Creating FF9 Monster Images

Capturing the monster images for FF9 is going to be a pain in the ass. So, we need to start it early-ish.

Needed Stuff

• Final Fantasy IX ISOs. Could make them yourself from your own discs, but yuck. Try to torrent them, or if that's an issue, Josh has a set.
• Noesis_(3D_Model_Viewer): Noesis is a kind of catch-all-games model viewer, with a standard set of plugins and a second set of user-submitted plugins. FF9 is part of the standard set, which is good. Use the newer version on dropbox.

How to Actually Do the Things and the Stuff

1. Unpack the ISOs. I think this is easiest to do by installing something like DAEMON Tools so you can mount the discs to a virtual CD drive.
2. Grab the IMG file for each disc inside the ISOs for each disc, and save that file somewhere locally. After that you're done with DAEMON and also the discs themselves.
3. Open Noesis, and navigate to the IMG file you want to start with. When you open that file, a window will appear to Export container file. Doing this will create a folder in the same location as the IMG, named similarly. Clicking "Done" will ask you if you want to unpack recursively. You do want this, and you are willing to wait for it.
4. Once the export is done, you can navigate through the file tree to the folder you just made. Inside that folder will be a lot of other folders, called "dir##" where ## is a two-digit number. The monster models appear to be in folder dir07.
5. Inside dir07 are a ton of other folders, called "file####_files". Each of those should be a monster, but some seem not to have them. file0001 might be the first one to have a monster, so use that as a test.
6. Inside THAT folder will be two folders, dbfile0000_files and dbfile0001_files. 0000 seems to contain the actual stuff we need.
7. Double-click the file in the middle pane that ends in .ff9mdl. You will be prompted for an animation file, just click whatever the first is in the list.
8. The monster will now be completely spazzy. You can click the pause button to pause the animation - if it doesn't pause in an attractive way, you can restart the animation, slow it down to 1 fps using the << button, and pause again.
9. You can move the monster around a little bit by clicking and dragging on it until the pose is something good.
10. Make sure the shading is off. You can tell the difference by clicking the yellow ball button - we want the brighter version, because it being visible is better than it being realistic according to the game engine.
11. Take a screenshot of the monster. This can be done any number of ways. We want 24-bit PNGs, which can be done either with the Snipping Tool in Windows 7 or something like Jing (http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html).
12. Save the image with the folder name (file####.png). We'll need to rename them later to match the actual monster name.
13. Next monster!
14. Start by doing the monsters in Disc 1. I don't know yet if the other discs have other monsters, so we should see how many we can knock off just from disc 1 before we start dealing with finding the others.

Other Info

Might or might not be useful. http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=13145.0