Hello everyone,

I'm working on a personal mod for Final Fantasy IV (3D Remake - PC Steam version) to make Barbariccia a playable character, intending to replace Rydia (due to her existing Black Magic command set).
So far:

The 3D model replacement (both overworld and in-battle) is handled thanks to piano221's model swapping mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasy43dremake/mods/1).
I've successfully located and edited the file for character names in menus: it's babil_common.msd (found within the game's main data folder > "extracted_data" > "files"), which can be read and edited with Sublime Text using UTF-16 LE encoding.

My current challenge is replacing the character's face portrait image that appears in the menus.

After much investigation, I've discovered:

The face portrait images are packed within the MENU_Common.dat file.

Using QuickBMS with the ff4_ssam.bms script (by Luigi Auriemma), I can successfully extract the contents of MENU_Common.dat.

Among the extracted files is face.NCGR. Despite the .NCGR extension, this file is actually a standard PNG image (renaming it to .png allows it to be opened and edited perfectly). This PNG is a sprite sheet containing multiple character face portraits.

The problem is re-importing/repacking the modified face.NCGR (the PNG) back into MENU_Common.dat.

When I try to use QuickBMS's re-import function with the same ff4_ssam.bms script, the process fails for every file with a consistent signature error:

signature of 4 bytes at offset 0x00000000 doesn't match the one expected by the script:

this one: "PNG" (or "RECN", "RNAN", etc., depending on the actual file type)
expected: "SSAM"

This error occurs even if I try to re-import the files immediately after extraction without making any modifications to the face.NCGR (PNG) file. It seems the script expects the input files for re-importing to already have an "SSAM" signature/wrapper, which is not present on the raw extracted files.

What I need help with:

I'm looking for a way to get the modified face.NCGR (my edited PNG, renamed back to .NCGR) back into the MENU_Common.dat archive to change the in-game menu portrait.

Does anyone:

Know of a modified version of ff4_ssam.bms or a different script that handles re-importation for this "SSAM" archive format ожидаются?
Understand the "SSAM" wrapper structure and how to re-apply it to the raw files before re-importing?

Know of any other tools or methods to successfully repack MENU_Common.dat for FFIV 3D Remake on Steam?

Any clues or assistance to solve this re-importation issue would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!