Final Fantasy VIII models

[SierraLatkje]

And don't drive yourself crazy. Take some time, then come back when you're ready to do more.

Actually, I couldn't concentrate on anything 'cause I had to give up caffeine for about two weeks, and I could barely keep my eyes open. (After that long, you'd think my body would have adjusted, but...for some reason it didn't.) But I'm back on it again (thank goodness for diet sodas!) so I'm slowly regaining my coherency and ability to focus. Now if only my brother hadn't sent Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 over to my place to keep him from playing it all the time.... (Why am I so addicted to that game? I don't even know 75% of the cast...)

Uh, yeah, anyway, I'm pretty excited about some of the models in this batch.

First, two standard enemies, though each of them introduces a complication. The cyborg Esthar soldiers are simple enough, except that I wasn't careful enough when I did the standard Esthar soldiers, so their icon is actually wrong. So, two icons, one for the new model, and one for the old, in addition to the new model.

Spoiler

http://www.mediafire.com/?n6iu4xjs0252pzg

The only complication about the Propagators is the fact that they come in several different colors, but are still the same monster, absolutely nothing different about them other than their color. (I think there was some sort of reason there, like there were two of each color in different places on the Ragnarok, and you had to defeat them in a row, without fighting one of another color in between, or something like that? Been a long time...) Anyway, although there's only one color on the icon, all the colors are in the .zip, in different folders. I presume that's the appropriate way to handle it?

Spoiler

I actually made two different versions of the preview image, but one of them is really pretty awful--too crowded, so you can't really see any of them very well--so I'll just upload the one version.

http://www.mediafire.com/?3cov4x8ryl9bq4c

Next up we have the Jumbo Cactuar. Like the King Tonberry, this is a large boss you fight in order to gain the right to summon one of his(?) lesser brethern as a GF.

Spoiler

http://www.mediafire.com/?1o3uh41slg1lb3r

And now we have a batch of standard bosses.

Spoiler

http://www.mediafire.com/?jvbo5d615wf7zdj


http://www.mediafire.com/?2l6jvbvlj0al8fs
For Garden Master NORG, I made up two previews, one showing the NORG pod as well (which I had to assemble in MMD because my Blender/Metasequoia knowledge is too limited) and one just showing NORG himself. I'm not sure which is the better idea to use, so I'll leave that up to your judgement...though I should admit that technically NORG is in the wrong place on the pod in that preview, 'cause I couldn't get it to open without a ridiculous amount of effort.



http://www.mediafire.com/?zvobtc5rbo66r5r


http://www.mediafire.com/?14examer7qzsjo4



http://www.mediafire.com/?eh9h2fuo0ds9ohk

I threw in that full-size render of Ultima Weapon because I didn't think the preview image would fully display the fact that he is, in fact, wielding Cloud's Ultima Weapon. I thought that was pretty cool. (If I noticed it when I last played the game, I've forgotten in the decade since...)

Right, so, finally, we come to these two tricky customers. Both of them are both bosses *and* party members. I'm not sure how best to categorize them, therefore. Probably party members? I dunno... Anyway, Edea was simple, because she hasn't got a weapon, and only has one appearance in the battle segments of the game. Seifer, on the other hand, is a little more complicated. You fight him four times, and he has three different models, though the difference between the main model (from his time in the party and the first two fights) and the third fight model seems only to be his slumped posture, but...I thought I'd better include it just in case. Fortunately, since he spends such a short amount of time in the party, he only has one weapon, so that simplifies the weapon issue. Since it has no moving parts, I only ripped it as an .obj, since it seems like the main difference between .obj, .dae and .smd is the ability to have bones. If I should have ripped it in the other formats as well, let me know, and I'll add them in and post a new .zip. One more tricky issue on these two is that I wasn't sure how to label them on their icons. I prepared three versions for Edea, and two for Seifer...

Spoiler

Edea, btw, has one of my favorite character designs in a game ever. I'm not sure what it is, but something about her character design just really works for me. And it's also worth noting that so far she's the only model I've ripped who has individual fingers. (It's possible Ultimecia or Adel might, but none of the others have had any so far...)
http://www.mediafire.com/?z795z9p1iy9dwvn

What to do about Seifer's gunblade brings up a larger question that I'll need to address when I get to the main party members. Since they each have several weapons, should I put each weapon into a subfolder off the main folder, or into subfolders in a Weapons subfolder? Also, more importantly, Kiros and Zell have no hands. Or rather, they have blank polygons which are then skinned with their weapons, which have to be ripped separately. (Makes sense in Zell's case, since he has many weapons, but as Kiros only has the one, you'd think they'd have just put the textures on there in the first place...) This is only a problem because since they're ripped separately, they're not UV mapped onto the blank polygons. How should I handle that? (Trying to UV map the texture onto Kiros's katal blades produced rather...uh...awkward results the first time I tried it in MMD...)

Other than this awkward problem, I think it's all fairly smooth sailing from here on in...oh, except for Ultimecia's final form. It's so freakin' huge, I have no idea how I'm gonna handle it. For that matter, would people rather see Ultimecia's forms in one .zip file, or in individual ones?