Ridiculously Basic Question

[Guest]

This is a ridiculously basic question from someone with no modding experience. The closest thing I found in the tutorial section was JC's ripping heads tutorial, but what I want should be far simpler than that. If this has been explained elsewhere, feel free to redirect me to the post. I'm fully expecting you all to eat me alive here.

So I recently read in a mod description that by renaming the mod's clothing texture/skin (.tga) and then placing it in the Override folder, it will automatically replace the clothing texture that shares that name, regardless of the purpose the texture was made for. Does that mean you could make a copy of any existing vanilla .tga and rename it to replace any clothing texture?

Say for example you want Juhani to make her entrance in her underwear to make her appear more liberated. Or say you want to replace Bastila's default underwear permanently with the slave outfit. Would you simply have to make a copy of the slave .tga and then rename it to the default underwear and just dump it in Override? How would you go about pinpointing the file you want and the file you want to replace?

Does this work with any character that's not poorly rendered or that isn't an alien? Will the head stay the same, or does it have to be a texture for the same character?

 

I've never screwed with files that much, so I wouldn't know what I'm doing without asking first. I just need confirmation that this is doable by myself without any modding tools. It's something I've always been interested in so I'm eager to hear your answers.

 

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the kotor modders out there, from the head honchos to the one-hit wonders. I've been collecting your work for years and never really bothered to thank you. Now that I have an account, I'll be throwing 5 stars around and about.

Edited May 30, 2020 by Guest

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Textures aren't universal. You can't just rename a random texture and have it magically work with a different model.

For the most part what you talking about in broad terms is done via an appearance.2da edit. That defines the models and textures for each given body type - underwear, clothes, armours, robes. If you want Bastila to wear her slave outfit (or alternative versions), there are already a bunch of existing mods for that (unsurprisingly).

Aliens are primarily full body models - i.e. they don't have separate heads. So they are limited to some simple palette swaps unless you plan on making custom models.

As to doing it yourself, yes, it's doable once you learn the robes. But not without tools. Like I said, it's not magic. Some simple filename changing is not going to achieve much (besides a mess).

[Guest]

1 hour ago, DarthParametric said:

Textures aren't universal. You can't just rename a random texture and have it magically work with a different model.

For the most part what you talking about in broad terms is done via an appearance.2da edit. That defines the models and textures for each given body type - underwear, clothes, armours, robes. If you want Bastila to wear her slave outfit (or alternative versions), there are already a bunch of existing mods for that (unsurprisingly).

Aliens are primarily full body models - i.e. they don't have separate heads. So they are limited to some simple palette swaps unless you plan on making custom models.

As to doing it yourself, yes, it's doable once you learn the robes. But not without tools. Like I said, it's not magic. Some simple filename changing is not going to achieve much (besides a mess).

Hey, thanks for the quick reply.

There are a bunch of mods that make Bastila lewd, but I can't find one that does just that. Same with Juhani. I'm only interested in using textures already present in the game files.

So then renaming only works when working with textures that use the same body model? Would that shortcut work in Bastila's case at least, since both her underwear and the slave outfit seem to be textures for the same model?

 

I'm looking at this post,

that explains how to modify appearance.2da using Kotor Tool, but I'm not sure what to look for. Am I supposed to edit a specific set of values? Is there an option to import the body model I want in order to replace the one that the .2da file uses for that character?

If the process is too complicated to explain here, a link where it is explained would be perfect. Or, at least, something to point me in the right direction.

Edited May 30, 2020 by Guest

[DarthParametric 3,782]

This one adds it as a disguise, which is not the most ideal approach: https://www.gamefront.com/games/knights-of-the-old-republic/file/keep-bastila-s-slave-outfit

If you want something simpler, Kex's tutorial breaks down what each column of appearance.2da does. What you want to do is edit Bastila's row (label "Party_NPC_Bastila") and replace one of the existing body columns with the slave outfit. If you wanted to make the slave outfit appear for her underwear, for example, then all you would need to do is edit the texture, since the slave outfit shares the same body model. The underwear appearance is body A, so you'd just need to edit the "texa" column which is the texture and change that to "P_BastilaBAS". If you wanted instead to change her clothing appearance, then you'd need to change both the model and the texture. Clothing is body B, so you'd change the "modelb" column to "P_BastilaBA" and the "texb" column to "P_BastilaBAS", same as before. You could do the same for any or all of the other body appearances as takes your fancy. C to H are armours, I is Jedi robes, J is Revan/Star Forge robes.

[Guest]

On 5/30/2020 at 3:55 PM, DarthParametric said:

This one adds it as a disguise, which is not the most ideal approach: https://www.gamefront.com/games/knights-of-the-old-republic/file/keep-bastila-s-slave-outfit

If you want something simpler, Kex's tutorial breaks down what each column of appearance.2da does. What you want to do is edit Bastila's row (label "Party_NPC_Bastila") and replace one of the existing body columns with the slave outfit. If you wanted to make the slave outfit appear for her underwear, for example, then all you would need to do is edit the texture, since the slave outfit shares the same body model. The underwear appearance is body A, so you'd just need to edit the "texa" column which is the texture and change that to "P_BastilaBAS". If you wanted instead to change her clothing appearance, then you'd need to change both the model and the texture. Clothing is body B, so you'd change the "modelb" column to "P_BastilaBA" and the "texb" column to "P_BastilaBAS", same as before. You could do the same for any or all of the other body appearances as takes your fancy. C to H are armours, I is Jedi robes, J is Revan/Star Forge robes.

Perfect. Everything's much clearer now. Thank you for taking the time to give me a hand with this.

EDIT: Just making a quick edit after a couple weeks of using KTool to point out that Juhani's appearance can be easily modified through her .utc under RIMs - Modules by removing her clothing from her inventory. This should be done before entering the module/area she's at, however, or just reverting to a previous save.

[Guest]

On 5/30/2020 at 3:55 PM, DarthParametric said:

You could do the same for any or all of the other body appearances as takes your fancy.

I noticed though that when using a male model with a female head, like Revan's robes (PMBJS), the head ends up turning rapidly to the sides during the running animation, instead of looking forward. Any idea of what could be causing this and how to fix it?

[JCarter426 1,214]

Male and female animations are different, and animations are applied separately to the head and body. So you have male animations on the body and female animations on the head.

You can fix it by hex editing the body model and replace S_Female02 with S_Female03.

Or you could hex edit your head the other way, but then you'd have the problem with all your other outfits.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, JCarter426 said:

You can fix it by hex editing the body model and replace S_Female02 with S_Female03.

I'm a bit at a loss here. What program/tool am I supposed to use for hex editing?

[Effix 532]

I use HxD, but I'm sure anything else will do.
https://mh-nexus.de/en/

[JCarter426 1,214]

I use XVI32 myself.

[Guest]

Well, that's a headache of its own, I guess. I'll try to figure it out when I have the time.

How about assigning to an NPC a different appearance label? For example, two characters that are pretty much in the same place and use the same appearance/face (you see this a lot in Taris) and changing the appearance of one in the 2da editor also affects the other. How would you go about changing that? This would also allow me to fix the mislabeling of Gana Lavin at the ambush spot on my own.

 

Anyway, thank you all for the responses. I'm learning little by little so thanks for bearing with me.

 

EDIT: Just making a quick edit to point out these changes are done using Kotor Tool through the character's .utc under RIMs - Modules.