A fellow modder reached out to ask how I made this mod, here is the response I sent them:
Well that's a bit of a complex question, but I'll try my best. Some of the information below was found here.
At first, I went into the character creation menu of Starfield and found a tattoo with the kind of face-placement I was going for. (For ex: the dragon tattoo has the dragon's head right in the middle of the player's forehead.)
Then, using the Bethesda Archive Extractor, I extracted the relevant game texture for that tattoo. (Tattoo files are located in the Starfield - Textures02.ba2 game file)
The texture path you want to extract is "\textures\actors\human\faces\chargen\postblenddetails\tattootint"
I found the dragon tattoo (tattoo_makeup_dragon_mask.dds) and opened it with GIMP.
I don't know how to use GIMP, so I just exported the file as a .PNG to manipulate in Photoshop instead.
The tattoo file is a black square with a white design on it, they're very rudimentary designs.
I opened the .PNG in Photoshop, made a new layer over the existing design, dropped in a design that I liked (ensuring that is a white design on the black background), placed it where I wanted it, covered up the 1st layer with all black so that just the new design is visible, then saved / exported the .PNG.
I then opened that .PNG with GIMP, exported as a .DDS (ensuring to select the DXT1 compression option, otherwise Starfield won't load your texture)
I placed that new .DDS file into the folder tree > "textures\actors\human\faces\chargen\postblenddetails\tattootint", zipped it up, imported it into MO2, and activated it.
Got back to character creation, found the tattoo, and if the placement looked alright, I called it done. Rinse and repeat.
I know that you can use Photoshop to directly manipulate .DDS files, but there must be something wrong with my plugin or something, and I was too lazy to fix it so I just used GIMP as a middle-man.
I have no plans to create more rune variants at this time and without the Creation Kit, I don't believe there would be enough tattoo slots to use the entire Elder Futhark anyway.
3 comments
I know that you can use Photoshop to directly manipulate .DDS files, but there must be something wrong with my plugin or something, and I was too lazy to fix it so I just used GIMP as a middle-man.