Modding Dark Souls with Blender (Official Soulstruct Tutorial 1)

Hey all! Here's a long tutorial for my latest Dark Souls modding tool: Soulstruct for Blender, a giant add-on for Blender that can import and export 3D game assets.
In this episode, I focus on initial setup, general settings, FLVER model import/export, and just the basics of HKX Map Collision import/export.
Get the latest release of Soulstruct for Blender here:
github.com/Gri...
I used SFB v1.8.0 in this tutorial. As noted in the video, there are still a few things that will be fixed in future versions, as well as support for other games and file types.
Much love to all my supporters on Patreon and everyone else in the modding community!
/ grimrukh
/ grimrukh

[@the8thknight]

I really hope that this series is not dead. I just got into using Soulstruct with Blender and it is amazing. Really want to learn more! Thanks for the video and I hope there is more to come. You are a legend!

[@gmt_cthulh]

Oh yeah it's dead 😢

[@jadenclawson3296]

This is a shot in the dark, I just installed the plugin to import ER Animations but my HKX Import is greyed out, just wondering if this is working for you and how.

[@gameringman]

Bloody legend! Started getting into PTDE modding two days ago, but the previous workflow was atrocious. This really changes things.

[@deathinho2913]

Nice tutorial bro, special thanks from Brazil!

[@AuramAlexander]

Truly incredible work! Can't wait to use this for ER whenever it's ready. Could I suggest recording these in 4K? If that's not possible, increasing your Windows UI scale would be a good alternative.

[@IJH-Music]

Yes... a resolution change maybe. TBF you can read 100% of everything in 1080p (maybe try Full Screen if using a small monitor)

[@asdsadasdadsadsaa5432]

such a magnum opus, legendary person in FS modding community

[@Okuu2]

awesome video man, even if you don't get a ton of views some people definitely love you for this lmao.

[@shoppingmarlin9204]

I'm just now learning to mod for the first time ever. While it is very overwhelming at times, these tutorials you've made have given me so much information. I cant wait to see what subjects you decide to cover in the future! Thank you for all the hard work and commitment you put into the souls community! I'm excited to see what kind of creative new mods will come from something this useful!

[@w.lf404]

you are a legend for taking the time to share this with us, thanks so much, now i will waste a ton of time modding my favorite game :D

[@nicrule4424]

Awesome! I should have subscribed after watching your older tutorials. I tried making something like this a year ago by adding Blender import and export to Map Studio. After giving up for a while, I tried again a week ago before finally noticing this video. This looks way more convent than what I was trying to do, but I didn't want to rebuild all the code that interacts with SoulFormats in Python… which I guess you did. That must have taken forever.

[@jacobbenefiel1908]

you are an absolute legend. i cannot thank you enough

[@IJH-Music]

Much appreciated! Great video! I hope episode 2 doesn't take long! 💙

[@elmaxitos]

Thank you very much for taking the trouble to teach and explain these types of things :D

[@JonWils]

Awesome work man.

[@alvarodelchill]

Your work is incredible, thank you so much!!!

[@thechristopherous789]

It would be great if we got a tutorial on how to add new map pieces and collisions.

[@CBZ-art]

Can't wait for the DS3 support, that's the best modding ressource for the game i've seen in maybe forever !

[@zeppeli1157]

New vid omg :0

[@Parallax3599]

Any plans on bringing it into 4.2's built-in extensions platform? Great work by the way, this is really really cool.

[@tinminator8905]

The GOAT.

[@luishenriquechesani8808]

Great tool, I'm also having issues with Python versions, even with 3.10, but I'm going to keep trying, thanks from Brazil. update: I downgraded to Blender 4.0 and it worked, I'm waiting for future updates.

[@pjstackz58]

IMA LEAVE IT THERE GANG

[@astralemachin8035]

THE LEGEND IS BACK

[@murdermetalsonic]

The animation can't be imported all at once?If you do animation all at once, it says "none type".

[@thechristopherous789]

Been trying this out recently, one annoying thing i found is that spawning in collision puts it in a different position than the mesh. A bit annoying when trying to line stuff up. Still looking forward to more tutorials, hope to get some for nav meshes and maybe a bit on how loading areas works.

[@LoVals_plays]

Not sure if this has been fixed, however about collisions: There is currently a bug when you export collisions to binders of custom maps If you attempt to export a collision to a newly created binder, say for Map 13_03, Soulstruct Blender will export it with the structure for another binder, like 13_02 Nothing a manual yabbering pass cannot fix, but adds a small step. Likely the plug-in was never intended to be applied for completely custom maps, but it works well enough to bake custom collisions extremely quickly

[@alexandrepedroso711]

Great video. To start learning how to make modifications to FromSoftware games, specifically Dark Souls 3, which programming languages do you need to learn? Which languages are the games programmed? Which programs would you recommend, besides having seen this video, for beginners will there be a chance to dream of their modifications?

[@vaenii5056]

Incredible tutorial! Will you eventually make one for equipment as well? I'm personally struggling to wrap my head around the materials / textures. I know you have to define custom properties for the materials, but so far no luck when I try to export everything. So far I have managed to get an error when exporting and another time I managed to export everything successfully but the textures don't appear in-game. For example what the textures should be named? Should they be PNG or DDS? Does the DDS format matter? How the materials should be named? Can you have as many or few materials as you want? When you press "export equipment" what exactly is the export tool doing for you? Where to find a list of Dark Souls materials and so on.

[@vaenii5056]

Also where are things like "this material is affected by skin color" defined? Is it just a separate material type defined somewhere? So you basically just assign that material to the part of the model you want to be affected by skin color?

[@niceone5208]

Zupa nice. Will we be able to see a guide to unpacking and modifying files from Elden Ring? Or maby somebody can recommend materials on this topic. Thank you for your attention!

[@JesseThaBest]

Hey :D I don't know if it was mentioned in the Vid, but after importing the FLVER files, can you edit the mesh? If I deleted a vertice, Blender crashed. Is this normal behavior? :D

[@toshi_382]

Amazing job man. Is there any chance Sekiro would be supported any time soon?

[@belgbeladel]

thanks for the addon really helpfull

[@aaronainairetv]

by the way, all the normal and specular textures should be set to non-color or linear, but are all imported as srgb. A change hopefully for the future

[@killer66fly]

Hello Grim, could you please make a tutorial on how to import a custom map to Dark Souls 3? It is very hard to find anything about this topic.

[@1h5ri]

Спасибо тебе большое! Thank you very much!

[@rap4ever476]

Can someone please tell me how did this guy open this app

[@_YLW_]

Well, I followed those steps and unzipped it into addons, it pops up a report error with lots of file names. What should I do?

[@nicrule4424]

I had a problem because I copied the files into the ProgramFiles addon folder instead of the Roaming one. Without posting the actual error, I can't tell you anything else.

[@_YLW_]

@@nicrule4424 well I found the same issue on Github, they said it's a bug specific in blender 4.1

[@CBZ-art]

i had the same problem, it's not working in blender 4.1 you have to downgrade to blender 4.0

[@_YLW_]

@@CBZ-art it works!!! thx a lot

[@despdesp2499]

❤❤❤

[@Dante_Tim]

Make a video of how physics works in the first DS and DS remastered. I have long dreamed of making beautiful physics for all moving parts of the armor in DS:R, but I can’t figure it out. I can make bones and simulate physics in blender. But I don’t know how to put it back into the game. This is my dream. I love the first DS. Аnd clothing physics is something that would decorate this game without harming the game itself and its atmosphere. It is known that in the game there are physics of clothes of some enemies, for example, the cloak of the Balder Knight.

[@MediaManPower]

Is it easy for a noob like me to make all enemies produce twenty times the amount of souls/xp when killed in order to not waste time farming?

[@_YLW_]

Can I use soulstruct blender to mod the weapon moveset?

[@chelonuria]

The new updates support sekiro game?

[@TheAntlionGuard]

tfw we got 2.0 of the program before part 2 of the tutorial

[@SuperMontana2008]

Any animation tutorials?

[@evisluE]

DARK SOULS 3 when

[@notdeus3834]

So uh... nightfall??🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 And could you explain programming languages in the context of souls games? I'm so lost. C++, Lua, python?? what's going on?

[@astralemachin8035]

Went pretty far with a linux port before my free time got thin