With Flagrum you no longer have to edit the game’s MRS textures to make them work as mods. All that’s needed is to plug the _mrs texture into the correct slot in Blender and it works as intended.

But what to do if you aren’t using FFXV models for your mods?

This guide will show you how to get a proper MRS texture for your modding pleasure.

We will cover how to put together an MRS out of separate single channel textures. That’s the kind of textures the MO uses, as well as what you’re likely to be working with both when porting and when making your own models.

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For the purpose of this tutorial we will be looking at Photoshop. It is paid software and if you don’t have it you can instead use any number of alternatives. Most image editors can do this with no issue. That said, Photoshop UI is the standard so it’s the one that’s the most likely to translate to other apps.

Pardon the UI language, the tutorial should be easy enough to follow regardless.

Here you can see the layers widget. It has three tabs. The first and default one is Layers. The next - Channels and finally Paths. Channels are what interests us. Upon clicking on this tab you will see your image broken down into channels: red, green, blue (and alpha) Clicking on them will let you edit them individually.

You can use this to both copy and paste one channel at a time, allowing you to rearrange them and combine multiple images into channels of one image.

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An MRS texture consists of three channels that contain different information. The name is an acronym for the contents of the channels, in the order in which they appear. So M corresponds to Red channel, R to Green, and S to Blue.

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The red channel contains M, meaning Metalness. It’s a purely binary texture, with white representing metal and black representing non-metal.

It’s extremely easy to make if you don’t already have it

There’s no change in how this texture looks now compared to how it did for MO mods, now it’s just a channel in a texture instead of a standalone image.

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Green channel is for R - Roughness.

The biggest change from MO mods is with this one. MO mods use a Reflectiveness model rather than Roughness.

A Reflectiveness texture is lighter for more reflective surfaces and darker for less reflective ones A Roughness texture is the opposite - the light areas are rough, the dark ones are smooth.

All you need to do to turn a Reflectiveness texture into a Roughness one is invert it. After that it’s just a matter of putting it in the Green channel of your MRS texture.

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Finally, the Blue channel contains the Specular information.

While Roughness controls the surface of the material and therefore the WAY it reflects light, Specularity is the AMOUNT of light reflected.

If you don’t already have a Specular map, you can actually just fill this channel with a 50% gray as that’s the default value.

As you can see this channel has pretty low contrast, and that’s how you should use it - a fine tuning measure, rather than the main source of the look of your model.

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Finally we arrive at one final look at the whole MRS texture. This one is a great example as it contains multiple different kinds of surfaces. The pink areas are metal buckles, the light green is denim, and the dark teal bits correspond to leather.

Here we have another example, this time of a face MRS. You can see there’s no pink on this one, as there is no metal, and the whole texture has only very subtle details.

The more reflective areas like lips and eyelids are light green, while everything else is a fairly uniform teal.