Bobblehead Begone - Halfling Neck Reduction

Patch #7 compatible

What does this mod do?

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 Assuming the mod is not out of date, it should be as safe to use as any other mod.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