Hello.
Before retiring from FF9 modding, one of the last things I worked on was how SFX are handled by the game. I previously had to decipher a couple of 3D model formats but I couldn't recognize anything as such when looking at the hexadecimal files supposedly containing the SFX models (it applies to all the versions of the game since, except for the sounds, the PC remaster uses the exact same files as the PSX version).
In PC, though, the game uses an unified model format (it's made with Unity) so we can export the SFX models as they are used by the game at runtime. Unfortunatly, an important part of the conversion from "PSX-formatted models" to "Unity models" is hidden in an external DLL that I don't know how to read either.
Anyway, when exporting the Unity models, here is what we get:
... which is not as great as it could be.
I made a little
video to give more examples and write some informations about that.
I know that 3D models of summons are a real thing at least in a version of FF8 because I have seen a few of them. However, that way of playing at the middle between false 3D and true 3D seems to be typical of PSX Final Fantasies (backgrounds are pretty much similar). For the SFX, though, I have no idea. I think I remember someone saying that SFX modding was very difficult in FF7. Are SFX formats a known thing for FF7 or FF8? Are they actually rendered and/or stored as planar pieces with depth?