The way armor dye "should" work.

Aesthier · June 2018

There are a ton of beautiful armors where you can tell that the artists really took a lot of time to make with all the etchings, however, the way that the texture or UV maps are divided up to allow for dying just falls completely short of what we as purchasers are looking for.

If ZoS would spend a bit more time translating the dying system to really match the armors I could easily see myself spending more money.

So the artists at ZoS are very capable of producing some wonderful armors however somewhere in the translation of what areas (or masking areas) are tied to what color pallet (think zones 1, 2, and 3) ZoS falls flat on its face and the result is less than satisfactory:

I think ZoS should allow their artists and coders a bit more time so they could zone texture maps in a manner that allows us as purchasers the ability to really bring the beauty of these armors to life like so:

Now I am not the best artists so forgive the outlandish blue but what I am trying to bring light to is the disconnect of the beauty of the armors produced and the translation of those files into a format that really allows us to make use of them at the dye station.

Recremen · June 2018

Oh boy, comPLETEly agree. All the base game armor has these interesting and obvious mappings to separate the bulk from the trim to really help the armors pop. Then at some point we started getting stuff like Order of the Hour motif, which while pretty has a teeeeeerrible color slot mapping. Like "oh hey, what if we just made this entire piece all one color, even though it has obvious trim and ornamentation that deserves its own unique slot".

ElFonz0 · June 2018

Totally agree. I would love to be able to have the etchings/trims/etc be their own dye channel(image 2) as opposed to having different parts of the armor be the different dye channels(image 1)

Like I would love the psijic and the ebonshadow styles more if I could color the ridges and swirls and stuff a different color because otherwise it's one big splotch of that color, and it usually looks kinda weird if I color it in transliminal violet, my favorite dye

Aliyavana · June 2018

That looks a lot better tbh

Exalted_Goose · June 2018

I cannot agree more; one of the reasons why I'm a huge fan of the Covenant and Ebonheart Heavy Motifs, (not the Aldmeri one, because it's too low-res and looks a bit tacky to me), is because of those dye-able trims - they look absolutely superb. Personally, I'm all for having more Dye Slots altogether. I think that having the ability to dye trims as well as different layers of the actual armour itself would look really nice. Using the given example...

Aesthier wrote: »

...I like how the blue gives the armour shape and diversity, (especially on the breastplate), and with the trim, I think it'd look even better. Equally, if you prefer it just as the second image, (with the trim, and without the subordinate blue on the actual armour), then you could just dye it the same as the primary section.

At any rate, I'd definitely like to see something that'll break the homogeneous, single-colour smack that's applied to so many Motifs. So many have some really interesting designs that'd really be brought to life by a distinguishable colour that's separate from the main body, it'd add so much more to armour customisation as a whole.