<aside> <img src="/icons/forward_gray.svg" alt="/icons/forward_gray.svg" width="40px" /> This guide aims at understanding the face shader in order to do face textures (diffuse, normal, mask maps) for face retexturing in FFXIV

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Understanding the face shader (face skin shader)

7.0+ Skin shader (Face)

Diffuse map

RGB: Color data

ALPHA: Opacity

Normal map

RED: Tangent space normal map X+

GREEN: Tangent space normal map Y+

BLUE: Skin color influence

ALPHA: Lipstick influence

Mask map

RED: Specular map

GREEN: Roughness map

BLUE: SSS Thickness

ALPHA: Unused

Red, Green, Blue and Alpha lines are referring to colour channels. Depending on your colour profile, all digital images include different colour channels within their information, the most used profile (and the one we are using) is RGB, also called RGBa. You can visualize those colour channels in editing programs such as GIMP and Photoshop.

Normal map, Mask, Vertex Color/Alpha and UV2 columns are the textures / 3D you can edit for your model:

• Normal map is the blue-purple texture assigned to your face. It’s a bump map giving information about heights and depth on your surface and how light should refract on it.
• Mask is the pink-blue texture assigned to your face. This map is giving the information about the reflectivity of the face, the roughness (or glossiness) and the refraction of the light withing the model. (sub-surface-scattering)

You can edit those 2 textures with editing programs such as GIMP or Photoshop.

• Vertex color and Vertex alpha are colours and textures assigned in your model’s 3D, unless you know what you are doing, I’d suggest not touching it. Those can be edited in 3D editing programs such as Blender or 3DSMax.
• UV2 is the second UV map assigned to your face model, editing this would possibly break face paints so I’d also suggest not touching it. This can be edited in 3D editing programs such as Blender and 3DSMax as well.

<aside> ⚠️ With the 7.0 graphic update, you will need to use a software in which you are able to edit your textures COLOR CHANNELS (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha) due to the presence of Alpha channels within the Diffuse and Normal maps.

You can use Photoshop, Photopea, GIMP… but Clip Studio Paint is not compatible with color channels.

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<aside> ⚠️ ABOUT FILE COMPRESSION

For skin in general, you should use less compressed (BC7) or uncompressed (A8R8G8B8 or 8.8.8.8) DDS file formats.

To do so, you can download the Nvidia DDS plugin for Photoshop or the standalone version here: https://developer.nvidia.com/texture-tools-exporter

If you do not own an Nvidia GPU you can use the Intel plugin as an alternative but I will not vouch for the stability / results: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/tool/intel-texture-works-plugin.html

Diffuse & mask maps are in general fine using BC7.

Normal maps are better left uncompressed with A8R8G8B8 / 8.8.8.8.

If you experience a loss of blending or artifacts / bad pixels on your Diffuse map, please try to use lossless file format. For more information about file format compression I recommend Cultist’s thread: https://x.com/cultistmods/status/1811381192639545656

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6.X to 7.0 compatible channels

How to make a 7.0 compatible Normal map

6.0 Normal map RED channel ➡ 7.0 Normal map RED channel

6.0 Normal map GREEN channel ➡ 7.0 Normal map GREEN channel