Alright, so today we're going to be creating a head mod using the official Baldur's Gate 3 modder's toolkit. First, we'll go to new project and type in a project name, hit create. And now this tutorial does assume that you already have the assets ready to go. If you want to learn how to create the head, skeleton, and textures, I'll have resources linked in the description, but here we're just going to go over how to put these all together into a mod using the toolkit. Now it's going to ask you to load a level, and we are going to load the Character Creator level. Type in CC use the one that ends in I, and hit select. And once the level loads, it should look like this. If it's your first time using the toolkit, you'll need to go to Options -> Preferences -> Global Settings, and scroll down to source asset data path.

and I've got mine set to an assets folder in the data folder of my game. And save and close. So now we'll open the resource manager by clicking the crayon box icon, and here you'll be able to see your mod labeled in blue. It will be the mod name you chose followed by a UUID. And if we click it, we can see that our project is currently empty. So let's go to add resource. Click the little teapot for model, and we're going to change FBX to GR2 and select just the head - do not select the _Base. And once you've named it whatever you'd like to name it, hit OK and import. And then after that, we're going to add resource again, and this time we're going to click skeleton. Select GR2 once again, and this time for some reason it actually sent us into our mod's folder rather than into the path that we chose earlier.

so I'm going to navigate back to that. ASSETS, and I'm going to choose the _Base. It's going to ask us to create a copy because it was trying to pull it from this other location, so we're just going to hit yes, go back into that assets folder that it tried to put us into, and just select. And now we're good. Now if you click on the visual resource, you will see a preview of your head, and so now we're going to put these together. So under the preview of the head, we're going to scroll down to Slot ID, and currently it is unassigned, so we're going to select Head. Then we're going to double-click on the visual resource. Hit skeleton in the tabs, and then select the skeleton that we just added, and hit the arrow. Now we're going to go to animations, and on skeleton slot, we're going to assign it 1.

And without closing the edit visuals, we're going to go to the all folder and type in the name of whatever [head] you originally used to create [your new head]. So I took Head_C, and I edited to create my current head from that. So go to that head, open up the visual resource with the teapot, and go to the animations tab on this one and then select all of that copy and paste. And if you're going to be using the vanilla textures rather than any custom textures, you can go ahead and fill in the materials for the head and the ears now. And you will also want to skip to the next section if you're using a custom texture. Then we'll just hit OK. Now it's going to say hey your head's going to break and just say okay. It's fine. Your head won't break, hopefully. We're going to go to this little orb, which is the material resource for the head that we originally had.

And we're actually going to say create new from selected. And name that whatever you would like. And that's just going to create a copy of the original material that's going to have all of the information that you need: shaders and shared materials and whatnot - things that you're not going to want to figure out, and then we can just edit it from there. So yeah, we're just going to say create new from selected, and now we are going to import our textures. So click add resource once again, textures, and it's going to put us right back into that mod folder so we're going to go back into the assets folder from before and we're just going to select all of those. And OK. It's going to ask us to create a copy, so we're going to do that again. And then when it asks you if the texture is sRGB, you need to make sure you click no on all of these.

if you accidentally end up clicking yes, just delete it and import it again. So, one more time Assets, select, and no. And then we are going to apply these to the material that we just copied. Scroll down to the bottom, and we're going to click the CLEA that we just imported and hit the arrow here. Same with the HMVY, and then with the normal map, you've got to be careful not to choose the wrinkle normal map and to use this normal map right here. And hit OK. And now if this is invisible, you will just need to hit open in editor, and you'll just need to save and close. That's it. The newest update may have fixed it so that this doesn't happen, but historically this is what I've needed to do. So, in case that happens, just know that's how you deal with it. And now we are ready to start applying the materials to the visual resource.

So I'm going to drag this over here because we need to click on the materials, and we're going to apply it to the head and the ears. Now we are going to go back to All, and we're going to right-click this orb, which filters by material. And we're going to type in shared, and we're going to choose invisible material [InvisibleMat] for the scalp. Hit the arrow. Going to hit [Eye] Glass Tearline - that is for the tearline. LashShadow for the eyelashes and the eye shadow. And then for the mouth interior this depends on the race. If you've got a gith or a tiefling you're going to use Mouth_Interior_B, otherwise we're going to use Mouth_Interior_A, and since I've got a dwarf, I'm going to use Mouth_Interior_A. And then for the eyes, we are going to actually type eyes.

So since I've got a dwarf, I'm going to skip past the gith stuff here and go down to Natural_Brown, but keep in mind if you've got another race, you'll want to look into that. And, you know, you can choose whatever you want, to be honest. But keeping it natural. And now you just check and make sure that all of these do not say ENGINE because if it says ENGINE, it means that you have skipped one. So if everything looks okay, hit OK. And then we're going to right-click on material again and X out of that, and go back to our mod. And now we click on the visual resource and make sure that all of our materials have applied properly. This thing can be difficult to manage - the little camera here. But it doesn't look like there are any grids here. Everything looks good, so let's move on. Next part is the UUID Object Editor.

and we're going to go down to the mod, hit the little arrow here, and we're going to go down to Character Creation, hit the plus, and we're looking for CharacterCreationAppearanceVisuals. Now there's another little arrow there, and we double-click that to pull up our CharacterCreationAppearanceVisuals. Now let's right-click and copy the ID to clipboard. Open this back up, and we're going to paste that into the Visual Resource box. That is going to make it so that the entry has a new UUID. Then let's select a display name. I'm using Janani. I will put my initials, I guess, there. And then I'm going to go to the end. I'm going to name it DWR_F_Janani. And that name isn't going to actually show up anywhere - it's just in the file. And then we're going to go to BodyType - I'm not sure what just happened.

We're going to go to BodyType, drop down, female. BodyShape, drop down, standard. And for the RaceUUID, we do not have a drop down, so we're going to go over to Shared, go to Character Creation. Find CharacterCreationAppearanceVisuals. And then I'm going to go to the head that I originally used. You could just go to any head that is of the race that you need, but just to make sure I've got the right thing I'm going to try to find the one I used. So that is Dwarf Head_C, and luckily that highlights the whole row for you. So I'm going to copy the RaceUUID here, paste it here. And then I'm going to go through - SlotName I forgot to fill in, so we're filling in head there. And then I'm going to just take a look at what's filled in here and make sure I've got the same stuff filled in on mine.

The display name for me was Janani. And then I'm just going to copy the default skin color. Now currently, this does not matter because icon generation does not work at the moment; however, there is an icon generation tutorial for when they do get that up and running, and I'm going to copy the skin tone just in case this needs to be used for the future or in case you are watching this in the future. So now we've got all of that filled in, and once you've made sure that all of that is filled in, let's hit save. And the only thing now that we have left that we will need to fill in is IconIdOverride, which is not on the vanilla [heads]. and so for now we're just going to save that and close. and because the Character Creator Icon Generation is not ready yet, I'm not going to go over the icons just yet. First, we're going to check to make sure that the head shows up.

I've hit this little controller icon, and now I'm going to go back to the game tab. And we've got the game pulled up - the Character Creator. We're going to go to race, dwarf - Ope, body 1. Sorry habit [from] the last head I started creating. Edit appearance, and we've got our head here. Now if nothing shows up then don't worry. Try restarting the toolkit. And if it still doesn't show up you can just go over the part that we just did with the CharacterCreationAppearanceVisuals, or you can go back a little further and make sure that you have attached the skeleton and set the animations correctly. So she shows up. Everything's good, everything's fine. And I'm going to create my character real quick. Let's just do that. And then I am going to hit play. Because even if this is a mod that you have already created in the past and that you know works correctly,

there is no guarantee that it has been set up in the toolkit correctly. Even if you know that this base works with this head, you still need to make sure that you have paired the base and the head correctly together and that the animations are set correctly. So I am actually playing through the tutorial in order to see whether or not my character's face moves properly. So once it gets to this part, you just hit the icon again, and the game will actually begin. Now one thing to look for to see whether or not your character's animations are applied correctly is when they make facial expressions, look for wrinkles in the forehead. [awkward silence] When this did not work for me, the thing that really stood out was that when she closed her eyes tightly, her eyes actually popped out of her eyelids, and that's not what you wanna see. So we are just going through and checking that the facial expressions look natural.

I actually play this [the tutorial] all the way to the end to make sure that the chin doesn't start jutting out in odd ways or the eyes don't come out and all sorts of weirdness. So the scene I've been using most recently has been this one with Lae'zel because that is where I ended up seeing the eyeballs popping out of the skull. So, yeah, just test it even if you have a mod with the exact same base, the exact same head, still make sure once you've imported into the toolkit that everything looks correct. So now because the character [icon] generation isn't working at the moment, I am going to show you how to use the texture atlas editor. So you just click on the little atlas of people and go to new. Now my icons are 150 by 150, so I uncheck square icons and check custom. It's going to freak out on you. Just say yes and type 150 by 150, save.

And it will generate a blank atlas for you. Then you just hit add entries. So I'm going to bring in my icon. Now this one is in DDS format. If you use DDS, you need to make sure that it is uncompressed; otherwise, it will show up skewed. And if it shows up skewed, you just know that you either need to use an uncompressed DDS or a PNG. So look at the name - it is Janani_Icon. That matters because that is what we are going to put in the UUID object editor in order to get that to show up. So here we go. Icon ID override. The name was Janani_Icon. Now I'm just going to click off of that, save, and close. I actually have to restart the toolkit in order to test my icon, so I will be right back. Alright, I'm back, and you can see now that the icon is showing up.

And that is that. So I'm going to hit the controller again, and I'm going to go to Project -> Project Settings, and I am going to hit Publish Local. And now I'm just going to save to my computer and make a copy to drop into my Mods folder. After that, I'm going to check the mod manager in-game to make sure it's active, test it out, and then we can publish it officially onto mod.io, and we will have an official Baldur's Gate 3 mod.

Creating a Head Mod using the BG3 Modders Toolkit

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