Thanks for your reply. I already am using a bunch of the mods you suggested in that list, that was actually one of the posts that kicked off my recent attempts to mod and play this game again. There's lots of good ones in there so thank you very much for the recommendations!
I know it's really old, but I'm messing around with the tools you mentioned and haven't had any success converting the APZ Cloud models into usable .iro's. I first tried simply packing the APZ model folders into their own IRO's, and they did show up in 7th but didn't change anything when activated. So, I unpacked some field and battle model .iro files from the catalog to see what their folder structure looked like, including the Ninostyle HD Field models which I am currently using. The file locations and types in Ninostyle HD Field and APZ Field had some similarities, but after an hour of failure trying to change things around and incorporate APZ into Ninostyle I decided this is over my head and I don't know what I'm doing (which is a bummer cause I was able to use it together inside another mod back in the day).
Thanks for your suggestions though Kuraudo!