Messages

1

WIP / Re: [FF7PC] Meteor - Character Overhaul Project

« on: 2025-07-10 16:42:07 »

It's been a long time so I wanted to share an update regarding Meteor. I've completed a few characters that I'm pretty happy with, but models with this level of detail don't look right in game. The seams in the cut pieces of the body are harder to hide, and they look more like mannequins than people with their unmoving eyes and hands. If I'm also being honest I'm tired of cutting models and using tools like Kimera. With the traditional method, models like Nino's look and fit better. So unfortunately for the time being Meteor will be mostly on hold either until we have a new modded game engine from Unity or Unreal, or the original can support external characters and animation files with smooth skinning and deformation. I won't be importing these traditionally for 7H. I'll keep working on characters and animations in the meantime, but it'll be awhile until I can share them. This functionality, as well as modded game engines has been in the works for sometime, but it's unclear if and when it'll be available for use.

For now, here's a few WIP shots. Some of these are older and I haven't done official renders yet, as things progress I'll share more completed work. Cloud is done, I need to paint and bake the textures for his hair and clothes, but otherwise the model is done and animates well. I've done his buster sword, and I'll do a full set of the rest.





Tifa and Barret are modeled and animate well too, but I still need to do props, clothing, and hair. Tifa also only has skin detail sculpted, I haven't painted it yet (that's why she has such a tan lol).




Animation tests with Tifa, I already fixed her eyes. Note: I hadn't made clothes yet when I tested the rig, so yes she's naked. She doesn't have genitals and looks like a barbie doll, but if you consider it NSFW or inappropriate than don't watch the google drive videos. I apologize, I haven't gotten around to recording another animation test so this was all I had. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z2F3R8wy7L_HyATdY6o6vZ9-W9g_6EHt/view

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rgn8Lkeitt8X3E2YaGfzTMEJ3MRAIcfO/view

I use a tool with a default mannequin that's already rigged, and then project my characters onto it using zWrap, so these models are already rigged and skinned, and have blendshapes to support facial motion capture, so after retargeting the animations from the game they'll be a lot more detailed in a relatively short period of time. I'm looking forward to really kicking this off once they can be used in game, hopefully that can happen sometime soon.

2

WIP / Re: [FF7PC] Meteor - Character Overhaul Project

« on: 2022-07-24 01:07:14 »

Hi everyone, I have a big announcement for Meteor detailing a slight change in direction. The first post details the project overall, but the cliff notes are Meteor will now consist of detailed PBR models made from the games original models, and Kaldarasha’s Chaos models. Overall, the change is to help speed up progress, allowing me to do multiple characters a month, instead of just one at best, and make the models better work in game (like 2D eyes that can blink, instead of 3D eyes that can't). I'll start posting updates for Meteor as early as next week, as well as share a streaming schedule for those who'd like to join and see these models made live. I might start streaming next week, but I'm on my second day of a COVID diagnosis, so I may push it to August 1st if I don't feel up to it. 


Meteor will also support a new mod I'm working on, Reanimation. I'm going to be updating the models with more detailed skeletons, allowing me to animate things that would otherwise be static, like hands and fingers. The new animations will be far more detailed and lifelike, and 60 fps. 

3

WIP / Re: [FF7PC] Meteor - Character Overhaul Project

« on: 2022-05-15 18:53:41 »

Hey guys, sorry for the delay, being a new dad has kept me pretty busy lately and we'll be moving soon so things have been crazy. I finally finalized the style I’m going with and finished my main blockout I’ll use to model characters with. Concepting took awhile to figure out the design I want, from here things will progress much faster and future characters will take a fraction of the time. I decided to start at the beginning of the game and go in order of appearance, but I'm going to finish Cloud first so the remaining characters will match his style and appearance. I just need to finish getting the anatomy right, I think the arms need to be a tad longer and the hands are about 10% too small. Cloud has really long legs though so it’s throwing me off a bit. From there I’ll start detailing the face. I’m both excited and dreading to do his hair lol.

4

WIP / [FF7PC] Meteor - Character Overhaul Project

« on: 2022-01-23 23:46:33 »

Meteor is a PBR Character and Animation Overhaul Project. I’m going through the game and making new stylized PBR models with new skeletons and animations that support deformation, including fully animated hands and faces. I’ll do the NPCs, enemies, and bosses as well as the main characters. I'll share info as I go along detailing each step for those who are interested in how game characters are made.

Meteor will also have optional features for randomized enemies and additional NPC's to add more variety to the game. I'll texture alternate versions of enemies that'll be randomized, and add new NPC models using Makou Reactor so you won't see models reused so much, particularly on the same field. I'll also add animation support for Echo-S so characters speak and emote properly with their dialogue.
 
WIP shots below are similar to what you can expect from completed models. I’ll replace them though with the first updated character.

WIP shots below are similar to what you can expect from completed models. I’ll replace them though with the first updated character. 

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General Discussion / Re: [FF7, 8 + 9 PC] A New Mod Manager Is On The Horizon

« on: 2020-05-03 23:20:49 »

I remember discussing this with the developer in the modding discord, so psyched to hear this is being released! I’m curious, since this allows the game to render using Vulkan and the others, will the game be able to support PBR textures, or updated skeleton rigs and animations? Being able to import models without cutting them into pieces would be incredible.

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FF7 Tools / Re: [PC] Importer-Exporter FF7 models - FFVII ImportExport Maya plugin (v 0.1a)

« on: 2019-04-11 23:46:12 »

Does anyone have experience with this plugin? I'm using the 2017 version on Maya 2018 (this usually works without any issues), and I'm able to import field models, but cant get battle models to work. Either nothing happens, or I get an error with a single joint and no pieces of the model. Maya shows the plugin files installed properly. Is there a trick to getting battle models to import?

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FF7 Tools / Re: [PC] Translate graphics models to glTF - Kujata (v1.0)

« on: 2019-04-04 17:13:46 »

This sounds awesome, I’m very interested in it’s potential. I’ll be able to try it out later this weekend. What’s currently possible with this? Above all, being able to import models without cutting them up and converting them to P files would be great, and would help improve detail and overall quality of mods. Does this work with animations? If we could export animations to Maya and import them back that would probably be one of the biggest improvements to modding the game.

8

Team Avalanche / Re: Jusete´s field scenes

« on: 2019-02-14 15:43:18 »

These really look great! I was curious if you guys could do a tutorial for modeling these. You guys knock these out so quickly, I'm curious what tools you're using and how they compare to mine. I'm specializing in Environment Art, particularly in Procedural modeling, so I'm curious what your process is, and how these scenes compare to one made for Unreal (you're using Sketchup right?). Currently I blockout scenes in UE4 with BSP's, and model based on the blockouts in either Maya or Houdini, generally everything is modular. If someone can put together a run down of a completed scene explaining how things were done I'd definitely check it out.

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Team Avalanche / Re: Jusete´s field scenes

« on: 2018-07-17 22:34:51 »

This looks great man, glad to see you're still at it. I can see improvement overall, great work! Sadly I can't offer much help, I do all of my rendering either in UE4 or Marmoset and am unfamiliar with the tools you're using. Your materials looks great, but as some of mentioned, adding some diversity to the tiling will help. Such as skewed roof shingles and such. The only thing that really grabs my attention is the shingles on the house, the ones on the front don't meet up with the sides. It's a hard area to gauge since it's so small. Otherwise it looks great, the sign on the barn is just beautiful. When the FF7 scenes are completed you should definitely look into building environments in UE4, particularly if you're modeling modularly.   

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General Discussion / Re: Who's excited to mod FFXV?

« on: 2018-03-02 20:14:03 »

I was able to get a steady 30 fps in the benchmark at 4k with an i7 7700k and gtx 1080. With Normal or Low graphic settings it would peak around 45fps or so, but games can be choppy at the range between 31-59 fps. There wasn't a big difference in performance between graphical settings, so setting it to High and locking the frame rate at 30 worked pretty well. The full release is supposed to have a lot of configurable settings too, so it's possible to tweak and push the game to 60. Personally unless it's really noticeable, I'd prefer 4k 30fps instead of 1080 60fps. Unless it's fast paced like Titanfall and Destiny 2 (though bad examples, bc those games do play 4k 60fps lol).

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General Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy 8 in Unity?

« on: 2018-02-28 21:12:52 »

Luckily porting from one to the other wouldn't be a huge hassle, assuming you've just done level assembly and materials and no coding. The UE4 blueprints would make gameplay like this pretty simple though. There's even blueprints for turn based battles like old school FF games. Would probably require almost no custom coding. I'd honestly considered doing a project like this for FF7, but it wasn't something I wanted to undertake alone, not at that scale. Though I'll admit, learning Houdini to procedurally assemble level assets is making me reconsider. Feel free to reach out if there's anything I can do to help here. I may not have time to do an entire scene, but I could assist with any props or environment assets that need to get done. As well as Hero Props if you're planning to do characters down the line (working on a character pipeline for quick NPC creation, though I need to learn and practice with Marvelous Designer). I keep an album for personal projects on my Artstation, so everything I work on ultimately helps.

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General Discussion / Re: Final Fantasy 8 in Unity?

« on: 2018-02-28 01:54:54 »

Not sure how I never saw this, but very impressive! Above all, I'm glad to see you've stuck with this project ever since you posted it. That's half the battle. My knowledge about Unity is mostly textbook, no hands on experience, but I'm pretty familiar with UE4 (may translate well enough). I'm actually curious what made you pick Unity over UE4, I love the Unreal blueprints. To better help with development you should definitely look into Houdini FX and Houdini Engine if you aren't already using it. You'll spend more time creating a single Houdini digital asset, but you'll be able to procedurally create a whole level in UE4 and Unity in almost no time at all. Once you have a growing library of these assets you'll fly through level assembly (textures too). I'm actually getting into this now and learning more about environment creation in UE4. The Indie license isn't free, but it's not super expensive either. The amount of functionality you'll get out of it, and amount of time and effort it'll save you in the long run will make it really worth it.

I'm a Game Art student at Full Sail, and in the last...8 months or so of classes (one class each month), so my workload between assignments and personal projects can get pretty heavy, but I can try to help out with any environment or prop pieces you need. I'm getting into character sculpting now too, but it's a work in progress, anatomy is probably the biggest hurdle to get over. Other than you working in Unity, our pipelines seem pretty similar. I use Maya, zBrush, Houdini, Photoshop, and Substance Designer/Painter, so anything I work on would fit into the game design pretty well.

My Artstation if you want to see my work first: https://www.artstation.com/cmh175

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General Discussion / Who's excited to mod FFXV?

« on: 2018-02-18 15:02:33 »

Who else is excited to checkout the modding tools for FFXV? I think it's great that SE has been moving their games onto PC more and more, and is even releasing modding tools for FFXV. The possibilities are pretty huge with official tools. Maybe not quite to the point of Fallout and Skyrim, but that may just depend on us. More importantly, I'm just anxious to play with the modding tools so I can learn more about the Luminous Engine. They dropped it for Kingdom Hearts for UE4, which they began with immediately for FF7R, but hopefully that's just so the engine team can better refine their tools for future projects. Maybe the modding tools with the updated PC version of 15 were seen as an exercise to overcome the shortcomings of the engine during development.



https://www.pcgamer.com/final-fantasy-15-teases-mod-possibilities-with-civilian-cactuars/

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Team Avalanche / Re: Remaking MD0 - Shinra Tower

« on: 2018-02-10 03:09:38 »

This is really great work! Your materials could use a bit more detail to them though. You seem to have the right metal detail and color, but you don't have any roughness, so it looks like brand new brushed metal. You could also use some bump maps to further add detail to the metal and supports. The geometry overall is great, but your materials just look too clean, particularly for a power "Makou" plant. What are you making your textures in? You could either bake your texture maps and further detail them in Photoshop, or I would suggest looking into a student or trial version of Substance Painter. It's become the standard for painting textures, particularly since it supports PBR. If you end up needing to buy a license I think the Indie version is only about $100, and well worth it (same as any other version, just mean you work alone or in small groups, a larger studio needs a different license).

15

Releases / Re: [FF7PC] cmh175 Release Thread

« on: 2018-02-03 01:17:50 »

v1.54 is referring to the 7H client. That client version has no effect on the Catalog version, which is listed inside 7H from the Catalog tab. It's a tad confusing, but yeah...I don't know of an easier way to list

Oh lol, I thought that maybe the version number of the catalog or something. I've been so busy with work and school I haven't modded anything in about two years or so. No real idea what the current state of the modding community here looks like lol. Looks like a lot of new recent activity.

16

Releases / Re: [FF7PC] cmh175 Release Thread

« on: 2018-02-03 00:33:45 »

Yes, I sometimes take out options because the file size for downloading in the Catalog gets too big.

If I were to list every mod individually in the Catalog, the scroll bar would go on forever and new users wouldn't know where to begin. Compatibility would be a huge issue also.

If I were to group every mod into their respective categories, the file sizes would be too large for those with limited internet bandwidth. So, I do it this way but sometimes cut a few options to reduce the file size.

I don't really know of any middle ground to doing this. 

Not a problem Alyza, perfectly reasonable configuration for the catalog. You've done a great job organizing this as a successor to the massive bootleg torrent. I agree, I don't think there's a better way to organize things for an automated installation method for users, that also doesn't greatly increase download and storage sizes. I think the only issue here was just figuring out I was trying to answer questions for a different 7H mod lol. I'm a bit out of things lately, so I had no idea what "v1.54" meant lol.

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Catalogs / Re: Catalog v2.3x Report / Mod Requests

« on: 2018-02-02 18:43:30 »

For the most part, you can just download any standalone mod you want, and place them in a regular folder in your 7H library folder, and it'll import them for you. Unless it requires 7H scripts or there are compatibility issues, there isn't much else to it.

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Releases / Re: [FF7PC] cmh175 Release Thread

« on: 2018-02-02 17:54:10 »

Where did you download this mod from? Unless you downloaded my 7H version from my page and manually imported it into your library, otherwise I don't know what you have installed. The mod in your 7H window I assume is the Media - Movies one? This looks like something you installed from the Qhimm 7H tutorial thread (this one I assume: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=15520.0) that's a compilation of everything that's released on the forum for you to pick and choose from. I haven't looked at the Qhimm 7H catalog in about two years so I don't know what's in it. 

I can only really help with install issues of things downloaded from my page, or in game issues with one of the mods, though support will be dependent on severity since the last thing I released was in 2015, and no issues have really been mentioned at this point.

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Releases / Re: [FF7PC] cmh175 Release Thread

« on: 2018-02-02 17:35:48 »

I have v 1.54 and is no such option.

If I click configure, I can choose between a few different FMV's yours is only listed once as a single package, no sub options for it.

So no ending video resolution option.

I have no idea what v 1.54 is. I'm a bit out of the loop of the goings on here at Qhimm. That's not something of mine, that sounds like a Qhimm 7H catalog mod. My guess is that it's managed by EQ2Alyza. If there's no selectable option, I'd assume she went with the default video choices, so the standard one was used. It's even the image used in the preview.

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Releases / Re: [FF7PC] cmh175 Release Thread

« on: 2018-02-02 17:10:51 »

ok thanks.

How do I use the standard version with 7th heaven, there seems no option for it in the options.

If you click on Configure, and then Ending Video Resolution in the options window, there should be a drop down option to select the standard version, with a preview image.

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Releases / Re: [FF7PC] cmh175 Release Thread

« on: 2018-02-02 15:44:00 »

My release thread has been restored since the photobucket hosting issue, and more importantly Johnny Bravo is once again overlooking Qhimm forums.

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Releases / Re: [FF7PC] cmh175 Release Thread

« on: 2018-01-23 22:43:02 »

The audio was stripped from the 2011 videos, and I touched up the original 98 audio for these. It seemed to come out pretty well overall, unless you're an audiophile and are able to distinguish artifacts in the sound. I cant speak to much as to the technical details though, I did that mod in 2013.

For the "full screen" option it is stretched out. Cropping the image yielded even worse results, but since I knew not everyone would prefer them there's also the standard version available. 

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WIP / Re: Updated Character Models

« on: 2017-08-14 22:27:44 »

Marvelous Designer is an application for creating 3d clothing. It actually works the same way as sewing, as you lay out clothing patterns, and stitch them together. You just do it in 3d in this case. It's a great application that's able to get results comparable to sculpting in zBrush, but it works very different than any other 3d application.

For textures, I'd start with Photoshop. That's the best way to learn to work with UV's and layout your textures in 2d space. From there I like working with zBrush and Substance Painter. Both are on the shortlist for any game developers desired skills. They actually work pretty similarly, in a way at least. The textures baked in zBrush and Substance Painter will require a bit extra work though for FF7, since they'll greatly depend on normal, specular, and ambient occlusion maps. For FF7 alone, Photoshop is your friend. 

24

WIP / Re: Updated Character Models

« on: 2017-08-14 16:49:11 »

iClone and Make Human are great resources for quickly making character models, so that would be fine, but accessories and clothing cant come from ripped material. Otherwise it's taking credit for copyrighted material. A good workflow for something like this would be pairing iClone and Make Human for the models, and using Marvelous Designer for their clothing and accessories. You could likely complete a whole character within a few hours that way.

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WIP / Re: Updated Character Models

« on: 2017-08-14 16:12:47 »

Are your friends modeling and textures these themselves, or are they doing models similar to MoogleOutfitters on Deviant Art? Their models come out pretty well, but aren't eligible for release here since they use assets from many other game models. The textures for the face and body don't match, with a very noticeable UV seam along the neck. If I had to guess these textures aren't from a single source.