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

All this work, just to give us options we should have had at launch, and have had in previous games... But if Bioware won't do it, someone has to! Great job! Too bad I'm not on PC and can't make use of this

Funnily, for males, it's also the Normal from preset 1 (Shane) that is the smoothest. It's like they forgot to patch the other eight or something.... I wish I used preset 1 on female preset 3, but I used 6, which looks nice, but seem to generate a bit of shading, making the face appear a bit dirty.

Does anyone know if the MEAEditor is compatible with Patch 1.06 or is there an updated version coming?

Thanks!

Nature of the tools, unfortunately  

Hm. I actually got it to work fine. Just had to re-install everything from scratch.

I used the Recovery Tool and then restored the .DLL file that came with MEA Explorer back to the original (you could probably just delete it and hit 'repair' in Origin too). Then I updated the game, and replaced the .DLL file again. Re-exported my textures and imported the ones I wanted to use. Game started up just fine and I was able to make a new modded Ryder. Even re-installed the pale skin mod and the underarmor-as-casual-outfit mod. Everything works! Though again, I did start a new game... I don't know if that matters.

I've updated the first post with the process for patching, so hopefully it works for folks. I am hoping to try it again tonight, hopefully retuning my main to his glorious handsome state. Of course I love him for his good heart, and no shadow under eyebrow can change that, but, you know....

I deserve zero credit, tbh. fialka and @kitsume did all the explaining and the work, and the formidable folks made the tools to gently break into Frostbyte games(wavebend, I think ) I am a relentlessly enthusiastic spammer who wants peeps to try it out because I love what happens when I do it in my game.

My personal big thanks for pointing to that files! For a long time I was straggling with Jayde diffuse map - on any preset for me it gave effect of double brows. The only way I could remove it is by first using mod for changing presets. Turns out, hmf_head_xxxx_mask.res was responsible for that nasty imperfection - now I can modify anything without need of extra mod install! Thank you!

So you know how I was all 'everything works!' with the patch? Yeah... funny thing, that. Today I went to load my save from yesterday, and guess who got a freeze on load? Not sure why it worked yesterday but not today, but, I did find a fix!

After some trial and error I figured out that it was the texture replacements responsible (mods like the paler skin mod work, you just have to re-install them, and make sure you don't save over your modded game until you re-install, or it'll revert your character back to the default palest tone and there's no fix). I did some digging and realized that they apparently updated the preset textures in the new patch. Hence the freeze - remember the crashes we got when we tried swapping textures in different locations? That's what's happening here. So instead of swapping textures in the old location, you have to go to:

Patch > Win32 > characters_sp.toc > win32/dev/characters/player/bundles/sp/blueprintbundle_pathfinder_female_customized (or male_customized)

(Before we went to Data not Patch. The rest of the directory is the same.)

You'll have to export the textures like before, and re-import them, but within this new location. The one thing that's different is that Jayde's (default Sara) textures are no longer under "Jayde." They're under "Universal." I notice there's a "Universal" option under the male heads too. I wonder if this is default Scott, which means we can mod with it now?

Does this only work for Sara? I ask because I see nothing about Scott. I saw what I thought was a screenshot of default Scott but with a thicker beard. Didn't know if anything like that was responsible for it.

You can definitely mod Scott, but I know when we last tried the one preset we couldn't work with was default Scott's because he's in a separate directory (where default Sara is in the same place as the other female presets). Post-patch that may have changed - but even then we wouldn't be able to add a thicker beard to default Scott. We'd only be able to take his stubble away completely or add his face texture (stubble included) to a different preset. Don't have time now to test that myself.

Definetely no, because pre-patch texture files, all of them, crash the game.

 fialka thanks for the tip. I will try carefully exporting, and if it crashes the game, will try modifying files in the patch folder.