Mesh Modding ME3 blog - Getorex

I started out about 6 months ago tentatively trying my hand at mesh modding ME3. I was only passingly acquainted with Blender and not at all with 3ds Max. I picked up Blender fairly quickly and hoped to take it from there and get my mesh mods into the game once WarrantyVoider perfected his outstanding modding tool, ME3explorer. He was trying to reverse engineer the meshes so people could import psk models into the game. After months of struggle he found another way...upk format created by the UDK. Export a psk from 3ds or Blender, import that into UDK, save it as a upk. Fixed...except that Blender is useless for this work it turns out. It cannot export proper psk, fbx, or any other format that can interchange with 3ds or UDK. It borks weights and/or it borks normals or the skeleton. I was forced to learn 3ds Max.

I only passingly know 3ds Max at this point but have gotten far enough along that I can, and have, modded a number of skeletal meshes from ME3 and produced working mesh mods for the game. I use all my mods in my own game. I started out at the Bioware forums but have now expanded my work to DeviantArt and, now, to here. I hope ya'll find my mods useful and enjoyable.

My intention was to correct what I saw as flaws in the basic structures of characters in ME3 (mainly female characters). It seems that the creators at Bioware were not aware of the details of human anatomy and skeletal structure so that the women of ME3 had (to me) a jarringly bad posture AND they seemed to have focused on the young fanboy crowd by making all the women big boobed and big butted. No. Unacceptable. So I set about correcting this and started with my favorite female character in the game: Ashley. I reduced her butt, hips and breasts with the intent of making her more athletic in appearance (and more in tune with her original ME1 form). I then moved on and have done mesh mods on nearly all the main female characters, including in the DLCs.

I am currently putting the finishing touches on my most difficult mod of all so far: Tali with a working full face mod. Her character mesh has a half face that terminates at the upper lip and is oddly formed (by human standards). I decided to give her a FULL face that was human-like attractive to go with the possibility of players romancing her (sorry, nobody is going to romance some "woman" that has the appearance of a spider or freaky VERY alien). I deleted her default half face, pulled a generic female human face out of the game, edited it to make it unique for Tali, then stuck it onto her default body mesh. From there much cursing and screaming ensued as it is actually quite difficult to properly meld a fully animation-capable face onto her. I had to enlarge her face mask a bit (no room for a normal chin in there) and move her visor forward a bit so her nose didn't poke through the glass. Then I had to properly weight the face for the bones. GAH! I'm a newbie and this HURT.

Happily, I finally succeeded in getting a fully working Tali with a face mod into the game. She blinks, her eyes move around, and her mouth moves (not that you can fully see this behind the mask/breather). As soon as I finish her I will be moving to my next hardest mod I've attempted: blending Eva and EDI's head together so that EDI has her face (from the drop-dead gorgeous Tricia Helfer) but Eva's hair and ears. I started that one before Tali and thought THAT was hard but now that I've pulled off Tali...perhaps there will be less pain and less rending of clothes, certainly more muffled cussing.

Finally, I decided the other day to go ahead and try to mod a part of the Normandy interior. Another thing that bugged me in-game was Ashley sitting there in that star observation lounge, using it as her room but...WHERE'S THE BED? I'm going to give her a bed. No one should have to sleep on the hard floor or some uncomfortable "couch" that looks like it was pulled out of the Indianapolis Airport. Allers has a bed. Liara has a bed. Damnit, Ashley needs a bed so I'm gonna give it to her.