FFGear is a Blender addon for handling FFXIV gear shading and applying dyes to them directly in Blender. It allows for easily setting up shaders for Meddle exports (but will also work with other methods). It's meant to allow for more customizability after you've already exported a character.  

 

Notable Features

• Dye your gear directly in Blender!
• Automatic setup for Meddle exports!
• Submaterial Textures (the fabric details and stuff)!
• A lot of artistic control!  

 

Installation

You have two options! The traditional way:

1. Download the latest ZIP from Releases
2. In Blender, go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Dropdown in the top-right > Install from Disk... and Select the ZIP

The new fancy way:

1. In Blender, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Get Extensions
2. Select Repositories drop-down and click Add Remote Repository
3. Enter the following URL:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ShinoMythmaker/FFXIV-Blender-Plugins/refs/heads/main/repo.json

4. Click Check for Updates on Startup
5. Click Create
6. Search for FFGear in and click Install

This adds a repository with a bunch of other Blender addons like Meddle Tools and AetherBlend which I both highly recommend. You can see the full list of (entirely optional) addons here.
If you're not sure which method to use, I recommend the new fancy one.

 

Usage

Each material now has an FFGear tab, in which you'll see a "Setup" area and a "Dye Colors" area.  
 

If your character has been exported with Meddle:
Import it and select all the relevant objects, then press the "Automatic Meddle Setup" button, then select the cache folder in your meddle export.
This should automatically set up shaders for all selected gear.

If you want to do it the more manual way:
Start by selecting each required file (mtrl and textures) in the Setup area. Then create a material with the button labeled "Create This Material". Shift-clicking will do this across multiple selected objects.  
 

For more information please check out the wiki  

 

⚠ Important Meddle Info

With characters exported using version 0.1.29 or later of Meddle, you need to make sure .mtrl files are cached

 

 

Limitations, Disclaimers & Good-to-know Info

• These materials are an approximation to how they look in-game, so although it looks very similar it is not a 1:1 recreation. The goal of this project is, primarily, making it look good in Blender. To allow for extra artistic control, the FFGear Shader node-group has plenty of user-accesible controls for simple tweaks, and all of the values the addon calculates are readily available in the shader graph for you to create your own shaders with if need be. If you want to change how this shader behaves by default you can edit it in the .blend file in the plugins "assets" folder.

• If rendering using Cycles you may notice visual artifacts on a lot of gear where the mesh is thin. This is because Cycles lacks "proper" backface culling which is a requirement for FFXIV models looking good, since they have many overlapping faces that Cycles doesn't fully know what to do with. To counter this FFGear has a button labeled Offset Along Normals, which I highly recommend pressing if rendering with Cycles. Eevee will not have this issue.

• FFGear is not meant to work on anything other than gear shaders, such as skin or hair. It's meant to cover "character.shpk", "characterlegacy.shpk", "charactertransparency.shpk" and "chracterstockings.shpk" only. I recommend using Meddle Tools shaders for everything else, or making your own.

• Data from the mtrl file is not always placed into blender 1:1, meaning the code sometimes changes the values beforehand. As an example, the tile texture transformation matrix data is converted into more user-friendly values: scale, rotation and shear.

• I am by no means an expert programmer, if you find issues with the addon please inform me of them by filing an issue here on github. I also made this over like six months on and off, and I was kind of shit at the start, my programming style changed a lot, and while I have refactored a lot of it a more experienced programmer will likely think this is a fucking mess. I agree with you, sorry :)

• I have no idea if this works on Mac or Linux, I have only tested it on Windows 10. If you run into issues using Mac or Linux, file an issue and make sure to include any errors the console spits out at you. Make sure to describe what you were doing to cause the issue, too.  

 

Acknowledgements

💖 The xivModdingFramework and Penumbra - Thanks for having all that code public so I could figure out how to read the silly FF files!

💖 PassiveModding - Thanks for inspiring the whole project basically, and the incredible tool Meddle, and for the code to check for new addon versions from inside Blender which I yoinked from Meddle Tools, and for adding extra Dye ID data to Meddle exports when I asked for it so this project can integrate more seamlessly!

💖 NotNite - Thanks for Alpha, making it really easy to find and dig up files I needed!

💖 ShinoMythmaker - Thanks for answering my questions about how you made the MekTools auto-update system! And then letting me know how to make an even better version.

💖 Chirp - Thanks for helping me with another project a while ago and for inspiring be to do cooler coding things! And for being a good friend :)

💖 Everyone who has shown interest - Thank you to everyone who showed interest in the project or encouraged its development when I posted about it. It's been really cool, and warms my heart. Sorry it took so long lmao

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Made with FFGear

Ysera	Hannish Miqo'te	Kaj

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If you make something with my silly little addon I'd love to see it!
That would be really cool :)
Either tag @kaj.blue or use #FFGear on Bluesky and I'll see it <3