Inspired by Bob Hall's work in doors, these are painting replacer special effects, to be applied to several of the stock game paintings, which do not require any placeables.2da edits. I've heard some people speak against adding additional paintings, but I think that's because of the bother with 2DA edits and blueprints, which this avoids.
After reviewing all of the paintings included across the three official campaigns, I chose five painting models representing several different aspect ratios (tall, wide, or square), with what I considered to be the best set of UV mapping for ease of editing, without the texture stretching evident in certain paintings such as the one of Sand due to incorrectly scaled planar mapping. Also included is the crooked painting. The selected paintings are 1, 6, 7, 8, and 9.
One disadvantage in using this method as opposed to actually creating copies of the placeable and assigning the textures to the copies, is that the texture swap does not appear in the toolset. It only appears in the game. Once swapped, it is affected normally by light as any other placeable is.
Another disadvantage is that the placeables cannot be converted to environmental objects, or the special effect will be lost. Environmental objects can't have visual effects applied to them. It also cannot be set to static, or the effect will not appear. It should be set to unusable so that it won't highlight or be clickable.
The advantages are mainly ease of making new paintings, ease of application, no redundant model copies, and no need for 2DA edits. All you have to do is drop a single texture file and a single SEF into your module or campaign folder for each painting.
To use, simply apply any of the special effects for a particular painting model to the placeable itself in its Appearance (special effect) field.
For the painting content, I chose mainly landscapes and still lifes, which I find less conspicuous than portraits. In reality, portraits would be unique in each house, as they're usually paintings of family members. In the OC, I couldn't help noticing how many people had pictures of Grobnar and Sand in their houses.
I took a few textures from Qkrch's painting mod, which also used special effects to achieve them, but in a very different way (using the duplicated models, but using placed model effects). That mod avoids needing a 2DA edit, but still needs duplicated models, and the placed effects are not rotatable. Other source materials I used are the concept art for NWN2 and classical paintings old enough to have passed into the public domain. Aside from the Waterhouse painting which was my initial test, I tried to use less recognisable paintings.
Contradicting what I just said, I also added a few from a favourite game of mine, but the painting I chose to use (#7) appears to have some texture stretching that I couldn't determine due to the art style of its original texture, so I scaled these down vertically to remove the distortion. For any future paintings, I won't use painting 7, and will instead use the similarly-sized painting 9.
Thoughts? Suggestions? Encouragement/discouragement? There's some NWN2 concept art that was never used in the game which could be adapted to landscape style paintings, for instance.
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