Saving, exporting and backing up

Characters, outfits, and scenes in HS2 Studio are all just files on disk. That’s convenient, because it means you can organize and reuse them freely, but it also means they can be lost just as easily. A few habits keep your work portable now and safe later: save outfits on their own, know how to pull a character out of someone else’s scene, load only the part of a card you actually need, and always back up before you touch your install.

Save an outfit as its own card

The Outfit tab in Character Maker has a “Save Outfit” button that stores only the current clothing and accessories as a coordinate card, a separate .png file from the full character card. Coordinates save under UserData\coordinate\female or UserData\coordinate\male, matching the character’s sex.

Because a coordinate is independent of the character card, you can load it onto other characters, or update the outfit later without touching that character’s face, body, or pose data at all. If you’re still fine-tuning fit or clipping before you save it, see editing clothing in Studio first, since fixes are much easier to apply before the outfit is locked into a card.

Pull a character out of a downloaded scene

Scenes you download (see where to get mods for where to find them) are StudioNEO .png files that go in UserData\Studio\scene. Loading one brings in everyone and everything in it, but not as separate reusable cards, it’s a single scene, not a folder of characters.

To get characters out as reusable cards: select a character in the Workspace list, then press Ctrl+E to run the Chara Exporter (it’s listed among Studio’s shortcuts under F1). It writes the scene’s characters out as normal character cards into UserData\chara\export, where you can grab the one you want and load it into any other scene.

Load only part of a card

When you load a character card, or a coordinate, onto an existing character in Studio, the load screen doesn’t force an all-or-nothing swap. It shows checkboxes for each part of the card, such as face, body, and hair, and only the ticked parts actually get applied.

That lets you do things like:

Give the card a good preview image

Studio’s load screen shows a small, heavily compressed thumbnail for every card, which is normal and doesn’t reflect the actual quality of what got saved. Scene files are full StudioNEO PNGs stored in UserData\Studio\scene, so opening one directly in an image viewer shows it at full resolution rather than the tiny preview the load list uses.

For character and coordinate cards, controlling what that preview actually looks like is what Shift+D is for. With the character selected, it opens the Studio Character Editor, which you can also use to save the card. Pose and frame the shot in the main viewport the way you want it to look (see camera work in Studio if you need help getting the angle right), then save from there so the card’s preview reflects that composed shot instead of whatever the camera happened to be pointing at.

Back up before you reinstall or update

This is the habit that actually matters. Before a Better Repack reinstall, a game update, or any change to your install, copy your whole UserData folder somewhere safe. That single folder is your actual creative work:

Back up any custom card frames you’ve installed too. Everything else, the game files, mods, BepInEx and its plugins, can be re-downloaded if something goes wrong during a reinstall. Your UserData folder cannot.

Get into the rhythm of saving outfits separately, exporting characters out of scenes you like, and backing up before you touch your install, and losing work stops being a risk you have to think about.