Gaia Reworked

Gaia Reworked

A redesign of Gaia to bring her in line with the Futures Unwritten illustration.
Once upon a time I uploaded this mod to XIV Mod Archive, I’m finally uploading it here.

Here’s the very quick TLDR: Mod makes Gaia stylistically match much better with Ryne and other teenagers in this game, for immersion reasons, via a mesh and texture edit.

This mod won’t be for everyone. If you like Gaia exactly as-is, or you’re already using a Gaia mod you like such as Sofie’s excellent Gaia Defined and don’t want to change anything, turn back.

This mod is a mesh edit and hand-painted retexture of Gaia’s face I made for myself and a friend. We were very excited to meet Gaia after seeing her illustrations, but when the final model showed up on screen… we experienced really severe uncanny valley/visual whiplash. Because of the way her lips were handled, she couldn’t smile correctly, making certain cutscenes sit firmly in the realm of extreme uncanny valley for us. Her eyes were also single-handedly the largest eyes on playable races in the game, and terrifying when placed next to any other character. I wish we didn’t find it so jarring and unpleasant but we did!

So… I made this. It’s a rework of Gaia that addresses multiple issues I had with the original model/textures.

Here are the changes I made:
A repaint of the entire eye section. This removes the enormous eye-bags and instead gives her only a little eye-shadow under the eye, like her Futures Unwritten illustration. This might be toned down too much for some, but that under-eye is so extreme on the model that adding anything in that area immediately turns extreme. Frankly I’m happy where it is currently, because it helps to de-age her back to the actual age she’s supposed to appear.

The eyes are now scaled slightly smaller on her face. It’s enough to allow them to remain on the large side, but now much more closely match her peer Ryne in size.

A repaint of her lips. This entirely realigns them to better sit on her model, and again match the Futures Unwritten illustration. Now when she smiles or laughs, she can actually pull the expression rather than the corners of her mouth on the texture and the mesh being completely misaligned to each other.

The lips have also been rescaled, and are ever so slightly smaller, so that the mouth better appears as part of the face during emoting rather than having that creepy kind of look like her whole skull is gonna split apart.

Removal of the extra lip mesh. I’m convinced this originally does nothing but make her look even worse. It also adds an unusual amount of lip-detailing for the vanilla game, so this is removed to make her more closely match with how lips are handled in-game.

Her nose has been shortened/repositioned, to help her regain some teenager proportions to match Ryne, rather than having features that are literally more aged than Thancred and Urianger.

The shadow of her hair in her texture has been removed, as other characters (including Ryne, who she is pictured near most often) don’t have this at all.

I darkened her upper eyelid make-up a little, since the removal of the under-eye bags felt like I’d taken away a lot of her make-up.