wow! i'll definitely buy this to support the effort, though I'll probably just play the cyclonefox recreation

btw everything with physics animations are hair, ears, collar thing, sleeves, coattails and the bow

Spent all day messing with built-in unreal methods and got absolutely nowhere. Then i found this free plugin which literally just works! Amazing, i am blown away with the results! github.com/pafuhana1213...

fixed the shadow going transparent as the model does as you get close. Small wins but really satisfying

Something else that to me felt really important for "the xenoblade feel" was the camera controls. I always loved how easy and how much freedom they gave the player in XC games; far, close, up and down. Even side to side in XC2!

and yeah i should probably tweak when the model disappears to be a bit sooner, seeing the inside of her face like that isn't ideal 😭

Oh but of course when you zoom into effectively first person mode, then the camera has to jump again !!! plus the model must also disappear, else you see bodyparts flailing around

I'd really like to learn how to do physics based animations for the hair and clothes. Monolith did such a great job with all this stuff, it adds to much life to the movement. Maybe that'll be what I try next

And here is the blueprint (visual scripting) setup it took to get working. For me, with no experience, it was really hard. And its still not quite right, but works well enough in most cases

Whilst running was quite easy, getting jumping 'right' (its still not) was much more tricky! After getting the animations to work, something felt off still. Turns out in all Xenoblade games, when you jump, the camera does not. And I really wanted it to feel as close to that as possible

Definitely a bit janky with the legs clipping through the clothes. I think ingame they have some extra control over certain bones, for elbows and knees too (more noticeable on like a sitting animation)

sorry about the quality, the framerate looks pretty choppy compared to the proper clip

And of course we can run too! Made it so the character goes translucent when the camera gets too close

So turns out in XC3 i never noticed that they have specific walking animations! Added a walking toggle to make a bit easier to see them in action

Sorry for lack of updates, been busy. Anyway. Animations! Not my own yet, but I think its really good to learn with known good examples, so I know what i aim for. Just implementing them is a huge learning experience

never thought i'd hear the word "teuchter" on the Nintendolife channel! Brilliant

Flat shading hides a lot of the awfulness that comes from their extraction process

standard shading, showing all the inverted normals on every other poly

clay visualisation

the gang! Sadly they are super labour-intensive to try to fix. Only spent a bit of time on Shion, manually flipping and welding half her poly's... and made a quick hair texture as apparently they never made it from the game

Hopefully that all makes sense. I can understand if you don't go to all the trouble of setting that up for every model; the way they randomly packed channels makes it quite a lengthy process, but the info is there if you want it. It should help bring the materials to life a bit

As for emissives, I wasn't sure from your pics if they were already set up or not.
What I did is use the colour texture for emissive colour, then using the Linear Interpolate node with the GLO textures as the mask. Multiplied by 10 to brighten them up a bit! Obviously would require tweaking to suit

colour for material A for reference

texture 0001 red channel, Ambient Occlusion for material A Ambient Occlusion is probably the easiest to recognise; Mostly white with black for crevices

texture 0001 green channel, Metallic for material A Metallic is a bit trickier, its usually mostly black/white but artistic license sometimes takes over. Best way to tell is look for something known metal (I look at the gold sections on the colour texture), and they should be white or nearly white here. Something definitely not metal (plastics etc) should be black

texture 0000 red channel, roughness (opposite, actually) for material A Confusingly, I think monolith are using smoothness maps for XC2 (May not be the case for XC3, I haven't checked). Unreal wants roughness (meaning fully rough = 1 or white, smooth = 0 or black), that is why I use the "one minus" node to invert them before hooking them up to the material.

You can see individual channels of textures in unreal, or something like photoshop. Check the ALT text for more info on how I determined which texture and channel went where

Aion C material

So different games will pack ORM (occlusion/roughness/metallic) differently, and in this case its almost random (monolith's way of minimising textures), hence having to grab different channels from multiple textures in some cases. They did this to be efficient but its a pain for us!

Aion A material

Aion B material

Aion C material

Aion D material

So i'll first just post pics of the Aion A, B, C, D and E materials, then explain a bit afterwards. I've marked which ORM texture I'm using where for clarity, might be hard to tell from the pic otherwise

Aion with monolith's roughness/metallic maps applied. Could probably use some tweaking but its a nice start

Btw. if you wanted to go even further, you could hook up the Ambient Occlusion, Roughness and Metallic maps too!
Though because of the way Monolith packaged them, its quite a bit of work to decipher what goes where... I'll make a little thread of how I set up Aion, feel free to ignore though!

heh thats awesome! I wouldn't worry, I reckon 95% of people wouldn't have noticed anyway, but for anything more brightly lit or close-up, its well worth it

side by side comparison with and without NMs on A. Colour information removed for clarity

Aion model with the NM, but without colour information

Aion model without the NM, also without colour information

Basic setup of a normal map in UE - just hook the map to the normal slot in the material. Then for the texture, the green channel probably needs flipped (does for all XC3 NMs anyway, i highly suspect anything monolith will be the same) - UE should recognise a Normal Map and change the others settings to suit, but you can check them anyway

@sparksopus.bsky.social regarding my yt comment: easier to show pics here than explain the effects - some examples of what NMs are doing, and a pic of how to set it up in UE(4 in my case but its the same in 5)

Maybe a hot take but I definitely feel like the faces of XC1 were a regression. I can only assume it was a performance thing in order to facilitate the much more expansive worlds instead (i respect OG fans but I much prefer the DE ones!)

in the past few months I've played and beat FF7, Remake, Intermission (which i'm counting as a separate game, i loved it so much despite being so short), Crisis Core and now Xenosaga. So much peak and i'm barely scratching the surface of what's available!

Honestly just so thankful for Xenoblade; before I played them (which was 2024), i was a super casual gamer and really struggled to get hooked on any game. Now i've realised I love JPRGs and have decades of games to dig into

Just beat Xenosage Episode 1! Played it over the xmas break, loved it so much even though it kicked my arse!

I couldn't help but study the 3d art too. The character designs definitely grew on me, and I have an inkling most of the characters would actually suit being toon-shaded. Like the face shapes are surprisingly close to that of XC2/3. Big fan of the vertex lighting too; very of its time, very clean!