Final Fantasy 7 Battle Skeleton

[Eteus]

Yes, I realize that it is a dead horse, that has been beaten into a hole roughly the size of a thimble.

Please also realize i have searched this forum for roughly 4 hours now. Sorting through all sorts of posts of oblivion texture, model substituting, animation editing, and all of that information. I have been through the Wiki, I have visited Ficedula's, Alhexx's, and Micex's sites.

I have downloaded various model viewers, editors, bitturn, unmass, leviathan, patches, haxes, and batches.

I have read the text files on the xxAA skeleton files. I have tried looking at the skeleton files in hex editors. 3 days of messing with the tools.

I don't care about animations. I don't care about textures, shading, or anything like that.

I only want 1 thing.

in Bitturn, when you load one of the xxAA files, it loads the individual pieces for you, and does a bunch of things I don't really understand. When I export it to a 3ds file, the parts of the body are rendered in a way where they are set in a pose. But the skeleton information for this pose, is not exported.

What do I have to do, to get the bones that bitturn displays, out into an easy to read numeric format?

x,y,z positions of bones, bone lengths, and x , y, z rotations for the default pose that the export to 3ds format.

Can someone give me a direct answer, or a direct link to an answer?

The information is somewhere, someone has been able to decode the information enough to be able to render the information correctly in bitturn.

I've looked, maybe I'm a noob, maybe i looked right over what i was supposed to notice and have a lightbulb turn on.

Please, someone help me.

-Eteus

Editing Post:

To clarify, I have tried exporting the files into all of the various formats that bitturn offers. As well as opening them with blender, milkshape, and anim8or (I am in the process of obtaining lightwave) and none of the conversions have enabled me the ability to import bones.

Push comes to shove, I can build the skeleton myself, If I am able to get bone lengths and rotations. Once I have the skeleton, I can simply attach the body parts to the skeleton, and move on from there.

I do not care about re-importing the new animations I plan on creating back into Final Fantasy. The animations will be exported to a separate graphics rendering medium.

When Bitturn displays the render of the battle animation, and when bitturn then exports the xxAA file, into a 3ds, that original bone structure has to be able to be read.

[Borde]

The information about skeleton heriarchy and bone lengths is stored on the xxAA files. The rotations must be retrived from the animations (stored on the xxDA files). I've never tried exporting an FF7 model, but If you tried with biturn and never got anywhere, I supose It only exports geomtry (which I understand, because geometry is far easier to deal with than anything else). I think no one made any program to export animation and skeleton data as text, but If you want Cloud's information I can log It using Kimera and send it to you.

[mirex]

Hi Eteus
first of all, it can be done, but it has limitations. Whole model with the skeleton can be exported to 2 formats - LWO6.5 = Lightwave format and ASE = 3DStudio MAX text format. Maybe even .TXT / .MS3D = Milkshape format can hold those skeletons, but I'm not sure about that. File format 3DS is very old and I think that it can't hold skeleton information.

I worked with models bound to skeletons and it works really well. I tried both Lightwave and 3DS MAX. You can see screenshots of the renders in the "FF7 models to 3ds Max" thread ( see link below ). By the way Biturn can export model with skeleton with only one position of the frame of the animation file ( anyhow, so far it can't read any animations besides of first frame ).

You can read more about this in these threads:
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=2819
http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=4404
some more links:
http://mirex.mypage.sk/RNR/rnr.php?action=show_notes&parentid=97

To get the bone positions in the human-readable numbers you can either:

- Export model with skeleton to .ASE format, which is text format. You should be able to find skeleton bone joints as geometry objects named "root" or "b<joint number>". They should be stored on start of the file.

- Or even easier way - open the FF7 model in Biturn and click on 'Data info' button. You should be able to browse through all the model data there. In the first combo select 'joints' to see position of bone joints, 'bones' to see how are they connected and to see length of the bones, or 'bone animation' to see rotation of the bones


But another thing is that you say "in Bitturn, when you load one of the xxAA files, it loads the individual pieces for you," ... does that mean that you don't see whole model in meaningfull position, when you open xxAA file in Biturn ? You should see model completely as it should look like, for example as this one (Joker):


If you see only pieces, that would mean that you're probably missing animation file xxDA of the model. Try to extract it, and place it along the model files.

Hope this info helped you.

[Eteus]

I am trying not to Necro this old post, but its Mine and its the same topic.

I graduated with my Bachelors, and am now pursuing my grad degree, recently purchased dark basic. an affordable game making thingy-ma-jig, better than what i was using before.

At the moment dark basic works the best with .x files, and I'm going to give lightwave a try to see if i can rip what I need, and get it down to a .x

Thanks to Mirex and everyone else who replied.