Jaystring's mod thread

[jaystring]

In game screens already! Proportion have been tweaked again

It's starting to look even better now!

 

[Luis Alonso]

Are Roy's eyes still dead when used on Wii?

 

[Javln Mastr]

Very Early Look at an "OldSchool" costume for wii U Roy that he's getting with CSP update!

It's not just a head replacement, I actually re-proportioned Project M Roy's body to have the shape of wii U Roy's body

It's not finished of course but here's a quick look

With this, all 3 next update (Roy, Marth and Ike) will be getting oldschool costume update with their CSP and HD texture update!

I know this is only a WIP, but don't forget that muscle. Mmmm, those biceps. My boy really has come a long way. Not those Melee spaghetti arms. I want modern day, jacked up lean meat.
Why did I type this... lol

 

[jaystring]

Are Roy's eyes still dead when used on Wii?

you mean the fact that he doesn't blink!?

right now yes. I removed them to cut as much filesize and polygons as possible. Wii U Roy was a very hard fit on Project M Roy because of the agressive filesize.

If I put them back, i'll have to make a concession somewhere else like having even blurrier textures. (I actually might do that for dolphin user actually. doesn't matter how low res the texture are in the pac file, if you use HD texture with the mod, you'll have all high res textures back)

For Wii User, Personnally I thought cutting the eyes was a better optimization then reducing textures. because you see texture 100% of the time and the closed eye, you'll really see them only when pausing at the right moment.

The good news is that Project M Roy costume i've showcased up will get full facial expression for all versions. his lower res costume allow to have enought polygons and filesize budget to re-integrate them.

 

[jaystring]

I know this is only a WIP, but don't forget that muscle. Mmmm, those biceps. My boy really has come a long way. Not those Melee spaghetti arms. I want modern day, jacked up lean meat.
Why did I type this... lol

yeah! l'll work on the arms!! it's actually in the texture that the muscle will stand out and right now, no texture work has been done, this is the exact texture of Project M Roy Body which i'm gonna modifie a bit.

 

[Luis Alonso]

you mean the fact that he doesn't blink!?

right now yes.

Ok. I don't mind the fact that the Wii U ver. doesn't blink. It's much in the same way that I didn't mind that SJS ZSS model didn't blink. At the very least he has animated lips. I want to use both versions for cBliss in the future, that's the primary motivation for me.

 

[Obskore]

is it possible to delete useless vertexes of the model that are never visible or never actually show up, in order to save some space?

 

[drogoth232]

is it possible to delete useless vertexes of the model that are never visible or never actually show up, in order to save some space?

I'd hope so. Otherwise those verts are taking up useless space.

First (or maybe Fiftieth) rule of modelling: If you can't see it in regular gameplay, it's not worth having.

 

[jaystring]

is it possible to delete useless vertexes of the model that are never visible or never actually show up, in order to save some space?

yes it's possible but trust me, I've looked into a lot of options to optimize him.

The very high res stuff on Roy is his face and his hairs. I've solve the hair by optimizing about 1000 triangles on them (it's as much as I could remove before starting to see the visual downgrade) All versions actually have the low poly hairs

For the rest, well, while it's true that he has multiple layer of gear at some places mostly the chest and the front of the leg, very few polygons are actually "fully hidden".

and on top of that, the hidden and semi-hidden stuff is not that high res. I already looked into that options at the time and my quick calculation was that, at best, if I were to delete the fully hidden polygons + the semi hidden and then remodel him to actually cover up the holes, I would have saved about 500 triangles, at max, it would have taken me multiple days/hours, I would have some re-skinning to do and I was risking making some holes in him after looking around at him that I could have forgotten.

On the other hand, removing the eye expression took me 5 minutes to do and it saved 2444 triangles (that's the exact number!). That's mostly the reason why I went with this option. It's very very rare that you'll see his blinking eye in normal gameplay, just as much as you would never see his hidden polygons but removing the eye expression saved 6 time the triangles and saved soo much time it made more sense, in a context of someone who doesn't want to pass a full year on a single mod and actually release multiple of them.

The real issues with Project M Roy is actually the filesize limit. I could have kept all his full facial expression and lower the texture quality even more. But Roy has soo much details in his texture, it would have hurt the quality of the mod too much I think.

Anyway, for people who are annoyed by the missing eye expression on project M Roy, my .rar already have a version of Roy with his full facial expression!! It's the Marth version (the "FitMarth00_CXX.pac" files)

The Roy and the Marth version are identical except for the fact that the Roy version has lower res texture and no eye expression.

For people how want to try it out, just open the Marth version in Brawlbox and test lowering his texture until he doesn't crash for you.

You'll get a full facial expression Project M Roy!

In the next version, I'll actually include it With the HD textures for dolphin users because as i've said, it doesn't matter the resolution of the texture in the pac file when using the HD retexture project, you'll always have the high res on him.

 

[drogoth232]

What's the filesize of Roy with all the expressions?

 

[jaystring]

Full expresion (Marth version) is 1567 KB for the pac, 1020 Kb for the pcs.

Optimized wii version(lower res texture, no eye expresion) is 1120KB for the pac, 752 KB for the pcs.

Default project M Roy : 1141 KB pac, 603 KB pcs. (notice the Pac is actually heavier but the Pcs lower by 150KB)

my personnal test was that going over around 1250KB pac makes project M 3.6 crash. but really, there doesn't seem to be a real exact answer for it. it seem to be different for everyone depending of if it's dolphin, wii, which version of project M (there was a difference between 3.02, 3.5 and 3.6)

I think that the max filesize is a total number of multiple thing and not just the pac or pcs. I have yet to figure out the right answer for that

Actually, just now by looking at the number, it would make more sense that it's related to the pcs and not the pac.

 

[drogoth232]

There's different crashes, there's when you crash on the CSS and when you crash at stage select.

Below information is strictly for Wii and Brawl (although not necessarily PM)

CSS crash is determined by the FitCharacterXX.pac and FitCharacterMotionEtc.pac. This value will have to be less than or equal to 5.33 mb, although experiments have led to values that are slightly higher that still work.

Roy's 3.6 PM MotionEtc file is 3.793 mb, that leaves you with around 1.537 mb to play around with for FitCharacterXX.pac
Marth's 3.6 PM MotionEtc file is 3.249 mb, leaving you with 2.081 mb for the FitCharacterXX.pac

Just some information to keep in mind for everyone (this post should be stickied for everyone to see lol).

 

[Obskore]

i didn't know that, does that apply for every player port?

 

[jaystring]

There's different crashes, there's when you crash on the CSS and when you crash at stage select.

Below information is strictly for Wii and Brawl (although not necessarily PM)

CSS crash is determined by the FitCharacterXX.pac and FitCharacterMotionEtc.pac. This value will have to be less than or equal to 5.33 mb, although experiments have led to values that are slightly higher that still work.

Roy's 3.6 PM MotionEtc file is 3.793 mb, that leaves you with around 1.537 mb to play around with for FitCharacterXX.pac
Marth's 3.6 PM MotionEtc file is 3.249 mb, leaving you with 2.081 mb for the FitCharacterXX.pac

Just some information to keep in mind for everyone (this post should be stickied for everyone to see lol).

Is the 5.33mb total applicable to all characters!?

That's a really cool thing to know. I've been wondering about those limits for so long

 

[drogoth232]

i didn't know that, does that apply for every player port?

Yes

Is the 5.33mb total applicable to all characters!?

That's a really cool thing to know. I've been wondering about those limits for so long

Yes, it's for all characters (although that limit seems to change slightly as a model I once worked with was at 5.4 mb and still worked fine).

 

[Charby]

jaystring what version of the dolphin HD retexture project do you use? Can't figure how to map the hd textures properly in mine

 

[jaystring]

Yes



Yes, it's for all characters (although that limit seems to change slightly as a model I once worked with was at 5.4 mb and still worked fine).

all right! thanks for the info, this will be very handy and time saving in the future as I've always tested my stuff with trial and error before, not knowing exactly where the limitation came from.

jaystring what version of the dolphin HD retexture project do you use? Can't figure how to map the hd textures properly in mine

As a base, I'm using this one found here. The project M one in PNG format

It's design to go over vanilla Project M 3.6. There shouldn't be anything to do other then copying it to the load/texture folder and activate it in dolphin graphic setting. make sure you have one of the latest dolphin because the HD texture format changed at some point in one of the version of dolphin 4.0 I think.

Then right now i've started to modifie it to my liking with my own HD texture and my own HD CSP.

A cool thing about the HD texture is that you can reorganize it any way you want in the folder. The only important thing is that

1) the texture is named correctly
2) it's inside load/texture/"ID name of the game". other then that, you can place any texture in any subfolder, dolphin doesn't care (as long as you don't have 2 texture with the same name in 2 different subfolder, then only one of them will get loaded)

 

[drogoth232]

I realized the mistake I've made.

Now people will ask you to optimize Smash4 Roy.

Forgive me, for I have sinned.

 

[Inquirer]

jaystring what version of the dolphin HD retexture project do you use? Can't figure how to map the hd textures properly in mine

As it was stated above you have to have vanilla files in order for the mapping of that site to work. Anything you change (from icons etc) it will be different mapping than the one in the download.

 

[KingJigglypuff]

-snip

There's actually a code ASF1nk made that increases the total memory allocation for FighterResouce1 to 5.5 MB. You'll also need to take memory from something as well. In this case, ASF1nk took memory from the Online allocation.

Network Memory Shrink [ASF1nk] [Online Memory]
* 044218AC 000F0A3D
* 044949C0 000F0A3D

Memory Extention for FighterXResource1 [Dantarion, ASF1nk]
* 04421B44 00580000
* 04421E0C 00580000
* 04422474 00580000
* 04421B64 00580000
* 04421E2C 00580000
* 04421B84 00580000
* 04421EAC 00580000
* 04421BA4 00580000
* 04421ECC 00580000

 

[drogoth232]

The only reason I didn't mention that is because it requires gct editing. Otherwise, go for it v:

 

[jaystring]

There's actually a code ASF1nk made that increases the total memory allocation for FighterResouce1 to 5.5 MB. You'll also need to take memory from something as well. In this case, ASF1nk took memory from the Online allocation.

Network Memory Shrink [ASF1nk] [Online Memory]
* 044218AC 000F0A3D
* 044949C0 000F0A3D

Memory Extention for FighterXResource1 [Dantarion, ASF1nk]
* 04421B44 00580000
* 04421E0C 00580000
* 04422474 00580000
* 04421B64 00580000
* 04421E2C 00580000
* 04421B84 00580000
* 04421EAC 00580000
* 04421BA4 00580000
* 04421ECC 00580000

That's really great!! Thanks for the info, i'll definitively keep this somewhere, might be useful at some point for personal use!

For my mods thought, I think I'll still have to stick to brawl's default limit or else I feel my Brawlvault's inbox will get flooded with people who claims it's broken and crash and ask me to fix it.

Like drogoth232 said, not everyone is able to edit code.

I realized the mistake I've made.

Now people will ask you to optimize Smash4 Roy.

Forgive me, for I have sinned.

No worries lol

 

[Charby]

Here is a render of your ZSS jaystring hope you like it

 

[jaystring]

Here is a render of your ZSS jaystring hope you like it

It's cool! good job!

 

[jaystring]

Oldschool Wii U Roy is almost complete!!

Here's a comparaison shots with the original (his blue costume but still the original mode)!!

For people without good eye, here's the list of all the changes

1) Obviously he has his Wii U head.
2) He's got more muscular arms and texture, no more cylinder arms
3) skin tone of his arms have been changed a bit as well
4) His upper body overall is larger (bigger arms, forearms, shoulders, chest, back)
5) His lower body is larger as well, mostly his thighs
6) His feet got smaller and closer to wii U size, the original been a bit more on the cartoony side with the big feet

6) the gold part of his texture all got shiny material, which means his gold now shine a bit
7) the gold color has been tweaks to more an darker orange gold instead of the brighter yellow gold (you can see the difference by comparing both swords) (I brought it closer to the tint of the gold on the Wii U model)
8) the metal section of his boots are a bit darker. They were too white before making them blasted and losing the texture details. It also have a metal shiny shader.
9) a lot of shadow have been painted in the texture here and there (biceps area or on the tip of the cape for exemple)

I think that cover most of it! The release wii get a sizemod too (for ALL costumes) to make Roy about the same size as Marth (since he's a boy in default PM, he's smaller and he look weird a bit beside other FE characters with his wii U model and default size)

here's 2 more screenshots

 

[PseudoTypical]

Woah, it looks miles better than the original, and that model was great to begin with! Awesome job dude

 

[jaystring]

Woah, it looks miles better than the original, and that model was great to begin with! Awesome job dude

Thank you!

 

[??Sanic Hedgehog??]

Oldschool Wii U Roy is almost complete!!

Here's a comparaison shots with the original (his blue costume but still the original mode)!!

For people without good eye, here's the list of all the changes

1) Obviously he has his Wii U head.
2) He's got more muscular arms and texture, no more cylinder arms
3) skin tone of his arms have been changed a bit as well
4) His upper body overall is larger (bigger arms, forearms, shoulders, chest, back)
5) His lower body is larger as well, mostly his thighs
6) His feet got smaller and closer to wii U size, the original been a bit more on the cartoony side with the big feet

6) the gold part of his texture all got shiny material, which means his gold now shine a bit
7) the gold color has been tweaks to more an darker orange gold instead of the brighter yellow gold (you can see the difference by comparing both swords) (I brought it closer to the tint of the gold on the Wii U model)
8) the metal section of his boots are a bit darker. They were too white before making them blasted and losing the texture details. It also have a metal shiny shader.
9) a lot of shadow have been painted in the texture here and there (biceps area or on the tip of the cape for exemple)

I think that cover most of it! The release wii get a sizemod too (for ALL costumes) to make Roy about the same size as Marth (since he's a boy in default PM, he's smaller and he look weird a bit beside other FE characters with his wii U model and default size)

here's 2 more screenshots

That actually fits, Perfectly.

 

[Javln Mastr]

I love the hair difference betweem the old one and updated model. Estimately, how long does it take you to complete these models?

 

[jaystring]

I love the hair difference betweem the old one and updated model. Estimately, how long does it take you to complete these models?

It depends on the project but something like the 3 old school FE character is done really quick. Roy for exemple took me maybe 5-6 hours spread on 2-3 days. The reason is most of the job is already done, the skinning, most of the texture work. I just update the modeling a bit by strategically keeping the rigging so I don't need to have it redone. Then it's mostly a bit ot texture tweaking and material and shader job in brawlbox and testing.

Really what take me more time right now is CSP. posing, rendering and preparing the CSP are quite long... I haven't even started Roy's one yet...

A full Wii U import, like say WIP Ryu and Cloud would take me maybe a week if I concentrate on them with couple of hours each night (not counting CSP). It doesn't take me much time now because I know exactly how to do them. and since WIi U model get imported with their rigging in Max, it's pretty handy because I basically copy/paste the Wii U riggin over a Brawl Squeleton that I choose, saving a lot of time (rigging is long)

When porting a Wii U Character, most of the time I pass on them is the texture I make for them.

Stuff like Megaman X Full Armor I made is long to do, because I basically do everything from scratch (Modeling, UV, texturing, rigging, testing tweaking). There's no possible shortcut there so it's long.

If I have to optimize a model, this will be long too (Think Hyrule Warriors project, these will be long)

 

[drogoth232]

Good luck with optimizing Ryu while keeping enough edge loops for good rigging. It was really difficult when it got to the fingers, for me.

Also, more tips that I forgot to mention:

When importing into the newest brawlbox, when you see the MDL0 of the character (what you replace for the new character), you should see some values on the top right window. Facepoint count and Node count are the important ones.

Node count for brawl characters are around 300, although I have seen 600 (that might have been a skin wrapped character, though). Node count is essentially how accurate your skinning is. The more accurate (all the weights have like 0.0000000001 difference), the higher the value. The less accurate, the lower the value. When importing and using Tristripper, it's weight precision. A value of 0.01 should be fine, although you can play around with it and check your results out to see if a higher value would be better (with a value of 0.01, that means that values that are 0.01 apart are considered the same).

Node count can inflate when using the Blend tool a lot while rigging. Keep that in mind.

Facepoint count is the more obvious one. It's a value of all the Faces, Verts, UV Points, and some convoluted stuff that equates to the final value. In a vacuum, a Facepoint count of 17,000 will be around when a model will lag with 4 on screen on Skyloft (iirc). It is important to remember that the Facepoint count only takes into account models that are on screen. So if the model has expressions and has visibility bones set up properly, they won't affect the lag until they show up (but if you did set visibility bones up properly, there won't be a problem at all). This can be seen with Wolf and how his Facepoint count is at 22k, but he doesn't lag (because visibility bones are set up properly).

NOTE: High polycount = High Facepoint count
Low Facepoint count != Low Polycount

Just because you shaved off 9000 faces, doesn't mean you'll see that much of a reduction of Facepoints. I have no idea what the formula for calculating it is, but this is what I've found out from asking people and a lot of testing.

Hope you find this information useful.

 

[jaystring]

Good luck with optimizing Ryu while keeping enough edge loops for good rigging. It was really difficult when it got to the fingers, for me.

Also, more tips that I forgot to mention:

When importing into the newest brawlbox, when you see the MDL0 of the character (what you replace for the new character), you should see some values on the top right window. Facepoint count and Node count are the important ones.

Node count for brawl characters are around 300, although I have seen 600 (that might have been a skin wrapped character, though). Node count is essentially how accurate your skinning is. The more accurate (all the weights have like 0.0000000001 difference), the higher the value. The less accurate, the lower the value. When importing and using Tristripper, it's weight precision. A value of 0.01 should be fine, although you can play around with it and check your results out to see if a higher value would be better (with a value of 0.01, that means that values that are 0.01 apart are considered the same).

Node count can inflate when using the Blend tool a lot while rigging. Keep that in mind.

Facepoint count is the more obvious one. It's a value of all the Faces, Verts, UV Points, and some convoluted stuff that equates to the final value. In a vacuum, a Facepoint count of 17,000 will be around when a model will lag with 4 on screen on Skyloft (iirc). It is important to remember that the Facepoint count only takes into account models that are on screen. So if the model has expressions and has visibility bones set up properly, they won't affect the lag until they show up (but if you did set visibility bones up properly, there won't be a problem at all). This can be seen with Wolf and how his Facepoint count is at 22k, but he doesn't lag (because visibility bones are set up properly).

NOTE: High polycount = High Facepoint count
Low Facepoint count != Low Polycount

Just because you shaved off 9000 faces, doesn't mean you'll see that much of a reduction of Facepoints. I have no idea what the formula for calculating it is, but this is what I've found out from asking people and a lot of testing.

Hope you find this information useful.

Great Info! thanks a lot!!

yeah Ryu is heavy but there's some places that shouldn't be too hard to cut. His hairs for exemple are 3400 triangle. that's very huge. His Gi as reference has 3900 triangles, almost as much as the hairs lol. As a Captain Falcon mod, he will not be able to get eye expression too so that will save some triangles.

I use more NumTriangles as an optimization reference than NumFacepoints but they kind of both should be used in the same way anyway : The closer you are to the original character, the more optimized and lagless your character will be.

I've discovered not too long ago about NumNodes. They are directly linked to skinning and they also have a relatively big impact on FPS too i've noticed. I did a pass to reduce that number as much as possible on all my mods around september (and now I always keep an Eye on it). Most of my heavy mods (Wii U FE Chars) are around 500-600 now. I remember my very first ZSS version had a 1200 NumNodes value lol

 

[drogoth232]

I used to go by tri/polycount but when I got Raiden down to 8k polys and facepoints were still at ~20k facepoints, I decided to ditch worrying about polycount.

RIP 1st ZSS. You definitely won't be missed.

 

[jaystring]

small update

just like I gave to Lucina and fixed on Wii U Marth, I'm giving Wii U Roy a new White recolors in the next update that fits with Marth and Lucina.

 

[??Sanic Hedgehog??]

small update

just like I gave to Lucina and fixed on Wii U Marth, I'm giving Wii U Roy a new White recolors in the next update that fits with Marth and Lucina.

RIP Me, THAT LOOKS AMAZING!!

 

[Obskore]

excuse me, is there anything else you're updating for the Roy model? because the PM version twists his right arm really weird during Fair, like it swivels on itself an entire loop just at the shoulder joint, it looks like a balloon animal joint lol

 

[jaystring]

RIP Me, THAT LOOKS AMAZING!!

Thank you!

excuse me, is there anything else you're updating for the Roy model? because the PM version twists his right arm really weird during Fair, like it swivels on itself an entire loop just at the shoulder joint, it looks like a balloon animal joint lol

I will not be touching the FitMotion file and the issue you are talking about I think is an animation issue and would need to be fixed in the animation itself, not the skinning.

 

[Obskore]

I will not be touching the FitMotion file and the issue you are talking about I think is an animation issue and would need to be fixed in the animation itself, not the skinning.

oh, my bad. i didn't think of that, sorry

 

[jaystring]

oh, my bad. i didn't think of that, sorry

no worries!

Animation and rigging goes together

You can have the best rigging in the world, if the animation is deforming weirdly your awesome rigging, it will look horrible anyway.

Roy has a couple of weird animations but most of the time it's when he's quickly slashing so you won't see it unless you pause.

The one I hate the most on Roy is his default stance animation. It's horrible because he has his head looking down soo much that he's always clipping in his shirt collar or his cape. I had to weirdly deform all my Roy mods to have this work properly with default animation. I really hate it.

Even Default Brawl has some sketchy one. Ike for example has some weird sword slash animation too where his arms deform super weirdly.

 

[Obskore]

Even Default Brawl has some sketchy one. Ike for example has some weird sword slash animation too where his arms deform super weirdly.

his UpAir lol, it carried over to PM. his expressionless face makes it even funnier. also Sonic's crouching animation, apparently it clips his shoes through the floor and someone made a fix for it yesterday