Help getting the Death/Grim Reaper animation

[convalise]

Hello!

First a little background: I'm the developer of a little Triple Triad remake project and one of the features I implemented is a FF11 Tetra Master variant. One of the features of the original FF11 TM is what's called a Chance Block in which, when you break it, it reveals a special effect power up (more information here) and one of this power ups (better saying power down) is the Grim Reaper. You can see the effect on this very old YouTube video (on 00:40): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvNQ8YeVqEM&t=40s

So I've been trying to extract the Grim Reaper model and animation (the one loaded when you cast Death black magic) in some way to put it on my project for a long time now, from either the PSX or PC versions, but without any success 'cause apparently this model is in a hardly encrypted space and the regular tools (Noesis, HadesWorkshop, etc) don't work it out; not even NinjaRipper was able the get the mesh. I've tried many things, even decompiling the PC game to try and figure out how the FF9SpecialEffectPlugin dll would load the assets, but without luck. It's very frustating because the data is sitting right there on Resources/specialeffects/ef094.bytes.

Then I saw that Memoria has a model viewer you can open within the FF9 Launcher, and while it does have some SFX I couldn't find the Grim Reaper/Death there. Taking a look in the project I noticed that Memoria implements the SFX calls to FF9SpecialEffectPlugin, so I wonder if it can be used to achieve what I want? it would be a call to static SFX.Play with effnum = 94 (Death). Even if I'm not able to extract the actual model itself, if we could simply play the animation using the Memoria model viewer I could screen-record it and make my way to turn it into a spritesheet.

I say spritesheet because in the end that's what I'll use. For instance, this is what I've done with the Power Up (Garnet) one: I extracted the PSX model with Noesis, imported on Unity and used the Recorder to export the animations frames (there's probably a better way to do it, but using Unity was easier for me). See bellow:

Garnet example

recording-powerup.mp4

Can the Memoria model viewer be used to play the Death animation? Either to extract it like the other models, or simply play it so I can screen-record it? Or is there something that can be used to help me achieve this? It's pretty much the only asset I was not able to acquire or create myself so far.

Thanks! :)

[Tirlititi]

Hello.

That's a complicated problem. The model indeed exists in an unknown format. Unlike almost all the other SFX of the game, the Grim Reaper model can be (at least partly) read with the tool Rɘverse FF9 made by tasior2 (it requires a IMG file of the PSX version of the game, which can be extracted from ISO/BIN files).
Although tasior2's work on deciphering the format for these is awesome and would be great to resume, I'm not even sure if it can really be used for your needs: it doesn't look like it reads the Reaper's animation, unfortunatly, and only shows the static 3D model.

So indeed, currently, the best shot would be to use Memoria / the game's engine directly. However, these spell visual effects require some setups that are not in the scope of the Model Viewer (at least not yet). For example, SFX require battle camera and unit position setups before SFX.Play could be used.
So I would say, the best way would be to simply cast the spell in-game with some setup to hide everything else. You won't have control on the camera though, so you can only choose the camera angle amongst the available in-game cameras.

The simplest way to hide everything else would be to use a custom SFX sequence StreamingAssets/Data/SpecialEffects/ef094/Sequence.seq. This one should do the trick:

// Shared sequence of SFX Death modified to hide the units and battle background

SetBackgroundIntensity: Intensity=0 ; HoldDuration=94
ShowMesh: Char=Everyone ; Enable=False ; IsDisappear=True
PlaySound: Sound=1891
PlaySound: Sound=1892
PlaySound: Sound=1893
Wait: Time=20
PlaySound: Sound=1894
PlaySound: Sound=1895
PlaySound: Sound=1896
Wait: Time=48
PlaySound: Sound=1897
PlaySound: Sound=1898
PlaySound: Sound=1899
Wait: Time=2
PlaySound: Sound=1900
PlaySound: Sound=1901
PlaySound: Sound=1902
Wait: Time=24
ShowMesh: Char=Everyone ; Enable=True ; IsDisappear=True
SetBackgroundIntensity: Intensity=1

Hopefully that will be enough for your needs.
You could try to adjust the camera indirectly by changing an enemy's initial position and with the in-game options concerning battle cameras. I guess that's still limited.

Good luck.

[convalise]

I didn't know about the Rɘverse FF9 tool you linked. It indeed finds the model, which is very interesting, but sadly not the animation as you mentioned. Sadlier it's also not in T pose; worst case scenario I could try rigging it myself after hours of youtube tutorials. lol

But we're not in worst case yet. I had a little time this weekend and did a quick test with the Sequence you provided and it indeed hides everything, thanks man! I'm gonna do a little research about the camera and other things I can try this week. All these instructions are valid for a Sequence, right? It appears it doesn't have any camera instructions, but, do you think ShiftWorld would help? I mean, repositioning the camera or the world is just a matter of perspective anyway :)

Thank you for shining a light on my problem!

[Tirlititi]

ShiftWorld's behaviour is actually to change everything except the SFX themselves: it's because we can't move SFX that we move everything else instead. It's used to make it possible to have summon SFX casted on the player's party (it always hits the enemy's side of the battleground, so by rotating the whole battleground, the player characters take their place).
So it won't be of any help for you unfortunatly, I guess you'll see that quickly. It's just as if "the layers of SFX" stay exactly the same while the background/characters change position.

Yes, these instructions are valid. I think the wiki is up-to-date regarding that.