[S] 5-minutes guide series: Remove Ear Flaps

5-minutes guide series:

How to remove Ear Flaps

This guide can be used together with "5-minutes guide series: How to remove Miqo'te ears from hair" to achieve a look so you can have custom ears without any disturbing flaps or ear furs on your favourite hairs.

What will we do?

To remove the "ear flaps" (so the inside of the miqo'te ears) we need to remove them from the miqo'te face itself. We will do this by painting the ears black in the blue channel of the normal map which defines the opacity. Meaning, everything that is black there, won't be seen.

Tools:

- Textools

- Photoshop with DDS Addon (grab it here: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-exporter)

Step 1

At first grab all the materials you will need for this. So in this case, I wanted to remove the ear flaps from Miqo'te Face 1. In Textools navigate over to the face, in my case it is:

Character > Face > Miqo'te Female

Then choose the face which you wish. (Please keep in mind that for Miqo'te you have different faces depending if Seeker or Keeper).

Go to the second columns which says "Material" and open the drop down to select "FAC A".

From there you are directly at the diffuse, hit export at the left bottom (best to export as DDS). Go to the last column that says "Texture Map" and select "Normal" once again hit here export.

(You could also use only the normal map but I personally felt safer to SEE where the ear was actually placed)

When you are done with this, click the tiny folder button in the right bottom of Textools and copy the path file of the folder, this will help us to navigate faster to the folder we need later.

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Step 2

Open now Photoshop and load in the two DDS we just exported. So use the just copied pathfile to navigate to the folder (told you it would come in handy).

Now with both files here. We first look at the diffuse and spot the ear there. I used the red channel personally for myself cause I could easier see where the ear ends. Use any selection tool by your choice, I went with the polygon selection and "drew" a frame around it. Copy the frame (so just hit ctrl + c) and move to the normal map. To be 100% sure that it's on the same position use "edit" in the upper menu and then "paste special" it will place it at exact the same position. (Take care that both maps need to have the exact same size, if one varies, you need to adjust them before). Paste the copied selection in the BLUE channel of the normal map.

(as you can see in my picture the ear was too small since the both sizes were not the same. So I had to adjust and then redo it again, be smarter than me and do the checking before)

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Step 3

When it's pasted in the blue channel, simply use the fill tool (bucket like emoji) to fill the selection completely with black. If you turn on now all other channels of the normal map, it should look like this.

Blue Channel:

New Normal Map:

The yellow color shows you that it won't be visible in game when you import this map into Textools.

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Step 4

Export the new normal map as DDS with the format: 8.8.8.8. BGRA. Click in the window under format and open the drop down and use this. Export it (best in the already used folder) and rename it and you are done in PS.

Head back to Textools and import the new normal map you just created by clicking the small three dots beside the IMPORT letters and navigate to the map. Import it and you are done on this part.

If you want to know how you make now your favourite hair have no ear fur, click here:

Otherwise thank you for reading! If you have any further questions or critics, please contact me over my Discord Tag.