric 3,777]

You'd need to edit the normalhead reference in her appearance.2da row. The number is the row ID in heads.2da. Her default value is 5, which points to P_JuhaniH. If you wanted to switch it to a Twi'lek you could use values of 61 (twilek_f), 63 (twilek_f02), or 65 (twilek_f03). You'd probably also want to replace her portrait, po_pjuhani.

[DiscountWanderer 0]

13 minutes ago, DarthParametric said:

You'd need to edit the normalhead reference in her appearance.2da row. The number is the row ID in heads.2da. Her default value is 5, which points to P_JuhaniH. If you wanted to switch it to a Twi'lek you could use values of 61 (twilek_f), 63 (twilek_f02), or 65 (twilek_f03). You'd probably also want to replace her portrait, po_pjuhani.

Thanks for the fast reply. 

 

I've played around with .2da files, so I'm familiar with how to edit them. I'll go give it a shot. A question though, once I've edited it.. do I need to inject it back to the KOTOR files somehow? Or merely save it in the override folder? 

 

[DarthParametric 3,777]

Edited 2DAs go in the Override folder. If you have mods installed you may have a copy of appearance.2da in there already, in which case you should edit that one.