[S] 5-minutes guide series: Remove Ear Fur from Miqo'te hair

5-minutes guide series:

How to remove Miqo'te ears from hair

This guide can be used together with "5-minutes guide series: How to remove Ear Flaps" 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?

The ear fur is added to each hair, which means there is no technique you will be able to get rid of the ear fur all at once for all hairs. Instead you choose a few of your "favourite" hairs and will remove the ear fur here manually. I will show you guys the Photoshop texture way, of course you can also simply yeet them in any 3D program.

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 fur from Mint's Hillsong hair. Navigate in Textools to the hair. In my case it was a racewide hair (162) so the texture even though it was miqo'te were in the Hyur Midlander Female section.

So for me it was:

Character > Hair > Hyur Midlander Female > Hair - 0162

Go to the second columns which says "Material" and search for the Vanilla Material. In my case it was Material C.

Since you are already on the normal map, simply hit "export" in the lower left corner and export as DDS.

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.

(P.S. Especially older hairs use "their own" ear texture, if you encounter such a problem, look at the hair normal and see if there is a tiny spot (mostly in the form of a rectangle, where the ears are placed. Continue as followed and only black this small part)

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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 the normal map open, simply move to the channel selection and click the ALPHA channel (last one in the row). The alpha channel on a HAIR normal map defines the opacity / transparency, meaning everything that is black there, will NOT be visible in the game. Everything white is visible.

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Step 3

Simply choose now the tool you are comfortable with (brush, rectangle, form tool etc.) and paint the right side of the alpha map in BLACK so the ears are hidden. In my case I chose to simply use the rectangle tool (rectangle emoji) and draw a black form at the right side.

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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.

In the DDS plugin window you can actually see that the ears are not anymore visible with the edited alpha.

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.

You can click on the rider "model" and see if the ears are gone.

Direct comparison:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

If you want to know how to make now your ear flaps be gone, click here:

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