NPC Port Tutorial

if you already read Getting Started, then you certainly want to edit thoses ugly characters !

in fact, you can, but for now, you're forced to erase that external folder (until someone do something ☺)

Erasing that external folder for a character will just cause his special object to be invisible (no colored slime, no poltergust, no waluigi machine, no wario bomb, no bowser shell, no paint for bowser.jr, no banana for diddy and no mushrooms for toad.
AND YES, COLLISIONS ARE GONE TOO

EDIT : yosh found a way to make texture hacks with hex editor for every characters.
(that works with stages, goal, and other stuff too) see Texture Hack Tutorial

so take the character you want (see Filesystem/chr and ID Lists) decompress it and open it with brawlbox, then you can do what you want,

keep in mind that body_h stand for high quality, body_m for medium, body_l for low, and body_s for shape (when choosing mii), those lod models are used in multiplayer and also in single player when the model is far enough from the camera

AFTER YOU DID THAT, YOU WILL HAVE LIKE 1 HOUR OF WORK :

In .mot files we said there are animations.
In fact, mot files contain .chr animations that link to a bone.

If .chr link to a bone that doesn't exist, the game will crash when that animation is loaded

we recommend you to take an original character and to copy manually all his bones to body_h, body_m, body_l and to body_s
no, there is no faster way.

body_m and body_l are used in multiplayer

all characters have not exactly the same bones

direct character swap will not always work (for example ninja over toad crash because the mouth bone is missing)

Bones names are just real body parts in japanese

if you're not japanese use google translate

or right click a mdl0 and select "Preview  Ctrl+P" and you will see the exact bone place

or change translation or scale of any bone you want

how do i add a bone ?

that's pretty simple, in brawlbox just right click a bone and then click
"add new child" then rename that new bone
(keyboard shortcut works too)

Ctrl + alt + N to add new child

Ctrl + N to rename 

Navigate with arrows

Tips 2

yea we're kind

as we can't edit .mot files because of "external" folder, you can :

-use .mot files over another character to have his animations (so copy the character bones and don't forget tour.mot and menu.mot)

-bones do not need to be hierarchised with parents and children, but if you do that, body parts will get unglued and your character might look ugly when he is animated, like almost all the time

you can also read How to make a Character Texture Hack with Hex Editor

(works also for every 3d model in the game, including stages)