This content is structured as a technical guide and analysis, suitable for a developer blog, documentation, or a forum post for modding communities (e.g., Soulsborne modding or game engine migration). Introduction: The Two Worlds of 3D Data In the niche but critical field of game asset reverse engineering, two formats often represent opposing paradigms: FLVER (proprietary to FromSoftware’s engine, used in Dark Souls , Bloodborne , and Elden Ring ) and SDM (a generalized or engine-specific format, often referring to Skeletal Dynamic Mesh or a proprietary intermediate structure for simulation engines). Bridging these two is rarely straightforward.
This process has been tested with assets from Elden Ring (FLVER v16) and Bloodborne (FLVER v12) converting into a custom PS4-era SDM- runtime. With the scripts provided, you can adapt the same logic to any engine expecting a simple, fast, binary mesh format. Bbtools-flver To Sdm-
# Step 2: Extract vertex buffers with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmpdir: subprocess.run([ "bbtools-flver", "export", input_flver, "--format", "ply", "--output", os.path.join(tmpdir, "mesh.ply") ], check=True) # Load with trimesh import trimesh mesh = trimesh.load(os.path.join(tmpdir, "mesh.ply")) vertices = np.array(mesh.vertices, dtype=np.float32) normals = np.array(mesh.vertex_normals, dtype=np.float32) # UVs: mesh.visual.uv (may be None) uvs = getattr(mesh.visual, 'uv', np.zeros((len(vertices), 2), dtype=np.float32)) # Step 3: Build SDM buffer vertex_buffer = np.zeros(len(vertices), dtype=[ ('pos', 'f4', 3), ('norm', 'f4', 3), ('uv', 'f4', 2) ]) vertex_buffer['pos'] = vertices vertex_buffer['norm'] = normals vertex_buffer['uv'] = uvs # Step 4: Write SDM- with open(output_sdm, 'wb') as f: f.write(b'SDM-') f.write(struct.pack('<I', 1)) # version f.write(struct.pack('<I', len(vertices))) f.write(struct.pack('<I', len(mesh.faces) * 3)) f.write(vertex_buffer.tobytes()) indices = mesh.faces.flatten().astype(np.uint32) f.write(indices.tobytes()) This content is structured as a technical guide
Extend the pipeline to support animation retargeting (FLVER’s HKX skeleton to SDM’s bone palette) — a topic for a future deep dive. Tools used: BBTools-flver v3.2, Python 3.10, trimesh 3.23, SDM specification draft 0.9. Feedback and pull requests welcome on the project repository. This process has been tested with assets from
#!/usr/bin/env python3 """ FLVER to SDM- converter using BBTools-flver as a subprocess. """ import subprocess import json import numpy as np import struct import sys import tempfile import os
def flver_to_sdm(input_flver, output_sdm, generate_lods=True): # Step 1: Dump JSON from BBTools-flver json_data = subprocess.check_output( ["bbtools-flver", "dump", input_flver, "--format", "json"] ) mesh_info = json.loads(json_data)