Elden Ring Custom Asset Implementation
For this Personal Portfolio piece I wanted to gain more experience and knowledge in the field of asset creation and implementation. Below you will see my progress in creating an armor mod for Elden Ring by following an entire asset creation pipeline.
Tools Used:
3D Modeling: Blender, FLVER Editor
Texturing: Substance Painter
Unpacking game files: UXM Unpacker
Target Game: Elden Ring
Playing Elden Ring I was unhappy with the lack of a gothic Sallet helm and decided to make my own and port it to the game as a publicaly available mod so others that wish, might get to use it.
I made the basic shape of the helm from a subdivided cube, making sure I use the correct scaling as the other available helmets in game. I iterated on multiple versions with additional components such as gorget and moth pie
For the texture set I started off simple, fist just using a dark metal, gold accents and minimal wear. However I decided to go a step further and try to give the helm the same appeal as the Oeathkeeper helmet form the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. I managed to do so by unpacking that specific helmet's texture set and using sections of it as decals in Substance painter. To make the engravings stand out I converted the decals to a grayscale heightmap. The result turned out nicely
After experimenting with the decal placement I ended up going with the version seen above.
Porting the FBX file to a FLVER file proved to be the hardest part of this project since I am using community made tools with minimal documentation. I ended up importing the helmet multiple times until I figured out how to do it properly. This resulted in some funny outcomes.
Model imported with the wrong transforms, can be seen floating on the right side of the screen
Model missing its textures
Eventually I managed to get it to import with its proper transforms and correct texture set. I was proud to see my work ported to the game after so many attempts and hours worked on it.
You can check it for yourself by heading over to Nexus Mods and installing the mod.