Aperion

Aperion ports Call of Duty models into the Black Ops III Mod Tools. Drop a folder of models exported by Saluki, review what it found, and click Port. Aperion converts the models, rebuilds every texture, picks the right Black Ops III material for each surface, writes the GDT entries APE needs, and files it all under _custom - ready to open in APE.

No command line, no hand-editing GDTs, no guessing which texture is which. Drop, review, port.

Two things to never change in a Saluki export. Neither can be fixed afterwards - a bad export has to be re-exported.

1. Leave "Export images into material folders" ON in Saluki (it's the default). Turned off, textures land loose with no record of which material they belong to, and no materials can be built. Aperion refuses the port.
2. Don't rename, move, or merge the folders Saluki creates. The game folder name (bo4, bocw, mw_2019, …) is the only record of which game a model came from, and every game's textures are converted differently.

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Getting started

You will need:

• Saluki - CoD Asset Exporter
• .NET 10 Desktop Runtime

1. Run Aperion.exe and complete the one-time setup wizard (it finds your Mod Tools, you pick an author name).
2. Drop one or more export folders onto the Home page - or click to browse. You can drop a single model or a whole tree of mixed games; Aperion finds every model inside and sorts them by game.
3. Review what it found. Untick anything you don't want, and hit View in 3D to preview a model with its textures before committing.
4. Click Port. Watch the live log, or carry on using the app while it runs.
5. Open the output folder or jump straight into APE - your models are under _custom/<author>.

<Mod Tools>\_custom\<author>\models\<game>\<model>\

Aperion registers _custom with APE's converter the first time it ports, if it doesn't already contain it.

This allows the mod tools to recognise the assets, whilst keeping them nicely organised.

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What Aperion handles

The parts that would otherwise be hours of manual work:

Models

• Finds every model under whatever you drop, at any folder depth, across multiple games at once.
• Converts .cast and .xmodel_export to BO3 .xmodel_bin (and passes existing .xmodel_bin through). Batches all formats in any direction.
• Keeps every LOD (_LOD0–_LOD7) and picks sensible bullet collision - on for world props, off for characters, first-person models, and foliage.

Textures - rebuilt, not just copied

Every game crams its maps together differently. Aperion knows each layout and rebuilds them into the clean, separate maps BO3 expects.

• Unpacks every game's packed textures. Splits the fused colour-and-specular, normal/occlusion/gloss (NOG), spec-gloss, spec-roughness, and green-channel packs used across Infinite Warfare, Modern Warfare (2019), MW Remastered, MW2 Remastered, WWII, Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 into their true _c / _n / _s / _g / _o maps - decoding metalness tints, log-roughness curves, and per-material layout variants along the way.
• Rebuilds normal maps. Reconstructs the missing blue/Z channel from the two-channel formats games store (BC5-style and DXT5nm), auto-detecting which is in use, and flips the green channel where a game's convention differs.
• Converts roughness to gloss. Inverts the perceptual-roughness maps that Black Ops Cold War and other modern engines store, and decodes Black Ops 1's logarithmic roughness curve, so every surface reads correctly under BO3's shaders.
• Handles transparency intelligently. Tells opaque from hard cutout from soft transparency, distinguishes a real cutout shape from incidental "utility" alpha, merges separately-stored alpha masks back into the colour map, decodes signed-distance-field alpha (modern foliage) into real coverage, and strips baked utility alpha that was never transparency at all.
• Places detail and micro-tile layers. Detail normals, detail-normal masks, weapon camo masks, and the entire second tile-blend layer (micro normal / colour / gloss / spec) each land in their matching BO3 slot.
• Carries the rest across - emissive, reveal, thickness, and facial-tension wrinkle maps go to their BO3 equivalents, and skin/hair specular is dropped where BO3's shader has no slot for it.
• Swaps flat textures for stock. A solid-colour map is detected and replaced with BO3's matching built-in asset instead of shipping a redundant image, and tiny sources are guarded past the compiler's minimum size.
• Reads PNG and TIFF, and passes an untouched PNG through byte-for-byte when no processing is needed.

Materials - the smart part

• Splits vertex-colour texture sets (Black Ops 6 / Black Ops 7) into the separate BO3 materials the mesh's vertex colours select.
• Reads each surface and picks the correct BO3 material: opaque, cutout, transparent, decal, glass, emissive, weapon camo, skin, skin-tension (facial wrinkle maps), eye, hair, vegetation (with wind sway), plus detail and micro-tile layers.
• Skin, hair, eye and foliage detection is proven against each game's real shaders, not guessed from names - so a clothed arm stays cloth and a bare one becomes skin.
• Unknown modern "hashed" surfaces are flagged, never guessed silently - you confirm them once in the Surface Classifier and they're remembered for every future port.

GDTs & assets

• Writes clean, BO3-safe asset names, keeping the model file and its GDT perfectly in sync.
• Recognises assets you've already ported and reuses them instead of making duplicates - an asset is matched by name and type, so a model and a same-named material never collide.
• One GDT per model, or one combined GDT per game (your choice). The combined file is written atomically and preserves entries from other models and your own hand-edits.

Safe by design

• Every model succeeds or fails on its own - one bad export never spoils the batch.
• Stop takes effect cleanly between models; finished work stays finished.
• Every file it writes is written atomically, so a crash or a locked file can never leave a half-written GDT.

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The toolbox

Beyond porting, the wrench icon opens eight standalone utilities:

Tool	What it's for
3D Model Viewer	Open any exported model folder and inspect it in 3D - textured mesh, material list, selected surface highlighted, and semantic-labelled texture thumbnails you can open full-size. Packed channels are decoded for viewing.
Model Converter	Batch-convert between .cast, .xmodel_export, and .xmodel_bin in any direction.
Model Merger	Merge model files into one - a character's body and head, weapon parts, attachments - connected by their bones.
Folder Combiner	Group several ported model folders into one, so a character's body and head end up sharing a single _images folder and GDT. Merges the textures, combines the GDTs, and fixes every path automatically - no hand-editing.
GDT Combiner	Combine multiple GDTs into one, preserving every asset's exact formatting. Optionally save over one of them to keep its name.
Asset Packager	Bundle GDTs plus every file they reference into one folder, ready to zip and send - the recipient drops it onto their Mod Tools and it just opens. Follows dependencies so the package always builds on the other end.
Surface Classifier	(Advanced) Teach Aperion what an unknown surface is (see-through, skin, hair, eye, vegetation…) for the newest hashed-texture games. Confirm it once; every future port remembers.
Game Profile Source	(Advanced) Edit the raw per-game material profiles that map texture slots and packed formats.

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Games it knows

Aperion has dedicated, shader-verified material handling for twenty games:

• Treyarch: World at War, Black Ops 1, Black Ops 2, Black Ops 4, Black Ops Cold War, Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7.
• Infinity Ward: CoD 4, Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, Ghosts, Infinite Warfare, MW Remastered, MW2 Campaign Remastered, Modern Warfare (2019), Modern Warfare II, Modern Warfare III.
• Sledgehammer: Advanced Warfare, WWII, Vanguard.

(Black Ops 3 itself is the target, so it's what everything is ported to.) Other recognised games still convert their geometry and use a generic material profile. A folder Aperion can't tie to a known game is skipped and listed with the reason, never converted the wrong way.

The newest games use editable semantic maps and techset trait tables - surface knowledge can be improved and shared through updates without recompiling.

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Staying up to date

Aperion checks for a newer release each time it starts and updates itself, so you're never stuck on an old build - it downloads, applies the update, and restarts. Your own confirmed surfaces are kept and merged with any that ship in the update. You can also check any time in Settings › Updates, where the current version is shown.

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Settings & where things live

Runtime data sits next to Aperion.exe:

Path	Purpose
settings/config.json	Author name, GDT layout, log verbosity, wizard state.
settings/profiles/<game>.jsonc	Per-game texture-slot mappings.
settings/techsets/techsets_<game>.txt	Confirmed surfaces for hashed-texture games.
cache/gdt_name_index.json	Rebuildable cache of existing asset names.
aperion-crash.txt	Crash report (beside Aperion.exe), if the app ever hits an unexpected error.

The Mod Tools location isn't stored - Aperion reads it from the TA_TOOLS_PATH variable the Mod Tools set up, so it's always correct on any machine.

Settings also let you choose per-model vs. combined-per-game GDTs, toggle verbose logging, and clear the asset cache.

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Troubleshooting

• Mod Tools not found - install Black Ops III Mod Tools from Steam's Tools library, restart, and use Check again.
• No models found - a folder below what you dropped must directly contain a .xmodel_bin/.xmodel_export/.cast file or an _images folder.
• A drop was refused, or models were skipped - the reason is shown on screen. "Without their material folders" means the Saluki export setting was off (re-export with it on); "can't tell which game" means the export tree was renamed or moved (drop it as Saluki wrote it).
• Materials look wrong - check the Activity Log and that _mat_info was exported. For the newest games, confirm the surface in the Surface Classifier.
• The app closed unexpectedly - grab aperion-crash.txt from beside Aperion.exe and share it in the BO3 Mod Tools Discord.

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Support

Aperion is free, and built in my spare time. If it's saved you hours of manual porting, a small tip is genuinely appreciated.

Thank you. 💛