Author Topic: [FF7PC] Red Werewolf  (Read 208911 times)

Kuroda Masahiro

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #175 on: 2014-07-23 18:58:53 »
I don't have any videos of solely the new animations, I made videos of the projects as a whole, but many of the animation sets I did were for potential character replacements I might want to use in future.

Each was for a purpose, ie, I was working on a medieval FF7, so there weren't any guns or machinery, and Tifa's animations are by far the closest to it, but that was also the basis of a Legend of Dragoon project, she actually made a very nice Shana.

I never made any videos or screenshots of this, but I have a (very) early Dart I took pictures of.
http://th01.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/f/2011/122/0/9/ff7_mod_cameo___dart_by_video_boy_mal-d3fg05c.png
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/074/4/a/ff7_mini_mod_dart_feld__wip__by_video_boy_mal-d5y4lqc.png

From this, I greatly revised Dart, I also made Rose, Lavitz, Shana, Herschel, Miranda, Albert, Kongol and Meru.
If you're wondering how I did each, Dart was straight up Cloud, I revised some of his animations, such as the item usage and attacks to be closer to his LoD ones.
Rose was a (heavily) modified Tifa to have a rapier, that was the sword Tifa I mentioned in the last message.
Shana and Miranda used the same animation, which was the archer tifa.
Lavitz and Albert is Cid, but in order to speed up Albert's battle animations, I was lazy and simply removed a few frames from each animation.
Kongol was Barret, which took less work than you might think, I simply exaggerated his short range attacks, idle animations and used them as a base for the transitional ones.
Meru was.... such.... a pain to make. I had to redo her entire animation to have a mix of Aeris and Yuffie with Aeris being the base.
Herschel was a greatly modified Tifa to have a slower paced movement with lower attacks as if he genuinely struggled to raise his fists.

For these, I didn't really touch the limit breaks visualy, but I changed them to basically be an extension of each character.

In terms of who was who, I was planning on doing entirely new events, but little by little, it was going to turn entirely into a LoD using FF7's engine, and I ended up stopping work after getting all of the major characters (the 8 playable ones, Lloyd and a number of bosses, I included the human and Dragoon forms for all applicable.)

I was working on that in secret basically and planned on springing it as a surprise, but I got caught up with work and college, but, it's been over a year since I even touched FF7, but I still pop in to Qhimm and the other FF7 communities to see if there were any new breakthroughs or if I get any new messages.

So I figured I'd give a word of advice to the potential animation artist, but for this, I really suggest either giving it another character's animations, or making this werewolf into a limit break, such as giving Nanaki Galiant Beast and simply giving Vincent one less.

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #176 on: 2014-07-23 19:06:50 »
I myself have done several 100% animation changes, ranging from making Tifa have archer animations, (She held her right hand out, pulled the other one back and shot the (invisible) arrow with variants of it to allow for a bow) making tifa have a sword, (this took forever to work right.) making Cloud have the exact animations of the other soldiers, making a unique swordsman animation set (For a character in one of my projects, he moves like a combination between Reno, Cid and Squall.) among others.

One thing I tried was making Nanaki use a sword, which involved it staying in a scabbard on his back, and he pulled it out for attacks, I spent 3 weeks solid trying that, but Nanaki has the most complicated animation structure out of everyone, and by comparison, it's a cakewalk to do the entirety of Cloud, which is the simplistic.

If you are genuinely going to try to make Nanaki stand out on 2 legs with his native animations, you will spend months or possibly years doing this, it would be best to make him more into Kimahri from Final Fantasy X, and his limits could be changed into more generic things.

I'd love to see your animations. And would you want to help me with mine?

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #177 on: 2014-07-23 19:12:57 »
Wow Kuroda. Awesome!! I would have loved to see that project. Really I wanted him to be a full playable character and now its looking pretty bleak. I guess I can do it as galiant beast and take galiant from vincent to red xiii. This is a very very sad day...:(

Kuroda Masahiro

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #178 on: 2014-07-23 20:18:23 »
I'd have to get my windows pc hooked up, but I could take a look at some of your animations if you started any, and a troubling detail is that you cannot simply 'transfer' animations, even if you enter the precise bone rotation, height, etc for each individual part as another animation, it can and will give drastically different angles and positions.

Someone might have made a more reliable tool since my last proper visit, but I'm pretty sure we need to use Kimera.

I'm be more useful to talk to about the whole nitty gritty details over skype, or yahoo chat or something else, if you're interested, send me a PM with some way to do a live chat, even if its just facebook.

But in short, if you want him to work as a fully playable character, just change his skeleton to someone else, the closest one for our purposes would likely be Cid, we can either make him a spearman, or remove it, which gives a basic stance we'll want for a werewolf.
In which case, we'll want to take influence from Tifa, the whole animations can be untouched, except for the idle (just try to loosen up his shoulders and raise his arms like he's Tifa.) attack (make his arm extend like he's swiping his claws) the magic casting (Just do something like he's surging with power before throwing his hand out) and the victory animation, which can be modified to look like he's doing a sort of primal roar.

If you're interested, I wouldn't mind taking you on as a sort of protégé and show you some images or videos I did of my projects.

I'd dislike showing the whole forum, I like to keep some things relatively secret, although I forced myself into a corner and I'll have to show something from the LoD project.

While off topic, is the general consensus that I should release my LoD main cast, Uroboros, Hellena Guards, Hellena Sergeant, Fruegel, Phoenix, Greham, Freybrand, Emperor Doel, etc) as well as several NPCs, such as the merchants, Basil soldiers, etc.

I was working on that for a few weeks since I was depressed about not having Legend of Dragoon on the European PSN, but I ended up just getting a USA one for it.

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #179 on: 2014-07-23 20:41:37 »
My spirits are officially relifted.  ;D

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #180 on: 2014-07-23 20:57:48 »
I sent you a pm kuroda  thank you for giving me hope again.

Kuroda Masahiro

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #181 on: 2014-07-23 21:30:08 »
No problem buddy.

I'll check again in the morning to see if there's any developments.

obesebear

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #182 on: 2014-07-23 21:43:09 »
While off topic, is the general consensus that I should release my LoD main cast, Uroboros, Hellena Guards, Hellena Sergeant, Fruegel, Phoenix, Greham, Freybrand, Emperor Doel, etc) as well as several NPCs, such as the merchants, Basil soldiers, etc.
You can release anything you'd like!

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #183 on: 2014-07-23 22:46:35 »
Leonhart, If you do a google image search for Red XIII mod brings up your toothpaste ad. LOL.

https://www.google.com/search?q=red+xiii+mod&tbm=isch&ei=wTjQU6-LIceLyATUtoCQAw#imgdii=_

LeonhartGR

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #184 on: 2014-07-23 22:48:53 »
yep that's google! ;)

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #185 on: 2014-07-30 15:13:16 »
I have him separated into parts and ready to start importing. I need a favor. Can someone please send or upload the original cid and red xiii files. This would help me a ton if somebody could upload a zip file for cid and a zip for red. It has to be the original. Thanks.

obesebear

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #186 on: 2014-07-30 16:42:56 »
Sorry, we can't distribute original game files here. 

I can tell you with your import though, you don't need separate pieces for the arms and legs.  Once you have one side in Kimera, all you have to do is mirror the piece and save it as the piece on the other side.  Saves a lot of time.

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #187 on: 2014-07-30 16:48:57 »
My problem is that I have to overwrite red xiii skeleton with Cids

obesebear

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #188 on: 2014-07-30 16:53:54 »
That's probably a lot more work than just opening them in kimera and swapping parts.  To do that you'll need to do A LOT of searching of these forums and maybe Kuroda can help.

The easiest way would be to take Cid's **aa **ab and **da file and rename them to redxIII's and see what happens in game.  If it doesn't crash you're in luck and it'll be easy from there.
« Last Edit: 2014-07-30 17:09:58 by obesebear »

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #189 on: 2014-07-30 16:59:00 »
OK. Thanks. Yeah Kuroda has been helping me a ton and has pretty much told me that I need to overwrite Red XIII with CID and then import Red Werewolf's parts to the new Red XIII. Hopefully a full on noob can handle this lol. Hopefully I can get him into the game within the year lol.

cmh175

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #190 on: 2014-07-30 17:28:24 »
Overwriting the skeleton is easy, just save Cid's model as Red XIII in Kimera. It'll rename everything else for you. The hard part will be altering the game so it uses the correct attacks and stuff like that. Otherwise the game will likely crash if it's looking for the original skeleton and animations.

Importing and mirroring pieces definitely helps save time. If parts for the arms and legs are the same than this certainly saves time. If you have changes like if the chains around his wrists are different though than you'll want to import those individual pieces.

Iceboundphoenix

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #191 on: 2014-07-30 17:40:43 »
I am confused wouldn't saving Cid's model over red xii cause some kind of in game error later on? How would Cid be affected by a change like that? When the game goes looking for the files are the names going to be different or the same?

Kuroda Masahiro

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #192 on: 2014-07-30 19:28:10 »
@cmh - The game automatically knows what animations and whatnot to use based on weapon data, but what you need to do for it to work and not have missing body parts is to create a brand new battle.lgp.

In terms of limit breaks, we can use tools to just manually alter all of Nanaki's to be Cid's (which will allow it to not simply be mimicked) or just tell Nanaki to use Cid's limits directly.

Doing the create new lgp method, we can make every single person use Cloud's battle skeleton (and limit breaks) without a single ingame issue, I did extensive testing with this along as redirecting what battle data is loaded for each character.

As part of my test, I made Cloud use Barret's battle skeletons (sbaa, scaa, sdaa and seaa) which enabled me to give Cloud 4 different weapons for a limited character project I did before.

(Only playable characters were Cloud and Tifa, you had the occasional guest, such as Nanaki, Barret and Cait Sith.)

Cloud has Swords (Normal skeleton) Spears (Cid) Guns (Vincent) and Katanas. (Sephiroth)
Tifa on the other hand had tonfas (Normal skeleton) Staves (Aeris) and throwing knives. (Yuffie)

I recalibrated the whole game to allow for only 2 playable characters with fixed materia that went up like traditional rpgs, each weapon had different qualities, such as giving a bigger physical or magic boost, being long ranged, having high accuracy, etc.

Flying enemies were fixed to have almost impossible evasion, so you'd need either the gun or throwing knife to hit it. (or magic.)
While Tifa has more physical ones. (Tonfa) and the magical ones. (staves) and the katana was defence ignoring, and was a mandatory weapon to take down tank enemies, or a spell of the opposing element.

That project was actually a fun one to work on.

And it was easy to have nobody else join the team, I simply used meteor to disable party changes (SO MANY OF THEM) and not enable new additions to the roster, while they could still join for certain bosses.

An example is that in the first mission, Cloud was going solo, then when Barret normally joined, it was Tifa instead and they fought a new boss.

Then for the main boss, Barret shows up and explains that you need a gun or other such weapon to take down enemies like that and joined because we likely wouldn't have won otherwise.

Other examples include when we're fighting the experiment in the HQ, Nanaki will join for the battle.

...Enough about that though, the main point is changing battle skeletons and appropriate data is easy to do and takes a few minutes.

Iceboundphoenix

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #193 on: 2014-07-30 19:46:17 »
Thank you for the passionate response I do appreciate the reply and enlightening me on the subject.

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #194 on: 2014-07-30 20:10:13 »
So Kuroda, I will create a new folder and put every file from the battle.lgp in it. Then I can rename rzaa to rwaa and will then have a red xiii model that uses Cid's skeleton and weapons? After that I can import the parts. Finally how do I change him from using spears to hands/mouth?

Kuroda Masahiro

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #195 on: 2014-07-30 20:20:43 »
Just use Kimera 0.95 onwards, it'll automatically rename and sort the rzaa to rwaa, if you rename them yourself, it can cause some issues that need to be sorted out with a hex editor.

But the whole going from spear to hands/mouth is also in depth animation changes, for the moment, keep a copy where he works with the spear, then simply resize each file from rwck to rwcz to be 1/1/1 within kimera so it's invisible to the naked eye. (DO NOT delete them.)

Then you'll need to start changing animations, I suggest keeping a close eye on a combination of Tifa and Cid to compare and try to mimic the fists so he resembles a brawler.

That in itself will save you alot of time, but your overall goal is to have something similar to the Skyrim werewolf, and several of his animations won't work with the battle animation style, so you'll have to do hybrids and mix and picks for them.

Bare in mind you can spend an entire night just doing 2 or 3 frames this way, and Cid has a grand total of 34 animations, quite a few of his animations has over 20 frames, the longest having 34 frames.

You will spend the next few months to years just doing the animations to be remotely close to your goal.

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #196 on: 2014-07-30 20:27:09 »
so...
1. open Kimera
2. open rzaa
3. Save as
4. rwaa
Then all files will be saved automatically?

Sorry for seeming like a stupid redundant question. I am just trying to wrap my mind around the whole thing.

PS. If this step by step is correct, should I "save as" in another new folder to isolate him or "save as" in the battle.lgp folder?

obesebear

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #197 on: 2014-07-30 20:27:46 »
Or write an animation exporter/importer which will make everyone love you.

WolfMan

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #198 on: 2014-07-30 20:30:01 »
By importer exporter do you mean being able to animate in Maya and Export to Kimera?

Kuroda Masahiro

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Re: [WIP] Red XIII werewolf mod
« Reply #199 on: 2014-07-30 20:36:14 »
@Obesebear - I actually tried doing an animation importer/exporter, mainly for my own use, but it was nowhere near functional and the overall animation system is highly temperamental, I could work more on it, but it seems unfeasible with my current abilities to finish.

Do you really think that someone who turned Tifa into an archer, a rapier master and an old man wouldn't have possibly considered creating a vastly easier alternative to the normal method?

The most I could get it to do was copy a single frame of animation and paste it over another animation frame, which is only useful if we have 1 precise animation we want to use for something else. (Such as the manipulate animation from Cloud for the magic casting animation, and using this, I redid that in a matter of 1-2 minutes when it previously took 2 weeks to change it.)

But, the darn thing is prone to completely corrupting the animation and skeleton information, it's a headache to work on. -.-

@Wolfman - Yes, do that. And don't forget to make a new battle.lgp with Cid's data over Nanaki's so Red Werewolf works ingame.