How To: Borrow Better Skin and Brow for Your Younger Ryder

Thanks for putting this together! I thought about starting a thread like this but was lazy...
I have the day off today so I'll play around with this a bit more and put up some more example shots! See what I can do with some of the less popular presets in particular.

So here's some comparison pics. I posted this female character in the other forum, but I wanted to show off what a difference these texture swaps can make. Also wanted to see for myself what a couple different complexions would look like on the same character. This is my edit of preset 8, who I always liked but thought her skin made her look a bit drab. Exact same face, all makeup removed, with the lightest skin tone available in the vanilla game.

In the far left column is the unmodded default. She's cute, but her skin's a bit blotchy. It can even look dirty, or like she has a bit of five o'clock shadow in certain lighting conditions. The middle column uses preset 5's (Mariah) diffuse texture, and the normal map from preset 1 (Amy). The far right column is using the default Sara skin (Jayde) for the diffuse, and preset 5 (Mariah) for the normal map:
(EDIT: originally had my 'left' and 'right' mixed up.... whoops!)

The first thing you'll notice is it makes her skin a shade lighter. Obviously if you're super attached to the original shade, you can just tick that skin tone slider one to the right. Also, thanks to the normal map, her eye bags and the puffiness around her mouth are reduced a a bit. Otherwise the difference between the two I chose to change them to are pretty negligible. Preset 5's seems a bit more flawless with smaller pores, but the eye bags are a bit more apparent than Preset 1's. As for the diffuse, I like 5's freckles and eyebrows, but default Sara has really pretty lips and some nice looking built in eye makeup. So I'd go for Default Sara for a more glam look, and Preset 5 for something more fresh-faced and natural.

Anyway, here's more shots of the same girl from the middle column, but with darker skin and a bit of makeup:

Ok, so i posted this issue in the 'share your Ryders thread. I have tried this swap twice and my game wont start still, not even the recovery tool could fix it and I had to do another repair.

Has anyone else had this issue? I am baffled as I followed all the steps above, twice, abd it wont work....its not a dealbreaker but it would be a shame if i couldnt use simple mods like this.

Aha, i think i have found he issue, I didnt see any info about copying 2 files in the explorer install...let me do that and try again

A couple of takes on Female Preset 7 (cleaned up by application of preset 6 and eyebrows from the same Preset 6), cc and in-game



Male preset "Jonathan" again, just a bit more customization done to the face, but the same clean-up as before (Shane's skin, of course....). This one CC only, it's Scott to the previous Sara.

So this post is the result of a conversation between Amirit , @carefull , and myself. They were discussing what it is we're doing exactly with all this texture swapping business and why it works - something I took for granted when I posted my tutorial. Forgetting that once upon a time I was new to modding too - and wanted to know not just that it worked, but how. Anyway, I chimed in with this write-up here, and was encouraged to share it.

Now, you really don't need to know or understand any of this to be able to mod MEA. This is just for people who are totally new to modding, or totally unfamiliar with how game modelling works, and want to know, "but why!?" So, here goes:

About 3D modeling:
There's three aspects we care about in this case. There's more to it, but here's the stuff that's actually relevant to what we're doing:

1. The mesh
The actual 3D model that we start with. The "shape" of the head preset you want to use. Think of it as the unpainted clay sculpture of a head.

When I refer to a 'texture' I mean a 2D image that's applied to the mesh to make it look like what we see in the game. There's two different textures we care about here - the normal map and the diffuse map.

2. The normal map
A normal map affects how light hits the mesh. The actual 'texture' of the skin in the real life sense - the wrinkles, pores, eye bags. Is it rough or is it smooth? Oily or matte? If we went back to our clay head with a toothpick and tiny chisel and sandpaper to really fine tune it, that's what the normal map is able to mimic. I'm not going to go into how it does this, as I frankly don't know either.   Computer magic!

(The problem with the default Sara skin mod people are having, where her face looks bumpy - it's the normal map that's doing that, which is why I recommend using Preset 1 or 5's normal maps instead for that smooth look you see in my screens.)

Technical note, if you're curious: You could add these details to the "mesh," (use that toothpick to make every individual pore) and have a super detailed model. But it would be incredibly unoptimized. The file size would be huge, and if they did that with every mesh in the game you'd need a crazy good computer to run it. The normal map is an efficient 'cheat' of sorts that visually mimics the play of light and shadow over the form. Plus, by applying different normal maps you can make the same mesh look like it's made of different materials: You can make a simple cube look like it's made of wood or polished stone or even fur with different 2D normal maps. Or make the same head mesh look young, old, pockmarked, and so on.

3. The diffuse map.
The actual skin and facial features you're seeing. If you took the skin off your face, laid it out flat, and took a picture (such a gory description, sorry!). This determines what you see for moles, eyebrows, lips, freckles, makeup if it's there, all that stuff. If we took our clay head sculpture and painted a realistic face and scalp on it.

EDIT: Bonus: The specular map.
Okay, so I know I said there's only three factors we care about, but there is a fourth, if you really want to fine tune things. A specular map is a texture that affects how glossy or shiny the model looks. Whether the skin is matte, dry, dewy, oily, wet. I realize I also said the normal map determines this... and it can, also. Think of this way: the normal map affects how the light hits the model. The specular map determines how much. In the post just below mine, Kitsumi demonstrates this at work.
(The specular map for default Sara ("Jayde"), for example, can be found here: ROOT > game > characters > human > hmf > 0_heads > textures > head_jayde_mask_res.)

So, what is it we're doing exactly in MEA Explorer to change how these presets look?
The game knows that the mesh for a particular object uses the texture in a specific place. What we're doing is replacing that texture with a different one. We're extracting the diffuse map used by "Jayde" (better known as our default Sara). That's what the file we export called "diffuse_mean.res.bin" is. Then we're overwriting the diffuse map used by "Cora" (preset 9) with that one. That's what happens when we import that texture we save into our chosen preset. It literally overwrites the existing texture. (Which is why you want the MEA Recovery Tool to restore your files if you mess up!)

It does seem like you can only change a texture for a particular preset once. In my experiments, trying to swap the texture again, or even changing it back to the original, doesn't seem to work. In my case, not at all. Amirit ended up with double eyebrows because the textures layered on top of each other. So definitely make use of that MEA Recovery Tool! I cannot stress this enough! It brings all those files you replaced back to the default state. And you won't have to worry about messing up because it takes just a second to fix it!

Also, it does look like for now we're limited to swapping textures within the same directory. When you look at the file structure in MEA Explorer, just think of it as folders within folders like on your computer. We're limited to using textures from within the same folder, at least for now. Whether this is a game engine issue or if MEA Explorer can't handle replacements across different .TOC files, I couldn't say. (A .TOC is something like a .ZIP or .RAR file bundle used by some games - Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout use .BSA instead, which you might be familiar with if you've ever modded them.)

As for the file names, each of the female presets uses the same naming conventions. Normal_mean.res for the normal map, and diffuse_mean.res for the diffuse map. Which get exported as normal_mean.res.bin and diffuse_mean.res.bin, respectively. The exception being Preset 9 ("Cora"), whose maps are called norm_mean.res and diff_mean.res for whatever reason. So they get exported as norm_mean.res.bin and diff_mean.res.bin instead. They still work just fine, though I could see how it made my tutorial confusing!

Awesome! Thank you so much for extra information.

I will add those write-ups tomorrow into the first post so it does not get lost in the comments.

Does anyone know how to overwrite one of the male hairstyles with one of the female ones? I would not mind letting go of a couple existing less than stellar ones in favour of the messy hair so popular on females, or the short pony tail. though, perhaps, that incoming patch rumours are worth waiting on before going too far into editing. Not sure, but I guess when the patch comes, I will be restoring the clean install anyways to patch.

I am really curious what they actually would do, and if it's just on defaults, or we'll get more front end functionality.

Oh, nice find! I hadn't actually thought to try replacing specular maps, as I didn't really have an issue with the shine, personally (unlike Dragon Age Inquisition, where so many of the characters looked like they hadn't washed their faces in a week...) Still, the more we can customize, the better! I'll go ahead and add a note on specular maps in my guide.
Yeah, I'm definitely curious what the CC improvements will actually be. Access to hairstyles regardless of gender, and to ones used by NPCs not included in the CC, would definitely help. Along with complexion sliders so we wouldn't have to go through all this trouble - though it's possible we'll still end up wanting complexions they don't include, so it's good we know how to swap them! Really, if they just added those two things the CC would be 100% improved already and I'd be more or less satisfied with it. More sliders (to make the eyes bigger or smaller, and change the under/overbite specifically) would be icing.

As for swapping out hairstyles - I think the issue would be whether all those hair models are in the same directory or not... I believe it was Kitsumi who attempted to replace one of Ryder's casual outfits with ones worn by NPCs and it crashed the game (though using Ryder's underarmor works fine), much like our attempts to use textures from squadmate Cora and default Scott did. Not sure if meshes work differently or if it's the same issue at work where the files were in different locations? Also, it would likely change all the NPCs that use that hairstyle... but, I'm of the opinion that my character's looks are more important than some NPC's (unless I'm romancing them, of course  ) so whatever. But I'll poke around in MEA Explorer and see what I can find.

The hair maybe it will work for custom presets because the files are located in same .toc but the difficult part is to localize the exact .ebx file to swap models with hex editing for each hair, there are a lot of .ebx files for them, so it's something like trial and error but a really hard one. I have to test it further but it will be a pain with that bunch of files .

It's a simple hex editing to make it work, I'll tell you all the steps anyway just in case:

*Always backup your files first, that's the most important step if something goes wrong.
- Load into VFS the file Data\Win32\globals.toc -> win32/game/mastersharedbundle

- Then navigate to VFS/ROOT/game/items/gear/arms

- Now you need to extract two files gear_arms_angara_01.ebx and gear_arms_angara_05.ebx
*gear_arms_angara_01.ebx is for reference and gear_arms_angara_05.ebx for editing

- Open your files in a hex editor like HxD, now is the time for editing some lines. You have to copy lines 00000040 and 00000050 from gear_arms_angara_01.ebx.bin in gear_arms_angara_05.ebx.bin to summarize.

Here are some pics for better understanding:

- Last step, import back your edited gear_arms_angara_05.ebx.bin in gear_arms_angara_05.ebx.

And that's all I hope it helps. You will notice that the "preview" model for the arms remains as model 5 but it's the angara model 1 in your Ryder . With this method I can get rid of that annoying "antena" from Maverick chest which is my favorite armor, yeees .

I'm not such a pro hex editor myself but these lines are basically to say the file which appearance model to use, how I locate them? I use this method without making things complicated for myself with flipped ids, in the MEAExplorerWV on Text View tab with the file selected there are some ids so with last part from EbxFileGuid you can locate that id in the hex editor quickly, those two lines under that id are always the appearance model in question.

This only works with armors and casual outfits, for me all this is basically trial and error with a lot of testing. Hopefully we will get the tool updated eventually and make things easier .

Yeah, forget that guide because it's a bit confusing and follow the steps that I wrote in this thread only.
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Uh, I think I've broken something testing with the hair hahahaha, that's weird .
Well now I know that some hair have separated meshes in different .ebx files, in this case default Sara's hair.

Edit: added hair test commentary.