Animated Emissive Image Overlays!

(Characterscroll.shpk)
By Bacara

(Last updated 5/29/25)

Contact for assistance/issues on discord: Bacara

IF USING PENUMBRA: https://heliosphere.app/mod/bktfny69y57gf4y42bp4tn5z38
This addon to penumbra will name the characterscroll constants, making that process easier to find what you are looking for.

Firstly, let’s go over what Characterscroll does!

This shader effectively takes an image as your emissive, and scrolls it though the colorset rows it is enabled on.

This will allow you to do things such as what I’m showing with my own mod, Mjolnir.

Blender:

1. Go to the UV editing tab, select your mesh, and Give your model a UV2.
   Textools may have assigned your model a UV2 and UV3 upon model export. Delete the second and third UV if this is the case.
   *this is not a blender guide.
2. Adjust your UV2 to where whatever you wish to have a flowing texture, will be laid out straight and all oriented in the same direction. So if you wish the flowing texture to run down a handle or through a piece of armor, your UV2 will have to have things correctly oriented.
3. If you are using this shader on skintight clothing or a mesh up against another, offset by 0.03 from the other mesh to prevent LOD errors.

Textools Initial setup:

1. You can borrow the settings from my mod here as a preset or to play around with it (you may get a diffuse later doing this, just remove it.): https://xivmodarchive.com/modid/113134
   Open my mod as a penumbra transaction, or directly in textools to proceed.
   

Save my settings from Mjolnir as a preset, and load it onto your mod with these settings.
(You can also grab from a dawntrail NPC, level 97 spoilers: 9242 top, mat A.)

2. From here, you would be getting a new texture showing up called Unknown_o or something similar. This is where your new texture would come in that would be a your scrolling emissive. If this does not show up, Create a new image and have its sampler as g_SamplerCatchlight.
   
3. You would now put the effect that you wish to be your emissive as this texture. Nothing special about this map other than you want the image to be seamless. I will have an example at the end of the guide.
4. If you are working with opacity as well, go and change your shader keys to match these.
   

Colorset values!

Hey, you made it this far! Now we’re going to go over how to enable this effect on a colorset row. This will be doing so from textools.

Material Constants

These constants will let you control the direction of the translation and how fast or slow they move. The other two control your tiling of the image. There are different constants for the A and B row, so you can set completely different directions and speeds. I’m leaving some defaults i used in extra info on this in case. These will likely be named in future penumbra and textools updates.

Update: You can set your translate speed to 0, and tiling to 1 to use characterscroll to make a full RGB range emissive map.
Useful for very detailed galaxy effects or replication of aetheryte crystals.

And there you have it!

Welcome to the land of flowing fire textures, lightning effects and fun little effects you can pull off now.

Thanks to:

• Nylfae and Cultist for nudging me in right directions.
  Nylfae (Again) for the material development kit for penumbra.
• Cordia Qoet for extra constant information.
• Mimi for teaching/testing opacity and LOD fixes.Examples of “catchlight” textures below:
  (Note: You can make black and white catchlights to be able to use emissive color. When making your own “catchlight”, how you handle transparency of your scrolling emissive is your color vibrancy. So black = no emissive, white = full emissive.)