Switching body parts on the AI

[joeytheleo]

Hey, just wrote a big paragraph asking this question but it got deleted, so I am going to condense it this time. Is there some way to change a body part on a AI minifig? EG: I want to take off Gov. Broadsides hat and give him hair instead. I am trying to make a mario kart texture pack and I want to change some hair pieces on the AI so I can make them better resemble the characters they are supposed to be. In particular I am looking for a file that lists what textures the AI are going to use so I can switch, for example, GB_Hat with GH_Hair1. If not is there somewhere I can find the 3d models so I can look into directly editing those. Thanks in advance!

[lol username]

I can't help you find it, but I'm fairly certain there's a file that controls what pieces all the NPCs use... I've heard others discussing it anyway.

[joeytheleo]

Yeah, i felt like I had seen it before just cruising around the forums but I can't find it again. I also looked at the screenshots from Rock Raider Racers project and it looks like they managed to do it, so I have a feeling it is possible

So I managed to find this, in GMPELVIS.GBD

 

k_27    // Materials

[2]

{

"gm_mat"

"mat01"

}

 

Which shows that in the beginning of the code for when they put Gypsy moth in her car, it loads her "mat texture". So now i could realistically switch around the textures of all of the drivers (even though I'm 99.999999999999999999999% sure this has already been done).

 

Now i just have to find where it loads the actual 3d body part, not just the texture

[Jimbob]

I was able to do this for Rock Racers, but only to some extent. If you look at Creator's playthrough here, you can see right at the start that all the racers are wearing helmets. I can't remember exactly how I did this, but basically I just copied Rocket Racer's pelvis file and renamed it to whichever racer I wanted to use that texture. Then inside that pelvis file I found a link to the texture it uses (I think that's the mat file you found above, possibly, although I did mine in Notepad++ before the Binary File Editor was released) and changed that to my own one.

 

While it could be possible to swap around parts I haven't really tried it, I just took the easy route above. Hopefully that's still somewhat helpful though!

[Car CrazeXVI]

You can change the parts the racers use (and a bit more) in DRIVERS.DDB. Here's this from RR's entry:

        k_35
        1
        k_36
        28
        k_37
        15
        k_38
        18

It's pretty simple. It goes in the same order as the parts in the builder. (left to right)
Unfortunately, it only changes their parts in the menu. In the game their appearance is defined entirely by the pelvis files, so we're pretty much stuck with what the devs left us with. How wonderful.

 

Unless someone can figure out how to get it use the customizable minifigures, or at least get the pieces out of the GCB. I'd love to see that.

[joeytheleo]

Okay thats interesting.

 

So basically we can take entire pelvis files and replace a character but we can't mix and match the pieces.

 

I guess I can work with this, but I think I'm also going to mess around a bit in the pelvis file and see if I can figure it out. Sadly since all the textures for the AI are in one image I'm pretty sure the entire model is one entity rather than 4 different pieces so it might be impossible to mix and match parts.

[Jimbob]

Just because the textures are four parts combined into one image, it doesn't mean we can't still modify the parts. I'd imagine that if it was possible to, say, switch the torso of Rocket Racer to use the hook torso of Captain Redbeard, while keeping other parts the same, you'd simply end up with Redbeard's torso using Rocket Racer's texture.

EDIT: Whoops, I misinterpreted what you said. Been doing that a lot lately. The figures may be one model, but I reckon that they just use a single texture for ease and actually are split into four. I guess there's only one way to find out!

 

Alright, I'm going to whip out my copy of LR again and have another look at this now.