Tutorial: character model swapping

Hi there, here's how we can swap player models by almost any model, in this case we're going to take a non playable "enemy" model and paste it into a "player" (.dat) file.

First let's choose which model we're going to take, for instance go to the "Enemy" folder and open Armed.dat, then inside NORM[3] and select the first MDLB.

Under the dark grey bar with text "Armed.dat"click the "copy" button, now what is selected is copied to the clipboard memory.

Now on the list of folders and file(on the left) go to the "Player" folder and select the Beat.dat file.
Thenselect the first MDLB as in the following image:

Then click "paste"

We've pasted the MDLB from Armed.dat into a Beat.dat's MDLB.

You'll notice we also need to replace the texture, but first we're going to make some parts of the Beat model, invisible, such as the head and hands models, because the model we're replacing already has those parts integrated in the first model.

Here's how the contents of a player.dat file is structured:

Inside the NORM [13], go to each head and hand model (MDLB) and click "Collapse vertices", this button moves all the model's geometry points to the same position, making the model invisible.

If the player model you selected has "Jiggle" models(such as clothing, chains or hair that moves), you can remove those by selecting one and clicking the "empty" button, but using "empty" might cause the game to crash, as the game expects to find those model parts, it's original bone hierarchy and to apply animation or the "jiggle" effect.

So instead of using "empty" we use "collapse vertices" for the hands, head models and jiggle models.


Finally lets get the texture from the original model, copy and pasting within the JSRF Tool won't work for this, because the textures have a unique ID number, so instead we're going to replace the image data through an image editor so the texture ID is preserved as the original.

Load Enemy\Armed.dat, select the texture and click "Edit texture"

Now open Player\Beat.dat and select the second texture and click "Edit texture"

In your image editor, copy the texture of Armed.dat, into the window of Beat's texture, save and then go back to the JSRF Tool with the beat texture selected and click "save changes".

 

That's all!

And the result ingame: