Both Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 have unique ways of displaying their texture maps. This article goes over how Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring's texture maps work, as well as a guide on how one can transform a BG3 texture map into something Elden Ring can render.
Texture Examples
BG3 weapon models usually consists of the following .DDS texture files: the albedo map, the normal map and the physical map. Below is how the Balduran's Giantslayer's normal map looks like:
BG3 physical maps combine the metallic, roughness and ambient occlusion maps into one file. Below is how the Giantslayer's physics map looks like:
Elden Ring weapon models usually consists of the following .DDS textures: the albedo map, the normal map and the metallic map. Below is how the Reduvia's normal map looks like:
In both games, the albedo map look like your regular color maps. There also isn't anything unique about Elden Ring's metallic maps.
Texture Channels
As mentioned earlier, BG3 physical maps combine the metallic, roughness, and ambient occlusion maps into a single file. Each map is stored in a different color channel:
- Red: Metallic
- Green: Roughness
- Blue: Ambient Occlusion
- Alpha: Empty
The purple normal maps you're probably familiar with store data in the red, green and blue color channels. BG3 normal maps, on the other hand, store data in the green, blue and alpha channels. Overall, BG3 normal map channels are as follows
- Red: Empty
- Green: Green (DirectX orientation)
- Blue: Blue
- Alpha: Red
Elden Ring normal maps are a bit complicated. The channels for Elden Ring normal maps are as follows:
- Red: Red
- Green: Green
- Blue: Inverted roughness (aka glossiness)
- Alpha: Mask
Extracting Weapon Textures from BG3
I plan on eventually writing a longer tutorial on how to port model from BG3 into Elden Ring. At the mean time, you can read this post on how to port models from BG3 into Elden Ring and this tutorial on how to find textures in Baldur's Gate 3 using the Modder's Multitool. You can also watch a video tutorial on how to do the latter below:
While digging through a weapon's texture files, you might encounter a texture with a "_GMSK" suffix in its name. This file is known as the Gradient Map. This GMSK file exists due to the fact that unlike Elden Ring, a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 weapons are reskins of other weapons, and the GMSK file is how BG3 recolors weapons. You can find more information on gradient maps/masks in the linked article.
Converting Textures from BG3 to Elden Ring
You will need the following tool to convert textures from BG3 into Elden Ring:
- GIMP
- Paint.net
Let's use the Balduran's Giantslayer as our example. In GIMP, open both the physics (gtp_1) and normal (gtp_2) .DDS files as layers. With only the physics map layer visible, go to Colors -> Components -> Decompose. In the Decompose window, set "Color model:" to RGB and uncheck the "Decompose to layers" box. Pressing OK will create 3 new tabs in GIMP, one for each color channel. Conveniently, the tab names contains the color they correspond to. As mentioned earlier, the red channel corresponds to the metallic map. With the metallic map tab selected, export the metallic map as a .DDS file.
With only the normal map layer visible, go back to the Decompose window. In the Decompose window, set "Color model:" to RGBA, uncheck the "Decompose to layers" box. When you press OK, 4 new tabs will be created in GIMP.
Now it's time to convert the normal maps to Elden Ring. First, go the the green channel tabs for both the physics and normal maps and invert their colors (Colors -> Invert). Then go to Colors -> Components -> Compose. Because we don't have a mask map, we can set "Color model" to RGB. Under the Channel Representation section, set Red to the normal map's red channel, Green to the normal map's green channel and Blue to the physical map's (inverted) green channel. When converted into Elden Ring, the normal map for the Balduran's Giantslayer should look like the following:
Export the normal map as a .DDS.
For models, Elden Ring .DDS files need to have BC7 compression. GIMP is unable to do that type of compression though. Therefore, you will need to open any .DDS files you want to use for your model in Paint.net and save them with BC7 compression.
Elden Ring materials (MTD) to use
In the FLVER Editor's Materials tab, you'll see a table listing all the materials in the mesh, as well as the .MATXML file each material uses under the MTD Path column. The MTD (also known as Matbin) material you use can actually significantly alter the appearance of your textures. Unfortunately, it's a bunch of guessing and checking to see which MTD is right for your mesh. Some useful materials I found so far include:
- P[WP_A_0222]_em.matxml: Coded Sword's material. useful when you have an emissive map. Set your emissive map on the Wyburn_Rune_snp_Texture2D_1_EmissiveMap row
- P[WP_A_1005]_metal.matxml: Nightrider Glaive's material. Makes your metallic sections look very white.
- P[WP_A_0100]_metal.matxml: Dagger's materials. Preserves the tones of your color map.
Emissive Textures
Several weapons in this mod have glowing emissive textures. As mentioned earlier, I used the Coded Sword's matbin (P[WP_A_0222]_em.matxml) to display these glowing textures. For example, here's the matbin table for Shortsword +2:
When it comes to glowing textures inside Elden Ring, the Wyburn_Rune_snp_Texture2D_1_EmissiveMap texture is multiplied by the Wyburn_Rune_snp_Texture2D_3_AlbedoMap texture. In our Shortsword +2 example, short_sword_2_gm.tif is multiplied by em_scroll.tif (em_scroll.tif is the name the Coded Sword uses for its glow multiplier).
Short_sword_2_gm.tif was custom made for this mod, but it originated from Baldur's Gate 3. More specifically, short_sword_2_gm.tif originated from Shortsword +2's glow map. That glow map (WPN_HUM_Shortsword_A_2_GM.DDS) is shown below:
Because WPN_HUM_Shortsword_A_2_GM.DDS is a greyscale image, it can be used as layer mask for a solid, cyan-colored texture. Upon applying this layer mask, you get the the following glow mask:
From there, this blue glow mask is multiplied by em_scroll.tif. Em_scroll.tif is a near black (#0A0A0A), greyscale texture:
Putting this all together, you'll get the following glow on your sword:
Without em_scroll.tif, the emissive textures will shine very, very brightly:
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