Creating Armour
In this guide, we will go over the steps required to prepare the model, materials, and textures for new armour to work correctly in your mod.
Model
The first step is creating the asset you want. Below are example male and female human basemeshes, along with their limitation references:
If you want the armour to be available for other races, you’ll need to adjust it for each of those races individually. We have provided the basemeshes for other races in a package here:
General Topology Rules
Try to create as clean a topology as possible. It will make skinning the asset easier later.
Make sure you can easily select different loops and elements in your mesh.
- Create clean loops and split off elements where needed.
- Minimise triangulated areas.
- Avoid spirals. (These greatly prolong the time it takes to skin a mesh.)
- Make use of the centre line and symmetrise elements where possible.
Check your mesh for common small issues like:
- Backfaces popping through the mesh
- Smoothing group mistakes, hard edges, or inverted normals
- Intersecting meshes not aligning nicely
Check for common issues such as:
- N-gons, zero-length edges, or floating topology
- Unwelded vertices or vertices that got welded when they shouldn’t have
- Bad topology flow in the model
Check the fit against the actual body reference.
Try to avoid holes in your mesh. Make an inside and/or cap your mesh whenever possible.
At this point, also check if any body parts would be hidden by the asset, and whether there are any gaps or clipping issues with other areas, especially when working with transparency.
Topology for Joints
To deform correctly, joints and corner points need specific topologies, as indicated in the image below.
Deviating from these specific topologies can cause unnatural deformations. In those cases, increasing the topology will not make skinning easier, but potentially far worse.
In the following examples, you can see that this topology also carries over to the creature pipeline, and anything else that has these types of bending point.
In short, all layers in this deformation area need the correct topology.
Even when hidden, this topology must be preserved. If you don’t, there is a chance it will pop out of the overlying model when animated, as shown in the next section.
Topology for Movement
To support movement, make sure your armour has the same topology as the naked body, especially in regions that deform a lot and on skin-tight armours where you cannot hide the body mesh.
You have more leeway if parts of the body will be hidden, but even then, it is a good habit to get into to match the armour and body topologies as closely as you can.
When there are different layers, apply this rule to all the layers.
Every layer needs to have enough topology to support the deformation of the layer under it.
Further advice for modelling clothing:
- Make sure the upper body/skirt works with trousers.
- Avoid solid objects like clasps in low areas on skirts. These need openings to correctly simulate or stretch.
- Keep belts and ropes close to the body if they are not simulated. They will look odd otherwise.
- Don’t put rigid objects on rotation points. They will heavily deform and look bugged.
Armor Across Races
Keep in mind that certain races (e.g. dragonborn and dwarves) have different proportions. While optimising is very important, don’t forget that meshes generally need to have enough loops available to support all of the race/gender variations, as you’ll want to keep the vertex order between versions identical.
The glove below looks a lot more low res on male dwarves (DWR_M) because it’s heavily stretched.
Certain races have shorter limbs and are more prone to clipping issues, so armours need to be scaled proportionally. Collars on dwarves, for example, need to be shorter than on humans to support their neck proportions.
Armor Limitations
Our equipment system allows you to equip many different items at once. Make sure to follow the same rules for all meshes so they can function in-game.
We have set up certain limitation meshes that, when followed, will ensure that everything easily clicks together. We have made these available for male and female humans. They can be found at the top of this guide.
Boots and Gloves
Width Limitations
Trouser and sleeve meshes need to always be thinner than the orange limit. They should never stick out at any location, unless it is with the green vertex colour and will be hidden.
Glove and boot meshes need to always be bigger than the orange limit. They need to fit snugly around it.
If you adhere to both these limitations, all trouser–boot and sleeve–glove combinations will work together and not intersect.
Length Limitations
Gloves need to reach the length disc (at minimum). Otherwise, there will be gaps.
Necks and Collars
Capes
Export
Remember that after you finish creating your model, you will need to skin it.
To import your final mesh into the Baldur's Gate 3 Toolkit, it needs to be in the .gr2 file format. The final .gr2 file can contain multiple meshes.
Material
If your model consists of different meshes, you will need multiple materials for the outfit. If you are re-using existing pieces of armour, you can simply re-use those materials instead of creating copies.
Textures
Depending on whether you make an entirely new armour or adjust an existing one, you may have custom textures for it.
Textures should be exported as .tga files.
Basic Textures
In most cases, you'll have the following textures:
- Base Map (BM or BMA): This is your base colour. This should be mostly greyscale values if you want your outfit to be colour-customisable. If your outfit has opacity, that texture will be in the alpha channel of this map.
- Normal Map (NM): This contains the baked details from your highpoly sculpt.
- Physical Map (PM): This is a collection of different greyscale textures packed together.
- Red Channel: Metalness map
- Green Channel: Roughness map
- Blue Channel: Ambient occlusion map
- MSKcloth or MSK: This is the ID mask that maps different areas of the outfit onto different colour options. This will enable colour customisation on the asset. MSKcloth is the more complex armour shader, whereas MSK is a simplified RGB mask with only 3 options (perfect for underwear meshes, for example!).
Your ID mask would look like this:
These are the different values your mask should have:
Optional Textures
- Glow Map (GM): If your armour needs to glow (like the adamantine armour), you will need a glow map to indicate which regions should do so.
What Next?
Once you're created your armour, you'll need to import it into the engine and set it up for use. Please move on to the Adding Armour guide for more details.
