Getting a Head

When starting to work with the NWN2 toolset for the Farlong and Away campaign I quickly found that one of my party members - Duncan Farlong - could not be used with his standard model. In the NWN2 Original Campaign he only appears in an apron and I quickly found that his body could not be used for my purposes, primarily because it was not designed to wear any clothing.  So what I needed to be able to do was to relocate his head onto a suitable half-elf body.  I had no idea what this would require and so I asked the community for help in a forum post on Neverwintervault.org. Fortunately a community member was able to provide instructions and another community member had previously released a free tool that I was able to use to alter the Duncan model successfully.

Duncan Farlong

In case this can be useful to others here are the instructions I followed.

My thanks to Neverwinter.org members Sabranic, cuiilv, and rjshae.

Required: rjshae's Java MDBConfig tool v1.9 available freely both on Neverwintervault.org and on Nexusmods.

Instructions from cuiilv: (I chose to use 114 instead of 101 suggested in the instructions below)

Copy the N_Duncan_Head01.mdb from your Program/Atari/Neverwinter Nights 2/Data/NWN2_Models/NWN2_Models folder to your override folder.

Open the copied file with MDBConfig and change packet names:

N_Duncan_Eye01 to P_EHM_Eye101

N_Duncan_Head01 to P_EHM_Head101

and do the same with the _L01/2 packets.

Save the file as P_EHM_Head101.

Copy N_Duncan_skel01.gr2 from Program/Atari/Neverwinter Nights 2/Data/lod-merged/lod-merged to your override and rename it to P_EHM_skel101.gr2

Open the toolset and Duncan's head should be available as number 101 for half-elf males.

cuiilv suggests that this could also be accomplished by altering the appearance.2da file but I prefer to avoid modifying standard 2da files if possible since community content often overrides them.

A test of Duncan and Daeghun and friend Flinn dressed for adventuring

With the two modified files in the campaign folder Duncan appears correctly in both the toolset and when placed in a game area.