REQUIRED MODDING SKILL LEVEL: Medium
This guide will be working on the assumption that you have used (or are willing to learn) Blender 2.8+* and are somewhat familiar with the model modding process in Elden Ring. If not, links to resources are provided to learn the basics.
*Can be done in other modelling software, but guide is only written for Blender users due to it being of a high quality that is also free to use. It's a growing standard in the modding community.
Expected Project Time: 2-8 hours depending on armor design and modding skill level.
Introduction
Initially when I wrote this guide, I wanted it to be maximally accessible – as I tried though, I realized listing every single step would make this guide huge, and paradoxically less easy to follow. There are also existing guides that discuss many of the concepts that will be needed for the process required here anyway.
So in that vein, instead of assuming that everyone is a beginner, this preliminary guide assumes you have some modding experience, or at least will be able to find the guides on modding for Elden Ring in general.
Even doing so – you’ll note that this guide is pretty long and comprehensive. The version that told you what buttons to press and how to organize your files and tools was much longer still.
Anyway, in my view is the more important part of the ABNB release – at the end of the day, you’re going to want to use armor in this game, so any properly working nude mod for the base body would be covered up quickly anyway! Additionally, unless the mod conforms to the proportions of the existing base body, it’ll create issues meshing up with the existing armor that does allow skin to show (while been hidden for the armors that don’t).
To that end, I’ve prepared the blender file with the mesh and textures and assorted files, and presorted the groups.
Modding Learning Resources
There are a variety of learning resources if you're enthusiastic to make your own ABNB mods, but haven't really modded anything before.
Scrubs Milk Barn discord server – friendly folks with good guides and resources to help you for all your modding needs. I’m on there frequently, but people are friendly and helpful too (and hopefully you are too!)
Youtube: Introduction to Elden Ring Modding
Youtube: How to Import Custom Armor Models
Youtube: Elden Ring Modding Tutorial - NPC / Mob 3D Model
For Blender Learning, Youtube is your best friend. There are any number of high quality tuts to get your familiarized with the interface and functions.
A good starting point to get a beginner up to speed to work with these sort of mods is this:
Blender Character Modelling for Absolute Beginners
I estimate it'll take an enthusiastic beginner roughly a week or two to become familiar enough in Blender to be able to work fluently with this modding project. Of course that skillset can then be repurposed for other means - 3D modelling and everything around it is a skillset with growing value in our modern world (as more and more stuff we do rely on 3D information and can take advantage of it).
Tools
To get started on making your own custom lewd/bikini armor mod, you’ll need a few tools to begin with.
UXM – get this from the servername discord – it’ll be pinned in the tools and resources channel. Do a bit of google-fu to find it, but honestly if you’re already modding, you will probably already have this tool and unpacked your game files with it.
Bloodborne modelling tool
Yabber
FLVer Editing Tool (which you’ll want to associate with .flver files).
Paint.net (which you’ll want to associate with .DDS files)
Blender 2.8+ (preferably 3.0+).
Will also need the XNALara plugin (or the Source Film Maker plugin) for blender.
A copy of the ABNB package from the downloads section.
Preliminary
1.Once you’ve downloaded and installed the necessary tools and installed the plugin for Blender, you’ll want to setup your workspace. Create shortcuts for Yabber.exe, The bloodborne model exporter directory (a shortcut to the exe has issues where it places the extracted files into the tool directory rather than the directory the original file came from), MySFformat.exe (the Flver model viewer/editor), Blender, your mod directory, your game directory.
2.You’ll also want to organize your mod directory – Keep ABNB, Copy of Parts, Active projects in separate folders in this directory.
3.Once you’re ready, you’ll want to figure out the armor you want to mod – go into the game and look at the various armors. Ideally full body masking (i.e. armor that'll hide all the body parts. And with good lines to allow for easy parts removal. In the example for this tutorial, I’m going using the Land of Reeds samurai armor.
4.Remember the name – use the armor list text file (included in downloads) to figure out what the file name is. The Land of Reeds set is found with the 1360 (and 1361 endings). For this project, I’ll be altering the body and legs, while leaving the gauntlets and helm alone, so I’ll need BD_M_1360, BD_M_1361, LG_M_1360 from your /parts directory. Note the _l versions of the same files are for NPCs (such as your mimic, and in game characters), so if you want to replace them, just make a copy and add _l at the end of the project – and replace the files in the parts directory.
General Process
5.Find and Extract the armor files you want to mod from your Elden Ring game/parts directory.
6.Unpack the DCX files with yabber – which will create a folder of the same name. Navigate to the .flver file in that directory and unpack with the bloodborne v3 tool.
7.Unpack the TPF file in the armor directory and convert the DDS to TGAs with paint.net. You’ll want to delete the numbers from the .tga files to avoid issues when using in Blender.
8.Import the ascii or SMD file into Blender with the XNALara plugin (for ascii) or the Blender Source Film Maker plugin for .smd.
9.You should also append the ABNB body (and bikini of choice if you’re using it) at this point to a separate collection so you can turn it on and off independently.
10.Setup your materials on the meshes so you can see what the whole model looks like.
If your materials have transparencies, you can add that to the material as above.
11.A files are for albedo. Use SRGB and set to the Principled BSDF color node.
12.M files are for metallic. Use non-color and set to the metallic node.
13.N files are multiple maps packed into one file – Set as non-color and separate RGB the color from it. Make a combine RGB node – put R into R, G into inverted G and Set B as 1. Plug this combined RGB into a normal map and feed it into the principled BSDF.
14.On the separate RGB blue node, invert that and connect to the roughness – the blue channel is a gloss map and roughness is gloss inverse.
15.Finally connect the alpha node from the _N image to specular.
16.This should give you the correct material setup; assuming that your mesh is using that material file. You can set all the meshes for that armor piece (Torso to torso, leg to leg, etc) to that material.
Cloth materials will need the .DAE export from the flver, as the UVs on the .ascii and .smd exports are broken.
Editing: Overview
17.This portion will require a bit of Blender model editing knowledge. Suffice to say, there are a lot of bitsy steps involved, using a few useful tools.
18.Your goal is to determine which meshes you can just delete, which parts you want to alter, and which parts are retained.
19.At the end, you’ll need to export the ABNB body parts of the mesh, as well as the parts that you have altered. Both the deleted and retained parts of the design are not exported (these elements are either deleted from or retained in the original armor flver file).
Editing: Weighting to Skeleton
20.At the beginning, once you’ve imported the ascii files in and setup materials, you’ll want to rotate the armor’s armature on global-z 180 degrees, and scale it -1 on global X.
Rotate the armature and invert on X-axis to put it into the proper orientation in Blender.
Then unparent (ALT+P -> keep transforms) the armor meshes from the skeleton.
21.Apply the scale and rotation (SHIFT+A -> Rotation & Scale) to the meshes you’ve just unparented
Then go into edit mode and flip their faces (ALT+N -> Flip).
Reparent these meshes to the armature (SHIFT+P -> Keep Transform).
22.During the process, you’ll want to set the ABNB body parts armature to the skeleton of the armor part you’re editing (torso, leg, etc). This way you can move the ABNB body along with the armor to figure out how well they’re meshing together.
23.Additionally you can test for weight groups that aren’t present on the armor that are on the body. You can do this by grabbing all the bones in pose mode and moving them around. Some verts will be left behind – those are the weight groups that aren’t affected by the armor bones.
24.You can also confirm the weight groups by switching the armature layer – there should be 2 dots, one is the active bones and the other the unused bones – the unused bones will look messy; if you grab them, they’ll move the verts that didn’t move with the rest of the body.
25.Go through and figure out which bones aren’t been used – once you do, remove those vertex weight groups from the ABNB meshes. These have typically been the axilla and pec bone groups in my experience (one or the other or both – do check though, you don’t want to remove groups unnecessarily). Sometimes it's Spine Armor 1.
26.Also double check again to make sure all verts have some weight – by grabbing all the bones in pose mode and moving them around. If not, then you’ll want to push a small amount of weight (from the surrounding bones) onto those unweighted verts – probably with the smudge or blur tool.
27.Once things are working, you should be able to move all the active bones in the skeleton around and both armor and ABNB body should move around with it.
Editing: Modifying the Meshes
28.Some tips that will help the editing process is when in edit mode – you can use L for select linked, allowing you to select large sections of armor easily. You can press H for hide and shift-H for unhide. This allows you to hide parts you’ve selected so you can select the unselected parts easier and then bring them back selected for easy retrieval. Once you’ve selected the faces you want to remove from the mesh, press P to separate. It’s better to separate and then hide or move into a separate hidden collection in the outliner than to delete elements straight out – in case you change your mind and want to get those details back.
29.For the armor parts, you can press H and Shift-H to hide and unhide. Parts that can removed entirely should be set to their own collection and hidden from view. You won’t need to do anything else to these parts.
30.Parts that you need to edit to remove some parts should follow the tips above. Then move the separated parts to the hidden collections folder.
31.In general, when making a Skimpy armor mod, you’ll want to expose the good parts – breasts, nipples, pussy and probably abs. Thighs and upper arms of armor parts are also good candidate for removal – do so at your artistic discretion. Keep enough of the armor mesh so that it can be identified as that armor.
32.Something worth noting is that with the elbow and knee pads on armors, there’s often multiple versions for male/female and under cloaks. These versions help reduce the clipping in game, but they need to use the parts in the flver to retain these characteristics. If you delete them and use a custom version, they’ll stay as the custom version and not respond to the over/under cape/cloth masking flags.
33.Some parts you’ll want to keep – things like upper chest plate and skirt armor – but you’ll have to resize them to fit them better to the body. Separate them from their parent meshes, and scale, move and rotate them into a position that better suits the model.
Upper Torso Armor Plate Clips into breasts, but useful to keep as the pauldrons connect to that piece.
Solution - scale and move that piece until it stops clipping.
34.There are a variety of bikinis and skimpy garments included with the ABNB blender file. Choose the ones that best fit your design - they can be mixed and matched. Once imported, parented and armature modifier set, you’ll want to remove the same weight groups you removed from the body earlier.
35.Additionally, you can borrow the armor material with the bikini – this helps to integrate the bikini into the design of the armor a lot better than having a separate material. Start by assigning the armor material to it.
36.Go into UV editing mode with the bikini selected and select the Albedo of the armor texture. Move the bikini cup UVs around until you find a nice position/pattern for them. You can scale, move, rotate, etc to find the right spot. Do the same for the Bikini strings.
You can achieve a variety of designs for the bikinis depending on which parts of the material you position the UVs over.
I ended up using ridged metal plates with the red string to best retain the feel of the existing design.
37.Also if you’re using the bikini mod, you’ll notice there’s a bikini version of the torso and a nippled version. You can export with both and then delete the one you don’t need from flver later.
38.Additionally, we can now continue to use the cloth physics that are built into various bones. When importing into Blender, the bones will be misnamed, causing those bones to not work properly on export. Now you can get them working properly – all you have to do is in the outliner, find the _cloth_ bones (use the search function), and rename them [cloth]. There’s a Blender rename pluging by Matthias Patscheider that’ll make this task quick and simple. This means you can modify meshes with cloth physics that have bones to support them (some don’t) and have them work as expected. The ones without cloth to support you’ll either have to not modify and retain them in the FLVER, delete them, or rely on simply bone weights to support their movement (i.e. they’ll no longer move like cloth).
39.When you’re happy with your design take a note of any parts you haven’t altered and set them into their own ‘unaltered armor parts’ collection (or some such). Although these will appear in game, you don’t want to export them as they’ll override the ones already present in the FLVER file.
You should also take note of which body parts are and aren't masked by the game armor. You'll want to include all the ABNB body parts that are masked out (so as to replace them, as they otherwise wouldn't appear). Use Yapped Runebear to determine which parts are and aren't masked. Their masks will correspond with the number before the body part.
40.Before exporting, we’ll want to go through and sort the materials on the mesh. The meshes should be separated by material type and section. E.g. Chest upper metal. Chest upper fabric. Chest skirt metal, etc. You can create duplicate materials and simply rename them for the appropriate meshes. The names on the meshes should indicate their material type (METAL, LEATHER, FUR, ETC). In the materials tab, you can duplicate the material and simply rename them accordingly. You don't need to do anything in Blender beyond this - but they'll be picked up by the FLVER editor when you import the FBX.
If the materials are appropriately sorted, you only need to copy and paste the different materials into the different types for it to work (metal to metal, leather to leather, fabric to fabric - and any detail masks and textures that those materials use will appear on the new meshes/materials).
You can also join mesh parts together - preferably in logical chunks that you want to be able to remove easily from FLVER to create armor variations; e.g. Pauldrons and everything connected to it, or skirt armor and all the pieces that rely on it, or indeed the ABNB body itself.
Importing into FLVER
41.While still in blender, organize your meshes and armatures such that you’re exporting the parts you want to change in the flver. So the ABNB body parts that aren’t covered (set aside the ones that are – you might have to delete some faces too from those parts), as well as the modified armor meshes. If you’ve been editing meshes marked cloth – you’ll need to consult a cloth modding tutorial to ensure you’re doing the right thing there – but in general, you can set those aside too for the purpose of this mod.
42.Export the active collection as a FBX.
43.Open up the armor flver – any changes you make will create a .bak file of the original, if there isn’t already one. If there is… then you’ll want to rename the .bak to something else.
44.Click on meshes and if using a mesh with cloth physics, check on delete facesets only.
45.Next click on the check button against each mesh – go through and remove the meshes that you’ll be modifying and have edited, and the meshes you want to delete completely. This should leave the meshes you’ll want to retain (e.g. elbow/knee pads).
46.Click modify and close out of the meshes pop up window, and import model into this flver. Navigate to your FBX that you exported – import in and check yes to invert Y/Z axis, click on to texture pathways and yes to LOD.
47.Hopefully if you’ve done everything correctly, the parts you import will be oriented correctly to the existing armor parts.
48.If not, you’ll have to manually rotate/scale the mesh parts into position, or redo the export step from Blender while ensuring that things are correctly rotated/scaled/parented, etc.
49.During this step, you should also turn on back face rendering for the meshes that need it – in the viewport, if any parts of the armor are rendering as transparent where they should be solid, check the mesh and scroll to the right in the mesh selection pop up window and click on the right most button. This is particularly useful for elements like pauldrons.
50.If you’re using the bikini body, you should also go and delete the mesh with the nipples on – remembering to keep delete facesets only on for cloth physics mods.
51.If you have a backup/copy of the flver before that point, you can create a bikini/lewd variation and export the DCX out twice.
52.At this point, you should setup your materials as well – armors typically are divided into a few material categories – metal, leather, fabric, belts. For the mesh you imported, they should be divided into those materials in blender too. This will allow you to then just copy the json of the materials already in the file and past them into the imported materials. Do so for all the materials except the ABNB body. For that you can copy and paste the text from the ABNB Material JSON.txt included with the package.
53.Once this is done, click modify to modify and changes and close out of the FLVER.
Setting up the TPF
54.The TPF file in the DCX folder is the texture directory. If you haven’t already done it, unpack it with yabber. This project uses the default materials in the armor file (unless you’ve made custom textures, in which case you should also know what you’re doing). It also uses the ABNB texture files. Copy the DDS over the ABNB TPF folder into the armor TPF folder.
55.Next copy the text from the Yabber TPF XML copy and paste.txt (provided in the ABNB Mod Project files) into the XML file in the TPF folder – open it with notepad and paste it into the texture section. This way when you repack, it’ll recognize the ABNB files and put them in.
56.Go back to the directory with the TPF folder and .flver file. Repack the TPF folder with Yabber. It’ll overwrite the .tpf file and make a backup of it.
Repacking the DCX File and Testing in game
57.Finally, you should be able to backup all the way to the folder containing the DCX folder and repack the folder into a .dcx file with yabber.
58.This should give you a completed lewded armor file that you can paste into your game’s parts directory. You should probably make backups of the original before doing this (although you can get them back by deleting the modded files and unpacking with UXM again – which will only unpack missing files).
59.Test it in game – hopefully you have easy access to the armor you were modding, otherwise you’ll have to find it in game.
Troubleshooting
60.If you’ve done it correctly, things should work. If not, try to figure out what went wrong – check for weights, check for bones, check for textures, check the TPF, check the flver to make sure it’s pointing at the right materials, etc. Don't be surprised if this turns out to be the most time consuming part of the project - especially in your first go around of doing one of these mods.
61.The issues I had while doing the Lands of Reed armor included not parenting components to the correct armature and not setting them to the correct armature in modifier.
62.I’ve had issues with n-gons (5 or more sided polygons) not appearing in FLVER (and subsequently the game. You can find these easily by going into mesh edit and selecting a four sided face. Shift+G to select by similar – select polygon sides. Then in the pop-up in the bottom left, select greater than. Triangulate these n-gons.
63.I’ve had issues with faces not appearing – which can come down to things like face orientation, but also two sided rendering – make sure the relevant meshes have TBF toggled in FLVER.
64.Other face/mesh not appearing issues were more esoteric – turns out the rope material in the lands of reed wouldn’t render on my meshes for some reason, so I have to use the fabric json material definition to make the appear.
65.Vertex Weights is also a source of frequent correction – first time around not everything will move as you want it to, so you’ll have to go back and play with the weights again.
66.At the end of all this, you should have a working armor piece.
67.Now repeat the same for the other piece – most likely legs. Typically you only really need to make the body/legs part of the armor skimpy. If you have a particularly awesome design in mind that incorporates all 4 armor components, I assume you’re also at the level of familiarity with the tools where you can figure out the rest yourself - if not join the modding community and get some help from fellow modders!
Uploading to Nexus Mods
68.Remember to upload your completed mod to nexus – tag it as ABNB in the name and ‘A Better Nude Body’ in the description so that it’s easy for others to find and cross reference these body compatible armors. Additionally, specify this mod as a requirement for any ABNB mod.
PLEASE NOTE: While you're free to make whatever mod you want from the contents provided with the blender file, if you're going to name it with ABNB (and thus mark it as cross compatible with other ABNB armors and this skin), please DO NOT ALTER the body mesh or skin color textures in anyway, other than deleting faces in edit mode when armor covers that portion of the body. So if you decide to use this body to make 6-packless, pubic hairless, snow white goth chick, please do so, and even share it, just without marking it as 'ABNB'. Credits and links would still be required however!
69.The more of these that ABNB skimpy mods we get, the more cross referencing and lewd culture we get to enjoy in ER!
Fin.
17 comments
Do I need the bloodborne tool? I can't find anything on it, all the links are dead, and the stuff I can google doesn't seem quite right...
Sorry really new to flver and blender. I managed to get to the step "Cloth materials will need the .DAE export from the flver, as the UVs on the .ascii and .smd exports are broken".
Can someone expand on these steps? I exported the dae from Flver and tried importing it into blender but I am at a loss what to do from there to apply it to the cloth?
My guess is I am meant to correct the broken UV mapping with it?
Thanks for the guide man, you're gold.