About this mod
This mod aims to give female halflings more proportional necks. Doubles as modders' resource.
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
It sculpts the female halfling necks into more proportional shapes, helping to reduce the bobblehead effect. It's genuinely awesome that Larian gave all the short races a unique look and proportions! But the vanilla neck shapes look like upside down cones with the necks solidly expanding towards the head, and some even have excess bumps in the back where the neck and body connect, with this mod that's all fairly evened out.
I tried my best to maintain the vanilla looks and to match the neck shapes to the heads they support, i.e. maintaining thicker necks on bigger heads. I also had to balance between smoothing out the neck near the body connection, and paradoxically creating a seam if I made the neck connect too smoothly. I may eventually add optional vanilla friendly textures to help make necks look even more natural, as some of the excess wrinkles got a little squiggly, but currently it's not a priority.
This mod also doubles as modders' resource. Halflings haven't gotten any custom heads until I made one, and I suspect at least in part it's because of the terrible neck shape that's hard to work with. That is, in Blender the neck looks fairly normal, but in the game something happens to it and stretches wide at the top. If you open up the models for editing, you'll see I effectively had to punch the necks in to get them into a proportional shape. So now that I did that work for the default heads, feel free to use these as a baseline for sculpting new custom heads (with appropriate crediting of course)!
If you'd like custom heads for halflings, I already have both some masc and fem heads over at SAFT and may add more in the future! You may also want to check out the Fresh Buns body mod I made for masc halflings!
Compatibility
Loose mesh replacements will conflict with any other mods that edit the same models.
Known issues
"We've detected a data mismatch, which may be caused by unsupported mods, corrupt files, or unknown data. This could cause crashes or issues running the game. Please see our support page for more information."
If you see the message above in your launcher, don't worry! It's a default warning with mods. Assuming the mod is not out of date, it should be as safe to use as any other mod.
Installation
Install the loose models by extracting the Generated folder to your installation location's Data folder. Default installation locations as an example:
Steam: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Baldurs Gate 3
GOG: C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG Galaxy\Games\Baldurs Gate 3
Additional comments
For anyone looking to make their own mods, I used lslib to unpack the game files, and the multitool to pack it for universal mod manager use. You'll find thorough guides on how to create your own mods on the BG3 Wiki's Modding Resources page, highly recommend it!
Special thanks to the number of super helpful people on Down By The River Discord! Additionally, huge shoutout to Padme4000, a pillar of the modding community with so many tutorials and templates to help beginners get started!
Addons and tutorials I recommend if you're interested in looking to make your own custom heads:
Padme's BG3 Tutorials and Modding Resources
Padme's Blender Addons
BG3 Armature Tools for Blender
Norbyte's GR2 Import/Export Plugin
LaughingLeader's Blender Helpers
YouTube: Setting Up a BG3 Head in Blender
YouTube: BG3 Editing Heads (also generally recommend Padme's channel)
Discord (Down By The River): Labotor's guide on how to use Armature Tools