Surfaces & Colour

How an attachment is painted, beyond its base texture. All of these live in the definition file.

{
  "tint": "hair",
  "tint_blend": "overlay",
  "tint_strength": 0.8,
  "tint_mask": "wing_mask",
  "emissive": "horn_runes",
  "render": "translucent"
}

Tint Sources

tint accepts a flat colour or a bearer-resolved source:

Value	Colour used
"#RRGGBB"	The flat colour.
"skin"	The skin colour the bearer’s face actually rendered with (MCA’s melanin gradient plus any origin tint), captured from the skin layer each frame. The older "skin_tint": true still works as an alias.
"hair"	The bearer’s rendered hair colour, greying included. Falls back to the flat tint until hair has rendered, or when the rig hides hair.
"eyes"	The bearer’s expressed eye colour, matching the face overlay.
"gene"	The heritable colour rolled on the granting gene’s tint channels. See below.

Author the texture in grayscale for bearer-resolved sources, the same as skin tinting: a tail that greys with its senior’s hair, horns that match the eyes.

Blend Modes And Strength

Field	Values	Notes
tint_blend	multiply (default), screen, overlay, color	The same four modes skin palettes use. Multiply darkens, screen lightens, overlay deepens contrast, and color keeps the texture’s shading while taking the tint’s hue.
tint_strength	0..1	Fades the tint toward the untinted texture. Defaults to 1.

Non-multiply modes bake a tinted copy of the texture on the client, cached and cheap. color is the mode to reach for when recolouring a painted (non-grayscale) texture, such as coat colours over detailed fur.

Tint Mask

A tint normally applies to the whole attachment. tint_mask names a second texture that sets how much of the tint applies to each pixel, so part of an attachment can be tinted and part of it left alone, like a wing where the membrane takes the gene’s colour and the chitin stays neutral.

The mask is a grayscale PNG that goes beside the base texture, in data/<ns>/attachment/textures/, and it has to be the same size as that texture. If it is not, it is ignored rather than sampled wrong, and /townstead attachment doctor reports the mismatch along with both sizes.

Each pixel’s brightness is how strongly the tint applies there:

Mask pixel	Result
Black	The base texture’s own colour, untinted.
White	The full tint.
Mid-grey	Eased between the two, so a region can fade into its neighbour.
Transparent	Read as black, so you can cut the mask out instead of painting it.

{
  "texture": "insect_wing",
  "tint": "gene",
  "tint_blend": "color",
  "tint_mask": "insect_wing_mask"
}

To use it, for example to make an insect wing, paint the membrane white and the chitin black in data/<ns>/attachment/textures/insect_wing_mask.png. That makes the membrane take the gene’s rolled colour while the chitin renders untinted.

The color blend in that example is not something the mask needs. It is there because the wing texture is painted rather than grayscale, and a mask works with any of the four blend modes.

Without a mask, brightness is the only lever you have, because the color blend keeps each pixel’s luminance and only replaces its hue and saturation. Near-white and near-black pixels barely change, so a white tail tip stays white while the rest of the tail takes the rolled colour. But a mid-tone region always takes the hue, so you cannot get neutral grey chitin beside a coloured membrane that way. That is what tint_mask is for.

Heritable Colour

"tint": "gene" reads the colour from the bearer’s genetics. The granting gene declares the palette:

"tint": {
  "label": "Fur Colour",
  "palette": ["#F1762B", "#EFE6D5", "#3B322D"]
}

Newborns roll a palette colour, children mean-blend their parents’ components, and the character editor offers the palette as swatches plus free colour bars. Pair it with "tint_blend": "color" to recolour a painted texture while keeping its shading. The genetics side is covered in Genetics & Morphs.

Emissive

emissive names a second texture drawn full-bright over the same geometry, day or night. Transparent pixels do not glow, so a mostly transparent mask lights just the markings: glowing runes, foxfire tips, bioluminescent spots. The emissive layer follows every morph, pose, clip, and physics swing of the base pass, and it is untinted, so a glow stays constant across heritable coat colours.

Translucency

"render": "translucent" renders the whole attachment with alpha, for wisps, membranes, and ghost tails. The default cutout treats alpha as on-or-off, which is right for almost everything else.