Ffxiv Au Ra Face Scales For Fam Elezen

How to Apply Au Ra Face Scales to FFXIV Female Elezen Characters

FFXIV's default face morphs don't always play well with Au Ra-specific textures, especially when you're working with female Elezen. The scale overlay meant for Au Ra heads tends to look muddy or misaligned on Elezen facial geometry. Here's how I've dealt with it in practice. The core issue is that Au Ra and Elezen share the same base head mesh in most editing tools, but the UV layout for the scale texture doesn't perfectly map onto the Elezen face. I ran into this when trying to convert an old custom face morph from my main's Au Ra to my alt Elezen sorcerer. The scales were shifting up by roughly half a texture unit and the eye ridge area was completely warped. Here's the workaround I settled on after about an hour of trial and error. First, load your Elezen face morph into AnyBody or RenderMonkey depending on your preferred workflow. Then import the Au Ra face scale overlay as a second texture layer rather than replacing the base face texture outright. You want both active simultaneously. Set the scale overlay to Multiply blend mode and drag its opacity down to around 40 to 55 percent. This alone fixes most of the visual harshness that comes from slapping a raw Au Ra scale texture onto Elezen geometry.

The real problem area is the snout and ear base. Elezen have longer facial structures which stretch the Au Ra scale pattern unnaturally across the bridge of the nose. I found that offsetting the UV coordinates horizontally by about 0.03 to 0.05 pixels and vertically by roughly 0.01 to 0.02 pixels brings the scale pattern into alignment without distorting the underlying face shape. Your mileage will vary depending on which base face you start from, so test on the actual character model before committing. For the download part, the community patch that patches these scale mappings is scattered across a few different sources. The most reliable one I've used is the AUra-Elezen-ScaleFix pack available through the Final Fantasy XIV modding Discord channels and occasionally mirrored on GitHub repos by users like Lyrath and KazeMod. There isn't an official source since this falls into unofficial texture modification territory. The files typically come as a .pak or .tex extraction pack that you drop into your game directory's resource folder. A few things that can go wrong. If your game is running the latest patch and your texture pack is from an earlier version, the face mesh topology may have shifted slightly and your manual UV offsets will need adjusting. I've seen cases where the scale texture appears correct in the character creator but looks distorted in actual gameplay lighting because the normal map wasn't included in the override. Always check that the download contains both the albedo and normal map files. Missing normals makes the scales look flat and painted on rather than embedded in the skin.

Another limitation is that this approach only works for custom face morphs created externally. The in-game character creator won't let you layer two textures on top of each other, so you're stuck using a third-party tool to bake the combined result into a single face data file. That means every time Square Enix updates the face mesh in a patch, your baked morph could break and you'd need to redo the work. It's not a permanent fix, just a functional one until the next major patch drops. If you don't want to mess with UV offsets and texture blending manually, the simplest path is just finding a pre-baked Elezen-compatible Au Ra scale face pack instead. The community has already done this work for most common base faces. Search the same Discord channels for threads labeled "Elezen-ready AuRa textures" and you'll find people who've already baked the corrections into ready-to-use .txtr files. That saves probably two to three hours compared to doing it yourself.