Gunner's Body Rebuild/Retexture (Male & Female, All Races & Phenos)

This hak replaces the default 001 body parts (except the heads) with new, retextured, higher-poly versions. Both the normal and large phenotypes are covered, and there are parts for humans, elves, half-orcs, halflings, gnomes and yes even dwarves!

I started making this on a whim after playing around with clothing parts and being frustrated by the blockiness of the body around which I was building them. I thought I'd have a go at creating my own as a base around which to build clothing/armour in the future. So, enjoy! Hopefully some of you will find this useful. And if not...well, I had fun making it anyway...

The download options (at least, in this initial version) are as follows:

Main hak – this overrides models and textures of the 001 clothing parts (which are the ones displayed when no clothing/armour is worn) with the ones visible in the screenshots. Place the file in your hak folder, add the hak to whichever module you want to use it in. Simple!

However, if you can't use the hak on your mod/PW, since my models have a different UV map from Bioware's you can't just dump this in your override folder and be done with it – the textures will look all mismatched and ugly. The reason? The plts in the override folder are being overriden by those in the Bioware texture pack. In the 'texturepacks' folder of your NWN directory, there's a file called 'Textures_tpa.erf' which contains body part plts. These textures have a higher priority than those in the override folder, but lower than those in a hak. This means that if my models are in the override folder, Bioware's textures will be applied to them, with alarming consequences. It'll likely cause you to grow large ridges across the front of your torso and sprout nipples between your shoulder blades (well, strictly speaking, your characters will, but still a disclaimer I've never had to make before). To get around this without having to play around with the texture packs, which is not a great idea as it makes changes to the base installation, place the hak version in your NWN Patch folder and add a line to NWNPatch.ini that reads "PatchFile000=BodyRebuild1_0" without quotations. It will then act as an override without having to mess with any .bifs.

Builder base – this is intended for anyone who wants to use these models/textures as a base for their own stuff. It contains a version of the models/textures without the clothing, and a higher resolution set of textures than the ones in the versions intended for use in the game – when editing textures, I prefer to work at a higher resolution and scale down when finished. Not that these ones seemed to cause me any real slowdown when I tested, but guessed it might on slower machines if there's a lot else going on.

Override version – the same files as the main hak, but as individual mdls/plts. The 'override version' is not necessary as using the Patch method described above - before I knew about this I suggested a method that involved playing around with the texture packs, which is more time-consuming and involves making changes to the base installation. I'll leave this up for now though, just in case anyone wants the files in the hak (as opposed to the builder ones, which have larger textures) without having to take the time to extract them.

Due to the way NWN applies textures to clothing, it's not possible to use a different texture for the same body part on different races and phenotypes. This means that the large phenos look like they've got more prominent abdominal muscles than they really should. In a later update I plan to try and resolve this issue either by offering alternative textures, or by using an overlying belt model that acts as a belly. I'm also planning to add more model variations to the hands in the future (open palms and clenched fists) – the reason they are the shape you see in the screenshots is to allow weapons and other objects to be held with minimal clipping.

Although the body parts themselves are significantly higher-poly than Bioware's models (which is kind of the main purpose of this hak), the shadows are not. This is an attempt to minimise any performance impact from having higher-poly models, as I have read shadowcasting in NWN is quite CPU intense.

Another point about shadows – the screenshots were taken with lighting turned up to full to allow them to be seen as well as possible. In darker areas, the shadows applied by the engine to the individual body parts will likely make the transition between them more obvious. This is due to how the engine processes the parts, and as far as I'm aware there's not really a lot I can do about it.

The heads in the screenshots are from CEP – they're not part of this download.

Many thanks to all those on the Bioware forum who gave advice/suggestions while I was working on this, and to Symmetric and wwwwolf for Neverblender.

EDIT 11/06/15 - I've added a .zip version of the main hak as somebody was getting issues with their browser trying to open the hak instead of downloading it. I think this might be an Internet Explorer issue. It's exactly the same file, just compressed.

EDIT 15/05/16 - Changed the description as per JediMindTrix's advice regarding use of the Patch folder for overrides. Thanks, JediMindTrix!