I wanted to dive back into video game modding, and have really enjoyed playing Baldur's Gate 3! I decided I wanted to learn how to mod it and bring the heads of some of my favorite characters into the game. It turned out to be quite a process over a few weeks to figure out how to do so.
Baldur's Gate 3 has a set of heads players can choose from for their characters. I started with a head that most closely was the same proportions as my reference head.
I then selected the vertices on the face that I'd shrinkwrap onto the reference head. I avoided the eyes as they'd easily get messy, and sculpted them to shape after.
The original head and my reference
Shrinkwrapping the face vertices
There was further editing needed on the eye details to fit the new face. I also wanted to have the heads available for four different races: human, half-elf, elf, and tiefling. For this, I had to attached different ears to the models.
A crucial part of the heads working well was I needed to make a custom skeleton so there'd be no weird movements with the face and so the piercings would fit. There were a few fan made tools and tutorials that helped, but I ran into glitches along the way I had to pinpoint and solve with lots of trial and error, until I finally got my custom skeletons working.
Adjusting the skeleton to better fit my new head
A glitch with the skeleton I had to solve
For textures, Baldur's Gate 3 uses a different process than many other games that just use a color, roughness, and normal map. They use RGB and masks for easy tinting across many characters. Because of this though, I couldn't just copy over the character's original textures, I had to recreate them with BG3's textures.
To start, I roughly wrapped the head shape and tested the various skin textures on the head. I then made not of what features I thought would resemble the character.
I was able to test the textures nearly in realtime without closing the game, and I'd copy and paste and stretched various features from different skin textures until I reached the look I was going for. Her eyebrows and freckles I hand painted, and her eyebrow scar was custom made as well.
One of the last steps was to make the heads be a new option in the menu and not just replace an old head. This step was highly confusing to figure out at first and required changing a number of entries and UUID's to point to my new head. Along the way I ran into a lot of glitches and the head wouldn't showing up. But after a few days of problem solving, re-reading tutorials and understanding the different changes needed, I got the heads to properly show up in the menus!
After weeks of testing and trial and error, the heads I made were both finally in game working nicely and ready to share for others to use!
