Pointing things defs entries to external art/sounds - circumventing vanilla art

[Rafe009]

I'm interesting in modifying the defs so that I can take the vanilla weapons and re-skin them. I've used two mods that add a large variety of guns: rimfire and High-caliber but I found that simply adding additional weapons – 30 to 40 more - screws the balance drops for grenades, particularly emp grenades. I want to scale back the archive of weapons I have access to to something more similar to vanilla but maintain  visual weapon variety that isn't vanilla artwork.

In order to do this would I have to delete the core defs for vanilla weapons and reintroduce them via a copy/pasted def I make for new guns and simply point to the new weapon texture files and sound files or is there a way to take the vanilla entry in the defs for something like the sniper rifle, rename it, reorient it to a new texture file/ sound file?

I'm not really interested in changing weapon firing characteristics, like damage, or tic rates. I want to try to largely maintain the vanilla balance. My main interests are simply adding a degree of aesthetic variety in weapons.

[RemingtonRyder]

I think you could do that with Mod Friendly Overrides. Don't take my word for it though, I haven't tried it.

[Thirite]

You don't need to modify Defs or xml at all to override graphics. Just put your override graphics in a mod like this:

MyMod/
   About/
      About.xml
   Textures/
      *OriginalTexturePath*/
         *OriginalTextureName*.png

Edit: The same should also apply to sounds