Replacing Lubberkin Model

[Szoreny]

I'm interested in replacing the Lubberkin's botchling mesh with the normal baby mesh seen throughout the game, so the kindly guardian spirit of the hearth appears more friendly than the bug-eyed beast we supposedly transformed. So I pulled the baby w2 meshes found in:

 

 

/uncooked/items/cutscenes/baby_01/model

 

 

and went to the botchling's directory here:

 

 

/uncooked/characters/models/monsters/miscreant

 

 

There are two subfolders in the miscreant directory:

 

model, and moph_01

 

 

Both have multiple w2meshes.

 

I was unsure if one was the combat model of the botchling, but I went ahead and deleted all miscreant w2meshes and pasted in the ones form the baby_01 folder, renaming each mesh to match the old miscreant models I deleted. At this point I just wanted to see if I could fool the game into loading the baby model in the lubberkin scenes. I wasn't worrying about any other errors, just wanted to see if I could get closer to result I wanted.

 

So I packed up my cute lubberkin mod and generated the bundles, caches and metadata dropped it into the games mod directory and loaded the summoning scene. No change, regular glowing botchling popped out of the ground.

 

In my naivete I don't know where to start when it comes to making this work, I thought I'd appeal to you guys to see if you think this sort of model swap is even possible. If the game supports editing meshes, it seems like it should support replacing one for another, though even if possible I'm unsure if this model could be changed without messing up the botchling's model for the pre-conversion scenes.

 

There's another file that likely deals with the lubberkin, its in:

 

/uncooked/fx/quest/q103 and is labeled

 

q103_miscreant_ghost.w2mi

 

Now I understand w2mi files have to do with materials, and as its in the fx folder this probably has to do with the glowing effect. But maybe its a clue?

 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Edited August 23, 2015 by Szoreny