Guidefor players3 min read
Fresh Animations, Tissou's Zombie Pack and other CEM packs on Fabric: EMF plus ETF
Custom Entity Models and emissive textures are OptiFine-only resource pack formats. On Fabric or Quilt without OptiFine, you need two separate mods, matched to each other, or you get animations with no glowing eyes, or glowing eyes with no animations.
Why these packs need more than a resource pack
A resource pack is normally just assets: textures, models, sounds, read by code that already ships with the game. Custom Entity Models and emissive textures are different. They are file formats OptiFine itself defined and reads with its own proprietary rendering code. Vanilla Minecraft has no idea what a .jem model file or an emissive layer suffix means, and neither does Fabric or Quilt on their own. Without something reading those files the way OptiFine does, the pack falls back to whatever the default model and texture look like, silently.
That is exactly what Fresh Animations and Tissou's Zombie Pack are built on. Fresh Animations replaces vanilla mob animations with custom rigged ones. Tissou's Zombie Pack gives zombie variants distinct textures with glowing eyes. Both depend on CEM for the model and animation side, and on OptiFine's emissive texture convention for anything that glows. Neither feature exists in vanilla Minecraft's resource pack spec at all.
The fix: two mods, not one
The replacement path on Fabric and Quilt is two separate mods by the same author, Traben: Entity Model Features (EMF), which reads OptiFine's CEM format for custom mob models and animations, and Entity Texture Features (ETF), which reads OptiFine's texture format, including the emissive glow layer. You need both. EMF actually lists ETF as a hard dependency on its own mod page, since EMF reuses ETF's texture handling and config screen internally. Installing EMF without ETF will not give you a working pack; installing ETF without EMF gets you emissive textures on the default model, with no custom animation at all.
This maps directly onto the complaints both packs collect. Fresh Animations' comment section has players saying the pack "just gets rid of everyone's eyes" or that mobs load with no eyes at all, on setups running only part of the required pair, or an old build of one half. Tissou's Zombie Pack has the same shape of report: "the glowing eyes still doesn't work, emissive is turned on, i checked," which is a texture-side symptom pointing at ETF specifically, not the pack's own settings.
Match the versions, not just the mods
Having both installed is necessary but not sufficient. EMF and ETF are two independently versioned mods, and a build of one from a different Minecraft version or release cycle than the other is a common source of exactly the partial breakage described above: animations working while the glow does not, or the reverse. A combination one player confirmed working and shared for others: EMF Forge 1.20.1 build 2.4.1, alongside ETF Forge 1.20.1 build 6.2.9. The pattern to copy is not that specific version pair, since both mods have moved on since, but the habit: pick your Minecraft version and loader first, then download the current EMF and ETF builds published for that exact combination, from the same mod page's version list. Do not mix a build from one Minecraft version with a build from another and assume it will work because the mod name matches.
Stacking multiple CEM packs is load order dependent
Running Fresh Animations and Tissou's Zombie Pack together is common, since one covers animation and the other covers zombie textures, but they both redefine some of the same entities. When two CEM packs both touch the same mob, whichever pack sits higher in your in-game resource pack list wins outright for that entity's model and texture. There is no merge between them.
Players running both packs together have reported precisely this: with Tissou's Zombie Pack listed above Fresh Animations, the animation disappears. With Fresh Animations listed above Tissou's, the animation shows up but Tissou's texture does not. Nothing in the game or either pack flags this as a conflict. It just quietly picks one pack's version and drops the other's for anything they overlap on.
If you are running both, open your resource pack list and treat the order deliberately: put whichever pack's version of the shared entity you actually want to see closer to the top. If neither combination gives you both the texture and the animation you expected, that is the load order deciding it, not a broken install.
