Home Gallery Resources The Team Rules chat Login Register
  Show Topics
Pages: [1]
1  Help & Tutorials / Help / Why won't Tifa over DeDeDe work? on: November 04, 2012, 04:07:11 PM
So... When I first started Brawl modding, I downloaded the Tifa over King DeDeDe hack that's currently in the vault. Once I tried to use it, the game froze.
Since then, I've learned a lot about modding and I've learned to use PSA and Brawlbox accordingly. I found out that the Tifa model only has one bone, and that causes the game to freeze.
But, no one has reported this hack, even though it's been downloaded many times. I've redownloaded it, and the model still only has one bone, so it's not my download. Do I need to do something special? Is there a trick to this? Why is it that others have been able to use this hack just fine, and yet, I can't?
Help would be appreciated.
2  Help & Tutorials / Model Tutorials / Combining Brawl models with only Brawlbox! on: October 06, 2012, 04:52:27 PM
Note! This tutorial is old and better methods may exist for combining models. This tutorial uses brawlbox 0.63c, though any version of brawlbox after 0.63c ought to work.

If you're having issues with the models, please make sure you are following all the steps. It works when I use it, but I am not skilled enough to troubleshoot brawlbox's computer-specific errors or model-specific errors.

This tutorial is meant to help people combine models or add new polygons to existing models. I made this tutorial because I spent three months and 250+ files trying to get my model combinations to work out, and no one had any tutorials for me to use. I want to spare others that frustration.
It's pretty simple really, but you ought to have a basic understanding of Brawlbox before you start this. I use version .65c, but it shouldn't matter which version you use.

Part I- Getting the object into Brawlbox.
    1. Open the .pac or .pcs file containing the model or polygons you want to add.
    2. Export the MDL0 file from the first BRRES, and any textures you'll want from the second BRRES as well.
    3. Open the MDL0 file, view it in Brawlbox's Model Viewer, and deselect polygons until only the ones you want to keep remain. Write those down and go to the 'objects' folder inside the MDL0; there you will be able to see what objects are attached to the polygons you want to add. Write these down.
    4. Open the receiving character's fitcharacter##.pac file, go to the model, and select 'import object'. Choose your MDL0 file and select the polygons that you wrote down in the last step. You can only select one at a time, so repeat this step as necessary.
    5. Brawlbox will ask you where you want the new bones attached to. DO NOT check the box that will merge the two models together, but just pick the bone that you want your new polygon to be attached to. So in the case of a meat cleaver-wielding Peach, that would probably be the Lhave and Rhave bones.
    6. Delete all of the new bones on your imported polygons that don't affect them. You can tell if a bone affects it by rotating the bone in the viewer. If nothing moves (AND it is one of your new bones), delete it!
    7. Import the textures that the new polygons have into the textures BRRES.
Part I is accomplished!

Part II: Editing the model
    1. View the model in the model viewer. If it looks good, then you're done here too. If not, then you'll have to rotate, scale, and translate the bones until they're where you want them (DON'T LOAD ANIMATIONS WHILE DOING THIS! THE MODEL SHOULD BE T-POSED!)
    2. Rename the root (first bone) of your recently imported bones to have an uppercase 'N' on the end of them. So if you're bone tree looks like cleaver_handle -> cleaver_base -> cleaver_tip, rename the cleaver_handle to cleaver_handleN.
    3. Save your model and go on to the next part. This will be the most tedious part, but very necessary.
Part II is accomplished!

Part III: Troubleshooting
    1. First, save your modified model, close it, and then reopen it. Most of the time, the objects will have the wrong materials assigned to them. Go into the 'object' folder in the model and scroll through ALL of the objects. For every polygon, the material name should be the same as the vertex node name. If they are different, change the material name.
    2. Often, the new polygons that you added will not have a visibility bone set. Set them to Top-N if you want them to appear all the time, set them to other bones if you only want them to appear when those bones are visible. Also, make sure that they are bound to their imported bones (singlebind entry).
    3. Test your model in Brawl! Sometimes, it will go over the size limit, in which case the game will freeze once you select the character. If this happens, try re-importing your textures and change the compression to CMPR- this will save a lot of space.
    4. If your model looks weird, as though Brawlbox hasn't accepted your changes, things get more complicated. I'm only a beginner myself, but I've overcome this problem each time I had to by following these steps. First, try renaming the root bone to have a capital 'M' on the end, rather than an 'N'.  
    5. If the model still doesn't look right in Brawl, there's still a way to fix it (I did this when I added wings to a special Marth model). First, write down all the changes you had to make to the bones to get the imported polygons in the right position. Then, change their singlebind value to the bone that you want them attached to (so for Peach to hold the cleaver, it might be Lhave and Rhave). Your model will not look the same in the model viewer, but that's alright. Just copy and paste the values back into place. DO NOT try to make it look correct (yet)- The model may or may not look weird in the viewer, but it should work perfectly in Brawl. If it doesn't, you'll have to do some more tinkering.
    6. In the case of some mods, your character may function differently- this is because the altered bone structure is messing with PSA. You have three options: you can try to make your new polygons fuze with the model's original bones, you can learn PSA and change all the values (wouldn't THAT be tedious Tongue), or you can do what I did and remove unecessary bones or play with the bone structure until the bones are in the right places.  What I mean is this: Brawlbox uses bone ID numbers to attach hitboxes and GFX. When you add new a new bone, it shifts the others' bone ID's up a number. Most of the time this will be unnoticable, but in the case of some mods it is very noticable. Most imports have unnecessary bones that you can delete without having any effect on the model- but because every character and every situation is different, it's up to you to experiment with this step! Note that, once again, this should not be necessary on most of your mods.

That's really all there is to it. If you want to remove polygons from your model, or if you want to replace them with polygons from other models, just find their object and delete it from the 'objects' folder. Simple as that!
I hope this guide helps those who need it. Leave some feedback for me too- this is my first tutorial!
Pages: [1]