The Flagrum add-on for Blender comes with a set of materials you can apply to your mods. These have been specifically set up and confirmed to work, because the mod loader doesn’t actually work the same as the main loader for in-game models. That means we can’t just use any material that the game uses without altering it to work. Some materials won’t work with mods at all.

Named Human materials are used by the game for main characters but they work fine on all model replacement mods as well. Basic material is used by the game on many different things, but only works with weapon mods.

These are the main texture inputs you will see repeating on most materials. Let’s go over them one by one.

That’s the one that gives your model color. Here’s an example.

The _o texture contains baked Ambient Occlusion and is named with an _o inside game files.

We have a full tutorial on how to make one if you don’t have it yet!

This texture controls which parts of the model are metal, and how rough and reflective all the surfaces are.

There’s a full turorial for this one too!

The game doesn’t actually use this input for anything.

SSS stands for SubSurface Scattering. That’s the effect that makes skin look realistic, like light is shining through it and not just on it. Like when you hold your hand up to a flashlight.

You don’t have to put anything in this input for your mods though, the skin material will apply the SSS all over.

This one is for the normal map for your model.

It adds detail to the surface.

This is the alpha mask. White areas determine what’s visible, black is invisible.

The game uses binary alphas - meaning that the texture needs to be fully black and white.

However, materials like hair have ways to appear softer despite that. For the eye material, the _a texture instead goes into the Refraction0_Texture input and controls which part of the eye is the iris.

You will find parameters named the same or similarly to most texture inputs. Flagrum uses the same names for all the material inputs as the game files do. Usually the way an input works is by multiplying the value that the texture file provides by a number.

We’ve also made sure to set all the inputs to values that work well in most cases. So you can build a mod without altering anything and it will work fine. Even the texture slots have default textures assigned, so you can skip those as well!

Let’s go over a few of the parameters and how they work.

BaseColor0 has three values. These stand for R, G, and B channels. For most things you want to leave those the way they are. The exception is skin - each character has a BaseColor0 value that you have to match in order to get the same look and reduce seams. For example:

			Noctis: 1.2, 1.2, 1.2

			Prompto:  1.5, 1.5, 1.5

			Gladio: 1.5, 1.5, 1.5

			Ignis: 1.5, 1.5, 1.5

			Ardyn: 1.2, 1.2, 1.2 

Occlusion0_Power and Occlusion1_Power both decide how strong the Ambient Occlusion is. 0 generally stands for the vertex color AO, and 1 for the _o texture strength. This will affect how strong the shading is that the model is casting onto itself.

Metallic0_Power affects the way the material can appear like metal. By default that’s turned off, set to 0. If you want anything to look like metal, you have to set this to a higher number. It can be 1 or less, depends on the look you want.

Roughness0_Power and Specular0_Power affect how strongly the MRS is expressed. Roughness adjusts the green channel of the MRS, and Specular affects the blue.

Normal0_Power is the strength of the _n texture. Usually it can be set to 1, but if you got your normal textures from another game, for example, you will have to adjust this value to make them look right.

AlphaThreshold is used when parts of your mesh are transparent, so when you have an _a texture. When your texture has gray values in it, this will affect how dark the gray has to be to make things transparent.

Don’t be afraid to experiment, it won’t break anything. And if you do mess something up, every material has a button to reset it to default values right at the top.

Just press this and start over!