#replacement head

Player character heads are not as easy to replace as NPC heads, as the warden's appearance is saved as part of the game save files, not as a separate MOR file.

Replacing an existing warden's head with a new one used to be a moderately tricky process that involved copying arcane information from one game save file to another manually. There are now third party tools available that do all the arcane bits for us. For this tutorial, we're going to look at using Siramod's Face Replacer from the Dragon Age Nexus to replace my warden's head.

Our dashing test subject for today is a random mercenary!Alistair Cousland I have floating around on my hard drive.

The first step is to create the replacement head morph I want to use as a replacement. In this case, I'm going to use a head I already have available in the toolset, a clean-up version of Oswyn, Bann Sighard's son.

All I really need to do in this case is load the head, right-click, and "Post to Local", to make the MOR version of it available for me to use in the face replacer tool.

Now, the tool does automatically backup the files when it modifies them, but I like to go into the game beforehand and make a specific named backup save anyway. That way I can very easily revert to it if I'm unhappy with the end results.

After I make the named save, I do a quicksave. It's the quicksave I'll be using the tool to modify. This way my named save is not touched, and reverting to the original head just requires reloading the named save instead of the quicksave.

So I load up the tool:

Then I click on the first "Browse" button. The tool navigates automatically to my characters folder, so all I have to do is click on the right character name, then the quicksave folder, and then select the quicksave file:

After that I click on the second "Browse" button, navigate to my packages/core/override/toolsetexport directory, tell the tool I want to see the *.mor files, and select the one I want to use as a head replacement:

With both files selected, all that remains is to click on the "Import" button at the bottom. The tool automatically takes the head in the second item and swaps it into the save game in the first.

I then exit the face replacer, and reload my quick save. My player character has changed to his new appearance:

Tip: If you've played for a while and then decide you want to revert to the original head, you don't have to revert to the named save and replay; just use the tool with your current place in the game as the save game to be modified, and the named save (or any earlier save) as the source for the replacement head.

Tip: If you like the idea of being able to have your character change their appearance over the course of the game, then the best way to accomplish this is to start by creating your character's head morph in the toolset (which has tons of extra editing options), then export it to the game as a preset (link) which you then use to create your new character. As you play, you can use the toolset to edit your character's MRH file in order to evolve their appearance, and replace the in-game head morph whenever desired.

Note: There is unfortunately no way to go backwards from an in-game MOR file to an in-toolset MRH file. If you want to use the toolset to edit a MRH for a character that you originally created using the in-game character creator, you're going to have to start off by attempting to duplicating their appearance in the toolset.

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.