Easiest method of changing NPC appearance?

Nildar

Basically I want to use a custom portrait for Rasaad in which he has black hair, instead of the skin colored hair he normally has.

I was wondering what the easiest way is to change the appearance of NPCs. I have tried out EEKeeper and it does work, but I don't want to screw up my game for such a small change (I don't know exactly how EEKeeper functions, does it only overwrite the aspects you change, or does it overwrite all data?).

To me it would seem that the easiest method would be if somehow the "appearance tab" would be unlocked under the customize tab, like it is for charname. That way you could also change some of the questionable skin/hair colors that NPCs have. I couldn't find a mod like this though. Does this exist?

I guess a simple replacement mod in the override folder would work too. I am really no modding expert though, so I don't know if that is easy to do or even possible (for me) .

Hopefully one of you smart modding people can point me in the best direction!

Thels

If you know the names of the portrait he uses (I'm guessing RASAADL, RASAADM and RASAADS), then all you need to do, is name your new portraits that, and place them in your Documents\BGEE\portraits folder. (You can just make one 330x210 BMP file, and copy it to all 3 names. The game will properly resize them.)

Since they're in your documents folder and not the actual game folder, this change even survives patches and complete reinstalls. And if you want to undo it, just move/rename/delete them.

Only downside is that this portrait will then appear 4 times in the list of portraits when creating a new character.

Nildar

Thanks for answering! After reading your reply I realized that I wasn't very clear in my original post. Sorry about that. I actually meat the "colors" tab and not the "appearance" tab. I already changed the pictures, I just wanted to match the in-game hair color to those pictures.

I.E. Rasaad is normally bald and his hair color is "skin color pink" so it resembles a bald head. Now my new picture has black hair, so I wanted to change the in-game hair color from "skin color pink" to black so it actually matches the portrait/pictures I use.

After some additional research it seems the easiest method to do that is with EEKeeper though, and I am guessing/hoping if I just change the hair color nothing else will get broken. If someone else has a more permanent solution I am all ears though .

ineth

Yes, EEKeeper is the way to go.

Don't worry about using it - it is very stable and reliable. I've used it a lot (on both BG2:EE and IWD:EE) and it has never broken anything.