Fixing the Neck Seam

In FFXIV, your face and your body are two separate models that meet in a ring around the neck. When a custom face and a custom body don't agree there (different skin settings, different textures, or a face saved without the data the game uses to join them), you see a line or a colour change at the neck.

Instant Edit can measure the seam, show you what's different, preview a fix, and then apply it to your mods.

Step by step

1. Check your character

1. Open the Quick Actions tab.
2. Under Fix neck seam, press Check and fix. This works on your own character.

The plugin compares the face and the body along the neck ring, the way the game's skin shader draws them, and lists what differs. Hover a row to see what it measures.

What it can find:

• Neck connection data: Dawntrail faces carry special vertices that the game uses to pull the body's neck edge onto the face. Custom faces saved without them leave a gap.
• Skin detail tile: the fine pore pattern of the skin. The face and body can use different sizes or strengths.
• Colour, skin tone influence, specular, roughness, subsurface scattering and the surface normal (how the lighting bends) on each side of the seam.

If everything matches, it says The face and body match at the neck.

2. Choose the fixes

Tick the fixes you want:

• Add neck connection data to the face model adds the missing connection vertices to the face.

• Bring the face's and body's skin settings together makes the skin settings match. The slider decides who changes:

  • all the way to one side: Only the body changes (to match the face),
  • all the way to the other: Only the face changes (to match the body),
  • in between: Both meet in the middle.

  The lines under the slider show the resulting values. Remember that the face material applies to the whole face and the body material to the whole body.

• Blend the face textures into the body at the neck shifts the face's colour, mask and normal map towards the body's values at the seam, fading out above it. Blend height sets how far up it fades (2 cm by default).

3. Preview it

Press Create preview mod. The fixed files go into a new mod called Neck Seam Preview - (your character), enabled for your character above your other mods. Your own mods don't change yet.

Look at your character in game. Measure again measures the seam with the preview active, so you can see the numbers improve.

4. Keep it or throw it away

• Apply to my mods writes the fixed files over the files your face and body mods use, keeping backups for a week. The preview mod is removed. Note that every character and mod option that uses those files changes too. Files that come from the game itself go into a new mod called Neck Seam Fix instead.
• Discard preview removes the preview mod and leaves everything as it was.

Good to know

• While a preview mod is active, the Quick Actions card reminds you, so you don't forget to apply or discard it.
• Changed face textures get new file paths while previewing, so other materials that share them aren't affected.
• If the check says your character has no face model loaded, refresh On Screen once your character is fully drawn.