Speedybeef

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!

Also loved seeing how and where they used various music track - I've listened to the OST for quite a while so was so fun hearing my favs! I feel like they saved a lot of bangers for near the end. Also that ending! Getting huge XC2 vibes (other way around really)

Xenosaga ep 1: So good. Been playing it for the first time over the break, just finished it now. I love the characters so much! I'm very confused still, but in the best way possible. Probably not jumping into 2 (or Pied Piper) straight away but certainly looking forward to it!

its true that anytime someone posts artworks from there, I check and never see it! I have xenoblade set as my sole interest in it too, so not sure why I don't see that stuff

the original still looks more charming with its whimsical trailing sparks effects, I don't know how to do any of that yet 😭 #Xenogears

I did also do a proper swinging animation that seems fairly close to the original, but I couldn't get a screen recording that wasn't choppy. I'll try again tomorrow with something better than the windows snipping tool lol

my depiction of "the chair", seen prominently in Xenogears disc 2. Eventually, Elly/Fei will be sat on it!

didn't actually get the chair finished but its fine from this distance (play Intangible Treasure when looking at this!) #xenogears

She is from Xenogears

oh and it looks nicer with the filter applied, if I ever get it working on the hair alone

just uses this texture added on top

oh i'm really pleased with this one! I got the fake hair highlight working! Things that are just taken for granted when rendering more normal stuff, but with the toons style it needs adding manually

love the core crystal "animation"!

other effects I've made are the hatching on clothing. Quite like it

with the directional kuwahara PP filter

without the directional kuwahara PP filter

made a funky painterly PP filter (99% copied from a brilliant tutorial, would never have managed it on my own 😭). I intend to only have it affect hair only, but here it is on everything for now. Looks interesting at least

oh lol in my hurry to test the functionality I didn't realise the imported model still retained its original vertex colours from Monolith, but they got nerfed when I merged the objects into one actor. A simple checkbox stops that 😅 Absolutely EVERYTHING is a steep learning curve