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An unfortunate drawback with this method is attempting to do this for a character whose final smash uses music (DK, Luigi, Peach, and Dedede) will cause issues when their music is supposed to start (crash on Wii, panic handler on Dolphin).

[How It Works:]

Model changers allow you to set various parts of a character's model to visible or invisible as needed. This has a number of advantages over manually scaling parts of the model to zero in different animations:

- Even if the model is scaled from 1 to 0 in a single frame, this will become several frames when the game is running in slow motion, which can ruin the illusion of something appearing/disappearing in an instant.

- Most particle GFX (including the final smash aura) don't like it when the bone they're attached to scales up from 0, which can cause them to detach from the character for a couple of frames and appear in a random spot around their body. This can be quite a nuisance if your character uses a constant GFX to indicate whether they're holding a charged special.

- It allows for control over whether a character's shadow is visible.

- It can slightly save on animation filesize, since it's handled entirely in PSA.

- It can also save on PSA filesize, as additional objects can be stored as part of the character's model instead of being placed in the PSA file as a GFX. This also allows for the use of slot-dependent models without hugely inflating your character's filesize.

- With enough creativity, it can allow for more advanced uses like spawning another character model to represent a transformation.

Requirements:
- Your character's FitFighter.pac and costume file(s).
- BrawlBox (pretty much any version should do).
- PSA Compressor.

How It Works:

We'll be using Bowser as an example since his one and only model changer is fairly straightforward.

Open your FitCharacter00 in BrawlBox and expand the MDLO and Objects sections. Inside you'll find all of the "objects" that make up your character's model.

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Each object is assigned to a visibility bone. Brawl's default visibility bones typically follow the naming scheme "BoneM" (e.g. ShellM) but you can actually use any bone for this purpose.

For example, most of Bowser's body is assigned to his TopN bone (bone 0), but the models used when he retracts into his shell are assigned to ShellBodyM (bone 24) and ShellM (bone 25).

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Once you've assigned your visibility bones, open your character's FitFighter.pac in PSA Compressor. First, navigate over to the Data > Misc section and expand ModelVisibility.

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Note that while the two sections inside are labelled Hidden and Visible in PSAC, these names aren't particularly accurate. We'll come back to this in a minute.

Inside the "Hidden" section you'll find one or more bone switches which may each contain one or more bone groups.

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A bone switch is essentially the model changer itself, while the bone groups inside are the different modes it can be set to. The values inside each bone group are the visibility bones that activate when the switch is set to that group.

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Bowser's bone switch 1 is used to switch between his default state and being retracted inside his shell. Group 0 contains the visibility bones for his main body and horns, while group 1 is his two shell objects. Keep in mind that PSA Compressor uses hex while BrawlBox uses decimal, so in this case ShellM becomes bone 19.

Switch 0 is usually reserved for activating final smash eyes (for characters that have them) and triggers automatically upon breaking a smash ball, but the others can be edited and used freely.

You can change these values to any bones in your character's boneset, but don't use a number higher than the highest bone or the game will crash. Setting a visibility bone that doesn't have any objects attached to it will simply do nothing. You can also null out an unwanted bone group by replacing the values inside with FFFFFFF or simply right click to delete them.

PSA Compressor also allows you to add new switches, groups, or visibility bones. While added groups and bones work fine, added switches have certain limitations compared to the default ones.

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The last step is to set up the so-called "Visible" section. Contrary to what you may assume, this section does not determine which bone groups are set to visible by default. It's actually a completely separate set of model changers that affect the character's shadow model.

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Like the main model, the shadow model is also made up of various objects (though typically fewer), and each can be assigned visibility bones from within the shadow model's own boneset.

You'll want to set up the shadow's bone switches to match the main model's, since both are activated at the same time. Make sure the Hidden and Visible sections have matching switches and groups or else the game can crash, though leaving a bone group without any bone values in it is fine. The exception to this rule is bone switch 0, which doesn't need to have any bone groups in the shadow section.

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To activate a model changer, place the Model Changer (0B000200) or Model Changer 2 (0B010200) event in any action or subaction; as noted in PSAC, they appear to be identical.

You can place multiple of the same model changer in a single subaction, and each will always override the previous one. The top value is the bone switch you want to use, while the bottom value is the bone group you want to trigger.

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Note that while the given example in PSAC is true for Bowser (0 is default, 1 is shell, and 2 is neither) this isn't necessarily the case in every instance, as creating a bone group 2 could cause Bowser's model changer to do something completely different. A character like Pit may have as many as 4 groups inside a single switch, representing all the different ways he can hold his blades.

Other Things To Note:

- While Brawl's preexisting bone switches are typically set up so group 0 is activated by default on every animation, this isn't true for bone switches you add yourself with PSAC. Added model changers have no default state, so all of the visibility bones within will be set to invisible until they're triggered, which can cause your entire character to become invisible if the switch includes TopN. Which switches are activated by default appears to be controlled within the character's module.

- Some characters' model changers are set to automatically activate under certain circumstances. For example, Toon Link's bone switch 1 and 2 both change from their default 0 (sword and shield in hands) to 1 (sword and shield on back) whenever he's holding a heavy item. An easy workaround to this is to simply make their group 1 have the same bones as group 0 and use groups 2 and up instead.

- Not every character reacts to model changers the same way. Toon Link's default model changers switch back to group 0 at the end of every action, but Pit's will stay activated until another model changer event is encountered.

trying to add an 11th costume for ganondorf through hex editor and keep getting nothing but crashes, any ideas? I have all proper BPs and CSPs.

Did you edit his FighterConfig as well, or just the CSSSlotConfig?

Found something else: The game freezes when selecting some stages in My Music. Final Destination for example. Must be something wrong with some songs since I played on FD one time and a song played without a name or sound.

This is a form of save corruption that can happen for other reasons. Try loading up Brawl with no hacks and see if My Music still freezes on those stages. If it does, you'll need to use the My Music Reset codes to fix it.

Not sure if it is just my build or not but Donkey Kong and Luigi both have no audio for their final smashes. Can someone confirm this?

That's a problem with BrawlEx in general, not just this build. It also happens for King Dedede.

Any news on the possibility of getting the full codelist?

Okay, cool. Now, when adding in the stage expansion, i have no idea how to add in the extra necessary SSS icons. And was wondering if someone even made a stage expansion with Project M's SSS.

Also, due to PMs prevbase being 176X176, any suggestions for a smaller prevbase?
especially if i'm adding in new stages, i need to reduce file size.

libertyernie made a template for adding your own expansion stages to Project M that should suit your purpose:
http://smashboards.com/threads/stage-expansion-template-for-pm-3-6-final-four-versions.345936/

I noticed the codelist wasn't included in the download. Are you going to release it anywhere in order to customize ASL stages and what not?

Did anybody ever figure out how to assign stock icons to clones? Pretty sure I remember reading that someone did, but ultimately ran into problems with the filesize limit. Still, some stocks would be better than none and I can't seem to find anything about how to do it.

I was thinking about giving some of the default characters 12 or 14 costumes. I believe 12 only requires you to reassign the cosmetic ID, but I know special steps have to be taken to go above that. I remember reading pieces of how to do this spread throughout this thread, but is there anywhere with all of the information compiled in one place?

I'm sorry for breaking the conversation you two are having, but I'm having a bit of a problem. When I do the button combinations for the other stage selection screens it never switches to them (Ex: Pressing X+Y then pressing b). Is there something I'm doing wrong or is that a bug or something?

What type of controller are you using? It has to be a regular Gamecube controller in slot 1 for the code to function. WaveBirds don't work, at least not mine.

Just wondering, in light of all the recent Project M drama, if you still intend to port the remaining 3.6 characters to vBrawl at some point in the future. Regardless, really appreciate the ones you've done so far and looking forward to Deoxys as well.

I once found an 8gb virtual SD card online somewhere and attempted to use it with Dolphin, only to discover that for whatever reason, BrawlEx's CSS expansion wouldn't load, limiting me to the usual 50 CSS slots. I have the same problem of using more than 2gb due to BRSTMs, so if using a 4gb card somehow gets around the CSS expansion issue, this is much appreciated.

Has anyone been able to successfully create a clone of R.O.B. without any gfx conflicts? His neutral special beam doesn't work like most gfx do and you can't simply change its ID by opening his .pac in PSA like you can with most graphic effects (including other traces).

A bit of an issue with Stage Manager. After taking a fresh sc_selmap and using the "prepare sc_selmap.pac for expansion stages" option, the Smash symbol (menselchrmark.20) appears when highlighting the random button on the SSS. I was able to fix this in the past but I cannot for the life of me remember how.