How to: Import custom models to Cold Steel IV

Introduction

This page is here to guide you in the process of adding custom models to Cold Steel IV. It is currently one of the most complex operations in modding as it involves several steps, and is still at a somewhat early stage. The guide will lead you to insert Van Arkride from Kuro no Kiseki to CSIV, but in a very rough state. He will not be able to fight or doing anything more than running on the field.

The current process includes the following steps in chronological order:

• Obtaining the model to import (Van Arkride) as a FBX file
• Importing it in Maya 2015/2016/2017/2018
• Creating the dummy shaders, then applying them to Van's materials in Maya (including his shadow shader)
• Exporting Van to .dae using the ColladaMaya plugin
• Importing Van in CSIV using CSIVAssetImportTool to obtain a .dae.phyre file
• Updating the shader names in it
• Using Ouroboros' ED84 decompiler, scripting the Idle and Running animations.

Note that this guide could see an extension of it later if we find the time, where we would discuss how to reproduce craft attacks using camera control commands through ani script editing.

Obtaining the model

To extract Van's model from Kuro no Kiseki game files, we will be using KuroTools mdl exe.
First we search for Van's model file which is called chr0000.mdl. We will also grab his run (chr0000_mot_run.mdl) and idle (chr0000_mot_wait.mdl) animations. All the mdls are located in "THE LEGEND OF HEROES KURO NO KISEKI\c\asset\common\model".

Then we will put all the files inside a folder near ED9AssetExporter.exe:

And the folder (called "model", above) content:

All that is left is drag and drop the folder containing van mdl and his animations onto ED9AssetExporter.exe.

The tool outputs a FBX file. However, it does not have any texture. It is because textures are separate from the mdl file, since they are located in "\THE LEGEND OF HEROES KURO NO KISEKI\c\asset\dx11\image". To know which texture you need to use, you will have to run the tool and take note of what the tool is outputting on the console; those are the missing textures:

Get them all from c\asset\dx11\image and place them in the same directory than ED9AssetConverter:

Setting up the model in Maya

At the time of writing this guide, we didn't find a better tool than Maya 2015 to 2018, as Blender dae export doesn't seem to work well when injected in CSIV (supposedly, the skeleton doesn't seem compatible).
That's why we will be using Maya 2018 from here.
Once Maya is launched, import chr0000.fbx into the scene:

You can ignore the possible warnings that show up. The result should look like this:

When enabling the texture, nothing really shows up. It is because Van's shadow is a mesh itself and is covering him.
You can hide that mesh by selecting the kage one and CTRL + H.

Note: if any texture looks wrong, you might want to convert them to DDS BC1.
Right now, we don't really care, as the only thing we will be doing is applying a shader to each material.
We provide a chr.fx dummy shader that doesn't have any code in it, only parameters. The trick is that we will be using existing shaders from Cold Steel that were already compiled by the developers. In Maya, we are just using empty shaders to set the parameters in the output dae.