Facial Hair HD updates all human male and female eyebrows, eyelashes and beards, with new high resolution textures remade from scratch to accurately recapture the vanilla design in much better quality.

The preview images here are uncompressed PNGs cropped from 4K screenshots, showing Facial Hair HD installed on ME1. The same facial hair textures are used across the trilogy.
Ignore the slight lighting differences between vanilla (left) and new (right), that's my own mistake in game configuration and nothing to do with the mod!



Update 3.0
This update fixes colour space issues with the original alpha maps, and uses new improved upscales to better bring my brushwork in line with the original game's appearance. The end result is that 3.0 is much more accurate to vanilla Mass Effect while retaining its high definition.

Thanks to CreeperLava, Bosmeroya and ScifiIsMyJam101 for your support!



Installation
For quick and painless installation of the mod, I recommend using Mass Effect Modder.
An alternate download is included with the .dds files, for installation with other software like ME3Explorer.

ALOT Users: This mod is already included in the latest version of ALOT.



Process
Initially I used Blender's hair particle system to render out different hair styles, but ultimately the results weren't looking like the vanilla game's textures. Instead I downloaded a collection of Photoshop hair/beard brushes to paint them manually.

The textures are split into an alpha map and a normal map: effectively the alpha is the shape of the beard, while the normal adds its 3D texture. First I used an AI upscaler to enlarge the original alpha textures, creating an accurate base to work on. Then I carefully painted over them with brushes in matching styles, adjusting rotation, size and strength to match the direction of the facial hair. Finally this image was used to generate a new normal map that perfectly matched the individual strands of hair.

Every texture has been individually remade from scratch, with the exception of the eyelashes - these were carefully denoised and upscaled to keep them precise to the original game without noticeable stepping in the gradients.



Other Mods
Facial Hair HD is available for Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.
I have also made Holograms HD for Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, and Ultimate Miranda for Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3.