PSA: Dragon Age Toolset Wiki (and downloads)

Hi TSM!

Is there anyplace Werriks blog is archived? That was the best tutorial

Edit:
I found it archived here:

fextralife.com/forums/t264474/custom-player-items-in-single-player/

Hi TSM,

I'm trying to get back to my modding, but this BSN going down is messed up. There were so many good resources there. I also had my Cullen morph for DA2 uploaded there, but not Nexus, so I lost that. I don't remember how I did it, because DA2 was complicated. I think I might have lost all of my old mrh's too

You seem to have kept busy with the modding!

I found my MRHs too!

The ItemVariation spreadsheet that Valerie1972 (and to a small extent, I) put together? The downloadable version is here, and the GoogleDocs version (which is probably more current) is here.

I'm the worst person in the world to try to answer this (because I'm incredibly stupid and anything to do with 3D modeling is way beyond my ken) but some general info:

Playable humanoid character models are separated into head, torso, hands/gloves, and feet/boots; with the exception of unibody clothing models and the less said about THAT the better because I hate those things.

Companions and the player character use the same meshes as NPCs. (As in, there's no 'Female Cousland' model, 'Alistair' model, or 'Morrigan' model... they use the same human male and female models as other adult human characters.)

Base game model files can be found in <game install location>\Dragon Age\packages\core\data, in the following archives, and can be extracted with a GFF editor:

MSH files - > modelmeshdata.erf
MAO files - > materialobjects.erf
MMH and PHY files -> modelhierarchies.erf

I'm not sure if it is still available (RIP, BSN projects), but there is a utility called DATool which offers visual browsing through individual base game models; it can also extract the model and textures for a model with one click.

And you will probably get more (and better) responses by starting a dedicated thread, rather than nested under another topic... anyone who not interested in locating the toolset or wiki probably won't see your query.

Hmmm... When I've used DATool, it could browse/extract just about all the vanilla models, including props and statics. Wonder why yours is different?

There is some modder activity on the Nexus forums, though not much... losing the BSN forums really was a blow to the modding community.

That's what mine looks like, too... does the option to view the other models for each subset not work? (View -> Next model, or CTRL+Right Arrow?)

Urgh. My interface is different... I don't have a 'Save As' but there's a drop-down option of 'Save All', which exports the relevant files for the model being viewed:


And if by 'the heads come to pieces', you mean that the eyes are separate from the base heads, which have no hair/back-back-of-the-head... that's because each of those things are a separate mesh.

For items, the UTI doesn't contain the model information, it's just data strings, one of which is a pointer to the model... and the model is actually defined in the applicable GDA. Learning how all the files fit together is absolutely key to understanding how to modify anything.

You can extract all the needed files from the ERFs, it's just a bit of a task to figure out which files go to which items.

I do apologize for not being more helpful... I'm not a 'real modder', I'm just a tinkerer who pokes at files, pulls things apart, and then cobbles something together that hopefully doesn't break something else.