#frosty editor

Requirements:

DATV game on pc (obviously)

Last release of Frosty Editor (here on GitHub)

An image to use as a tattoo

Gimp. A free images editor (here)

Preparing the Tattoo

First of all, let's open the image in Gimp. The image must be in PNG format with a transparent background, or, in the worst case, with a white background. Let's use my De Riva crest tattoo. Your file should appear like that. The checkered background indicates a transparent background, exaclty what we need.

If you took the image from the internet, be sure the image is in RGB mode

Is your image colored? Sadly, tattoos in Veilguard can only be shades of gray, the colors are given in the character editor. But how to turn your image into grayscale? Go to Colours -> Desaturate -> Desaturate. There are different options in the next panel, choose what makes your image read better.

Now, we need to turn our grayscale image to alpha. That means that everywhere the tattoo is white, it will be set to 0% opacity, while the black will be 100% opacity. Everything in between will be a % of opacity based on the grayscale color.

I'm using Gimp not only because it's free, but also because there is an easy button to do the grayscale to alpha thing. I'm sure it can be done in Photoshop (totally not free) or maybe Photopea (free website), but I prefer this way. All you have to do is go to Colours -> Colour to alpha. The default settings are what we need, white to transparency, so don't touch it!

Your image should now look like this. As you can see, we can kind of see through some parts, the blade especially, which was the lightest color. Great!

Now we have to think about where we would like to put this tattoo. Tattoos in Veilguard are a combination of two texture maps.

Map A has: - Chest tattoo (red) - Back tattoo (green) - Left Arm Tattoo (blue)

Map B has: - Right arm tattoo (red) - Left leg tattoo (green) - Right leg tattoo (blue)

Below Crow body tattoo 2A and 2B

Why those colors? Because of the sliders in game! When creating your Rook, you can choose what part of the tattoo set to show or hide. The RGB colors are meant to tell the game which slider they belong to. You take the opacity of the chest tattoo to 0? The game turns the red part of the A map to 0.

Let's say I want to put this tattoo on the chest, so let's color it red. Create a new layer here in the layer menu.

Then open the color picker by clicking the black/white box.

As you can see, the first 3 sliders of the color picker are red, green, and blue, exactly what we need! Set the slider to the max for the color you need, for me it will be red. Now select the bucket tool and paint your level red.

It's all red! Not what we needed! But don't worry, we just need one more step. Go to the levels menu and right-click on the red level, then select Composite Mode -> Clip to Backdrop Here we are! Our tattoo is ready to be put on the texture. Save it as a .png

Creating the textures

Maybe you are not familiar with how UV works, but this is Lucanis' body texture. I'm not here to explain to you how UVs get unwrapped, but we will need this map to understand where to put our tattoo. So save this image! I really hope Tumblr will not lower the size of the it, this is a 4k texture, a 4096px x 4096 px image.

To keep a continuity between chest, deltoid, neck and back, the back is upside down in the texture. Legs are upside down too, while for the arms, the wrist is near the lower back and the connection to the deltoid is toward the exterior of the map. For a beginner, I wouldn't suggest planning a tattoo that goes over the deltoid down to the arm, since it will have to be divided into two parts of the texture. The same goes for arm to hand or leg to feet, since the UVs are separated there as well.

Open the above Lucanis' body texture and import your tattoo. Go to Edit -> Open as Layer

Now that it's on a new layer, we can resize or move it as we need. While it ca be easy to find the move tool, the first of the tools in the left menu, you can find the resize tool here under Tools -> Transform tool. The move tool can be selected there as well. If you want to add more tattoos, now is the time! Just remember to stick to the A/B map and colors that I wrote above. This is my final image. We need just another little edit to have our map. Similar to how we did before, add a new layer between the body texture and your tattoos, and with the bucket tool fill it with black.

Export this image, and save a project file as well for editing the position later, you will need it! We are now ready to go into Frosty Editor!

Replace the tattoos in Frosty Editor

There are guides about how to set Frosty Editor, I will talk only about how to use it for this mod once everything is working and ready.

If you search for "tattoo" you will find a folder named Tattoo under Characters -> Generic -> Universal -> Tattoo You can also search for "a_TAT_" get directly to the tattoo files.

We will replace the a_TAT_CRW_Tattoobody01A_01_mask, the one with the little image icon on its left. If your tattoo contains the B map tattoos instead, you will need to replace that one. For a full set of tattoo you should replace both A and B Tatoobody.

Open it with a double-click, make sure it is still selected in the menu below, then press the Import button above. Select the texture we prepared before, and you should see your new map on the screen. The name of the map should also have a * near it, meaning the file has been changed.

Time to test!

And here it is! Our chest, left arm (and back) tattoos together with the map B tattoos. The dagger is not in the best position on the arm, it's time to open the gimp project file and move it around until I'm satisfied. But for the sake of this guide, we are done! Save your project, export your mod, and drink some water. You did it!

If you came this far and found this guide useful, consider leaving a comment, or maybe even leaving a tip on my Ko-Fi.