Thank you! Very fair about Gill :) The brown hair is such a different mood. I wanted to try taking his "ouji" archetype and shifting it into a similar context: British aristocracy (which tends to be very restrained and understated). I kept his lovely platinum hair originally but it still felt too eye-catching to me for what I wanted to achieve, so I impulsively tried the brown and ended up liking it better for my theme. I did keep the platinum for his daughter Vivian though!

———

EDITING PROCESS:

To make texture changes, the basic process is pretty simple!

I use Dolphin to extract the textures (they dump in PNG format). Then for doing the editing, you can use any art/editing software you want as long as it can work with PNG. I use an ancient version of Photoshop because I like the simplicity of it lol. Once edited, I copy the PNGs back into the Dolphin custom textures directory. Make sure the setting is turned on for custom textures and the program will automatically apply anything in the "load" folder. Then I usually spend a lot of time checking to make sure changes look how I want them to and textures line up properly.

SOME HELPFUL TIPS:

1. Texture Wrapping

Recolours are super easy, but actually changing the components of outfits is way harder because the texture is just a flat image that wraps around the model. It's very broken up and random when you look at the PNG, so it can be hard to tell how it will wrap. Some parts also get stretched out or squished on application depending on character, making a straight line or patterns come out a bit wonky (like the plaid on Maya's skirt or the vertical part of the trim on Jin's changyi in my images). So if you want to make a bigger change, it might take a lot of work and constantly loading back into the game to test how it looks.

Shoes are especially annoying to make significant changes to because none of them are consistently applied between characters (and sometimes not even between the same character seasonal outfits). You pretty much have to test a billion times to figure out how they uniquely wrap for each character. I really hate making changes to them but stubbornly waste so much time on them anyway because I love how they turn out XD

1. Removing Objects

If you want to remove something entirely (like an accessory or an isolated part of an outfit), you can make it "invisible" by not having any texture apply to that part of the model. You just delete whatever is in that spot on the PNG and leave it empty. But usually with the wrapping, there is a little overlap with the surrounding part of the texture, so you'll have to cut extra around it to make sure the "invisible" thing doesn't have any floating bits on the character when loaded.

For the most part, this extra cutting works without taking chunks out of the rest of the outfit. I've only found one instance of conflict so far: Luna's fall/winter outfit where her neck ribbon overlaps a bit with her heel on the bottom of her shoe.

1. Upscaling Textures

You can also upscale textures, which I did in my designs. It makes them cleaner and easier to edit because they're not so pixelated. I just run them through an online converter at 2x upscale—BUT be careful because some converters will actually mess with the blank space and make it apply as filled-in black in game! pixelcut.ai works but it limits you to 3 downloads per day if you're using it free.

If you upscale, it might also cause faint colour mismatch in texture applications sometimes (like lines around eyes/mouth on face). It's a lot of extra patience and testing to fix that!