Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

[locus]

This took a LOT of poking around xoops and quite a bit of research - the Japanese are annoyingly evasive about their techniques sometimes, but they're really skilled. As a result, now I have a major headache - but I'm going to start an ambitious project to show the power of this technique first.

(long story)
-As you dat modders probably know, xoops has recently discovered how to import NPC textures into PC files. I've found the technique they used and recreated a model someone posted on the page (the tonberry king's crown which someone did for hume female) - only for hume male instead. For something this small, it certainly took a ridiculously long time to get correct (the animation issues alone stumped me for a really long time - VRS will misread parts and you'll end up with a floating crown that thinks it's part of your waist or something.)

What does this mean in plain English? Well... take a look at the "Cornelia" Mithra mod thread:
http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/dat...--.mithra.html
Basically, the thread author had to use a preexisting model - probably a Houppelande, and paste Cornelia's texture file on top of it. With this method it *might* actually be possible to extract the mesh file itself, although bones will not be imported. (Sorry, no swooshy capes) This really increases the number of resource meshes we can play with - I could retexture the entire crown if I wanted (and I've already modified the shape so that it looks decent on your head).

I'm fairly certain I'm not the first English speaker to discover this, but at least I'm fairly certain I'll be the first to bother to write up an English tutorial on it unless some experienced modder beats me to the punch (go ahead, please save me the trouble!).

And yep, it animates perfectly.

Edit: Corrected a minor error with the crown, got overexcited.

[Lucres]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Locus, more and more cuteness for Hume Males. Nice job on the find too, this could lead to some interesting things!

[PotentPotables]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Locus, you can add plenty of animation and flow to your objects through VRS. It just depends on how much time you wanna spend playing around with the skeletal weight. Not sure how to change the Skeletal Weight? Check Kilandor's Site for a tutorial.

[Stromgarde]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

This really isn't terribly complicated at all. It's the same principal used when we ripped the Ark Angel weapons for player use.

Good job though, it looks good, and I know from experience it takes some dedication to figure that out without help.

As for the tutorial, go right ahead. I've only really in depth explained the techniques to Onimike and Kilandor, and I'm not really much for writing that sort of thing. If you do have any technique questions however, drop me a PM and I'll give you my IM address. You've got some talent, I'd be happy to get you past the stumbling blocks I faced.

[locus]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Thanks for the post - I've been getting a headache trying to figure out the skeleton offsets and writing them down on a readme file, but I wasn't aware someone had already done most of that work. Untangling a model is extremely time-consuming.

Currently I have most of the offsets I need, but I'm still hunting for the gsword/spear skeleton, because it's not obvious. I wasn't even aware Kilandor had a site. Will go hunt for it.

Once again, thank you two very much~

[Korith]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Open any model in VRS. Then paste it onto any race's skeleton. Then, reposition it if needed and go through the long painful proccess of setting skeleton weights. This can be used to put NPC armor/weapons on PCs. It can also be used to take equipment for one race and put it on another, or take PC equipment and put it onto NPCs.

There is very little less frustrating than setting skeleton weights, however.

[locus]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

That wasn't the problem. The problem is that Gsword isn't an obvious skeleton bone. I finally resorted to using the shotgun method instead, which is a lot faster than single target trial and error - and now I have a (sort of) complete bone list.

Thanks anywise. I guess that saves me the trouble of having to do a tutorial (tedious as hell).

[Gulkeeva]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Nice crown mod, need one for mithra too!
think the crown on mithra is too small personnaly.. it should be as big as the one queen of england wears...!

[Korith]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

To find the skeletal bone for weapons, I open up an existing one in VRS. Then just select any vertex on it and look at its skeleton weight. Works easy enough.

[Kuro Kaze]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Can anyone please explain to me what VRS is, and where I can get it?

Btw, is it really possible to change the actual animations themselves in the game yet? I saw JP have figured it out, with odd screenshots of their chars in game in some obscure pose that the game doesn't have.

I'd like to make Hume F actually hold a GK properly, for example... maybe adjust some of the other dumb poses they gave them.

[Ryadbraman]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

From what I've read, it's only possible to change animations in the Japanese version of VRS. The English-translated version doesn't have the tools to edit animations, from what I gather, and I'm sure it would be difficult to translate those tools as well. Only editable things now seem to be vertex count, textures and bone weights. The animations on the skeletons, however, will still be the same.

The good news recently is that VRS will be translated to English by the creator and Kilandor. Stay tuned for that, and then we could possibly create new animations!

To get the currently translated version of VRS, register at www.ffximc.com and go to the VRS section of the forums.

[Kuro Kaze]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Nifty. looking forward to more of the amazing features being unlocked to bring out the most flexibility and variety in modding. Getting to where just reskinning isn't as fun as it used to be ^.^

I personally would like to figure out Shaders so I can make my mods shiny in some places =D

[locus]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

Update: Apparently, the fastest way to solve the problem with the crown textures in-game is just to import a new 64x64 bitmap using VRS, although it kills the resolution. Result: The crown now actually works in-game (previously, it'd look fine in modelviewer and VRS, but the textures were all screwy in-game.)

You can actually fix the mapping and maintain resolution with metasequioa's UV mapping tools by scaling and moving the UV vertices (but you need a registered version to do this, methinks. Not sure.)

Now that I've got this figured out, it should be simple to add any number of polygons I need to a new model.

[Kuro]

Re: Breakthrough with VRS! (Opo crown)

I've been trying to get a mithra Cornelia for ages

But i have never wprked out how to get the mesh and not the skeleton *to stop the large implosion*

finaly i may have a hope of susscess! just need a lot of help and several guides and i can try it myself XD