Baldur’s Gate 3 might be the hardest game on Nexus to mod-shop for. The base game is already so handsome that every mod page screenshot looks roughly like every other mod page screenshot, and the actual work, lighting rebalanced a few degrees or a face softened by millimeters, hides somewhere between two images your eye can’t hold at once.
This page does it differently. The mods below appear as live sliders, both versions stacked in the same frame, the reveal under your finger. Where a comparison is portrait-shaped and needs the full screen, it opens on its own page instead. Everything is built from the mod authors’ own capture pairs, credited at the bottom.
Start with the light on people’s faces
BG3 lights its characters like a stage play: strong rim light, hard key light, everyone faintly glossy. Cinematic in cutscenes, plasticky the other ninety hours. Immersive Character Lighting by lexo1000 rebuilds that setup toward something a camera might have seen, and it’s the kind of change that evaporates in a static screenshot because it touches every pixel a little instead of one region a lot.
Under a slider it stops hiding. Drag this ruined camp scene and watch the party members near the torches, vanilla left, modded right:
The torchlight stops bouncing off skin like it’s laminated. Yes, the author stamped BETTER onto his own after shots, which is the kind of confidence you earn by being right. There are seven more scenes in the full album, purple ritual halls to sunny gardens, and the range matters: character lighting mods live or die across different light sources, not in one flattering campfire shot.
The camp restorations nobody screenshots properly
Karalyn’s Clean and Furnished series is the opposite kind of mod. It changes one place completely instead of everything slightly. Last Light Inn goes from cobwebbed wreck to a working tavern, and the pair below is the rare case where the before is the star, because without it the after just looks like BG3 with candles:
Sweep across the bar top. The wreckage, the cobwebs, the collapsed shelving on the vanilla side all read as one deliberate renovation once you can flip between states in place. The full sets run five scenes each: Last Light Inn, the Lower City camp, and the Rivington farm. Fair warning that these are quality-of-atmosphere mods, not graphics mods. If your party enjoys the refugee-camp squalor, that’s canon and you should keep it.
Faces, where sliders earn their keep
Face mods generate the angriest comment sections in BG3 modding, and most of that anger is a formatting problem. Two screenshots posted side by side genuinely look identical when the changes are a few millimeters of geometry, so half the thread sees nothing and says so. Put the same pair under a handle and the argument changes shape.
Both of these are portrait comparisons, so they open full-screen on their own pages. Another Face of Shadowheart, by Evge Rew, is the bigger swing: sweep her face and the fringe fills out, the vanilla scuff marks vanish, the eye makeup resets, and the ear tips quietly go pointed. The de-wrinkling pass by commanderstrawberry is the subtle one. Park the boundary on the forehead and rock it a few pixels; that’s where the whole mod lives.
Whether either is an improvement is your call to make; the slider just guarantees everyone’s arguing about the same pixels.
Judging any BG3 visual mod before it earns a slot
Three habits, learned from watching mods look great on their pages and different in game. Check the scene variety first: BG3’s three acts light their worlds completely differently, and a mod shown only at golden hour in Act One is a mod shown at its best hour. That’s why the multi-scene albums above are worth more than any single hero shot.
The mod page’s pinned game version matters more than usual here, since BG3 patches have a habit of rattling visual mods loose.
And take your own vanilla screenshots of two or three favorite scenes before installing anything. It costs thirty seconds, and it gives you a personal before to drag against later instead of a memory. Vanilla screenshots also turn weirdly nostalgic a few months into a modded run, so shoot spares.
If you mod BG3, this format is sitting right there
One advantage BG3 modders have over the open-world crowd: most scenes light themselves identically every load. No weather rolling in between your shots, no sun drifting. Load a save, screenshot, enable the mod, load the same save, screenshot. The pair comes out matched to a degree Skyrim authors need console commands to fake.
From there it’s a minute at imgi.co: drop the pair in, label the sides with vanilla and your mod’s name, publish, and the link goes in your Nexus description with a GIF export inline for the people who never click. The capture guide covers the posting workflow in detail. The face mods above collect comments precisely because people can drag them, and nothing about that is exclusive to their pages.
Credits, since every comparison here is the author’s own captures: Immersive Character Lighting by lexo1000, whose screenshots also form this post’s cover; the Clean and Furnished series by Karalyn (Last Light Inn, Lower City, Rivington); Another Face of Shadowheart by Evge Rew; and Less Wrinkled Expression and Forehead for Face by commanderstrawberry.