Importing Custom Formation Sprites and Portraits [Warning! Image Heavy Post!]

[SapphireFlames]

Wow, I spent almost 10 hours trying to figure this stuff out but anyway. After much trial and error, perseverance and patience, I have discovered some very useful tricks that will help expedite your extraction and rendition process with sprites when modifying UNIT.bin and WRLD FACE.bin. I'll lay it out step by step.

[For Human UNIT.bin]
Step 1: Open Shishi Sprite Manager, Microsoft Paint (Optional), and Graphics Gale (I used Free Edition).
Step 2: Select a character you wish to modify. For the purposes of this example, I will select Ramza Chapter 1.
Step 3: From Shishi Sprite Manager, open your FFT ISO.
Step 4: When open, go to Ramza 1 (should be the very first one).
Step 5: Assuming you have not replaced Ramza 1 with your designated sprite, do so now (I chose Young Noble Ramza).
Step 6: From Shishi, go to Export BMP and Export the now modified Ramza 1 sprite.
Step 7: Open Graphics Gale and open the now Exported BMP file for Ramza 1 (we'll call it RAMZA1.bmp).
Step 8: You will notice it will have a spread sheet of the different parts of Ramza and such. Zoom in about 300-400% to the SECOND frame from the top left of Ramza. It should be him basically facing sideways or at an angle.
Ramza 9: Use the 'Rectangular Selection' tool to draw a 24 x 40 square around Ramza. It does not need to be absolutely perfect but be sure you get it as close as you can, and, of course, that he's completely inside the box. Otherwise he will be cut out.
Ramza 10: Once a Rectangle has been made around Ramza, go to the 'All Frames' tab and from there select "CROP". Doing so should give you a perfect Ramza sprite for the UNIT.bin without having to deal with the annoying Load Palette stuff. Save it as RAMZA2Body.bmp.

Note: If, for some reason, the FFTEVGRP program does not recognize the sprite or allow it due to it exceeding 16 bytes, you may need to manually alter its palette. To do so, I recommend you first go to Palette Window and click on the black arrow pointing down to open up a menu. From the menu, select "REMOVE UNUSED COLOR". This will eliminate whatever excess colors that are not being used in the BMP. From there go to "All Frames" and go to "Color Depth." From there, format the BMP to 4bpp (16 colors) [Type A]. If, for some reason, Dither is checked uncheck it. There should be a 16 in the option box. If it is not 16, change it.

[For Human WRLD FACE.bin, Portrait]
Step 11: Go back to Shishi Sprite and use the "Print Screen" feature on your keyboard to get a copy of your screen (should be showing the portrait of Ramza).
Step 12: Paste it into Microsoft Paint (alternatively, you could just use Graphics Gale but it's a bit easier to do it through MS Paint).
Step 13: With your Square Selection tool, draw a rectangle at the very bottom where Ramza's face is. I suggest you zoom in 400% to get an accurate capture. It must be precise. Be sure ALL of Ramza's face is selected. There should be no extra pixels. You will see why later.
Step 14: Copy, and Paste. A duplicate of the file should appear hovering on the screen.
Step 15: Go to 'Crop' and crop the file so that nothing else is there but just the file. Rotate the file Left/Counterclockwise as it will likely be horizontal.
Step 16: Now that you have an original copy of your port. Save it just in case you screw up as Ramza1Port.bmp (24 bytes).
Step 17: With Graphics Gale, click on "File" and open a New file. It will give you options to use either a preset or use whatever is default. I highly recommend you make a new preset if you wish to extract multiple portraits. It'll save you time. Either way, click on 'Preset'. It'll open a drop down menu.
Step 18: Click on "EDIT" and "Add". Type in the dimensions 32 x 48 with a BPP of 16 (64000 colors). The portrait must fit EXACTLY in this dimension or you will risk having a wonky portrait.
Step 19: After you're done, it'll open up a blank slot. Copy and paste your picture there.
Step 20: You will notice you cannot Delete the excess colors. That's okay, you don't need to. Just go to "All Frames" -> "Color Depth" -> "16bpp." This will give your port the correct color resolution without having to use/abuse load palette.

I'll upload a guide for monsters tomorrow-- specifically chocobos on how to extract Ports and Units. It's a lot trickier and tedious than humans seeing how you the Palettes MUST match for it to be read by FFTEVGRP. Otherwise you risk having strangely colored monsters.

Well, good night for all. My first contribution to FFHacktics. I hope that helps!

[AzureSana]

Terrific tutorial Celdia! This really helped me out~ 

[en4cer1133]

I am using the current version of the tool package provided earlier in this tutorial, but when I try to replace a sprite using the new method (Sprite->Import SPR)  I am getting an error that is saying: "the sprite size is 44453 bytes.  The max size is 43008 bytes." and fails to import the sprite.  I look at the file sizes of each file (old sprite and new sprite I am wanting to use) in Graphic Gale, and they are the same... am I doing anything wrong?  I am using the toolkit FFTPatcher suite ver. 0.482 v2, and trying to replace the cloud sprite with the advent children version from the sprites download section for use on the PSP WotL if that helps clarify my situation.

[Caen]

you're wrong. you can reassign a unit.bin sprite to ANY sprite, for example, i assigned the Dancer unit.bin sprite to celia and lede's

how do you do that..? i mean i can't seem to find celia and lede (never used) sprites in unit.bin...

[3lric]

That post was made in 2011...

You can overwrite any sprite in the unit.bin.

You can also reassign them with the UWEntries (or however its spelled) program

[DarthFutuza]

Hello.  I've lurked for a long time.  I found this tutorial helpful and thought it a shame the original's images are hosted by photobucket and thus no longer show up.  I've taken the liberty of rehosting the images from the topic post here:

spoiler

Maybe a mod would consider editing the original post?

[3lric]

I will edit the post in a few days, just moved and dealing with some issues in that currently.

Though I should also add, with the latest FFTP, you can do this all with shishi, eliminating the need for FFTEVGRP altogether

[Aiolon]

Please correct me if im mistaken and i hope i am but FFTVGRP is still needed to import the portraits of monsters with different palettes.
shishi allows us to import UNIT.BIN monster palettes one by one but thats not the case for portraits or atleast i couldn't find a way to do it with shishi :/
of course this is only the case if people wants to add custom monsters and make them recruitable.

also, RIP CDmage and

spoiler

FUCK PHOTOBUCKET and their greedy updates

[3lric]

Please correct me if im mistaken and i hope i am but FFTVGRP is still needed to import the portraits of monsters with different palettes.
shishi allows us to import UNIT.BIN monster palettes one by one but thats not the case for portraits or atleast i couldn't find a way to do it with shishi :/
of course this is only the case if people wants to add custom monsters and make them recruitable.

also, RIP CDmage and

spoiler

FUCK PHOTOBUCKET and their greedy updates

I've not checked. But if shish can export them with all 3 palettes in 1 image then it should import the same way.

Also, CDMage isn't great unless you need to truncate something on import. Use CDProg instead

[DarthFutuza]

I will edit the post in a few days, just moved and dealing with some issues in that currently.

Though I should also add, with the latest FFTP, you can do this all with shishi, eliminating the need for FFTEVGRP altogether

Thanks.  If that's true, maybe I should just write a new tutorial with the latest method in that case, (though I haven't tried using Shishi to do FFTEVGRP's job yet) given how out of date this one is.  Seems a lot of the tools have changed etc and the tutorials haven't quite kept up.

[Celdia]

Even though its apparently wickedly out of date, I fixed the first post anyways. Thanks, Darth, for rehosting those images. Made super quick work of it.

[3lric]

Even though its apparently wickedly out of date, I fixed the first post anyways. Thanks, Darth, for rehosting those images. Made super quick work of it.

Mostly because you can do this in shishi now. No need to evgrp or any of that jazz anymore

[Celdia]

I realize that if I ever decided to work on a new project, I'd have to relearn how to do everything from scratch again with all the updates in the past years.

[Eternal]

Elric, which version of Shishi? 492?

EDIT: So it is. Very nice!

[chaosflarz]

Hi I have a question.

Tried doing this with the youtube guide but it doesnt seem to be working, i am pretty sure i editted with graphic gale correctly and save the correct files and CD mage it back into the ISO UNIT.BIN WILDFACE.BIN and WILDFACE4.bin

Attaching the screenshots of the result happening in my FFTEVGRP.

I am using a emulator on PC PSXE and i have tried to gameshark the values 3A ( CELIA unused class) to get into the new sprite class, upon turning on the ISO, the potrait and sprite still remains celia , while the shishi editor works changing my sprite when i enter into battle.

Any help and advice will be appreciated pls. Thanks!

EDIT*** I think i found the solution after googling and looking up other people tutorial, so apparently the SHISHI Editor 3A values is not the same and doesn't correspond with WILDFACE.BIN and UNIT.BIN 3A values, for e.g seeing how some1 editing a Summoner class on Sprite editor the value is 67 , and UNITBIN value is 20 and WILDFACE.BIN Value is 21, what i did was to edit all the 3A values since i thought they corresponded. If that's the case how do i tell which 3 sets of values/numbers would then work together?

[RavenCurow]

You can use the UWentries spreadsheet to change which jobs corrispond to which entries in the unit and wldface bins then patch it with FFTorgASM

[chaosflarz]

Thanks, i tried dlding the wentries spreadsheet, from : http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=7833.0 thread

1 question is that when i open the spreaadsheet it says to edit only the yellow highlighted TAB, which is per entry, but from what i know wildface and unit.bin values don't match for e.g a certain class can be 001 for unit.bin and 002 for wildface.bin.

2nd question is what does it mean to copy the XML tab into a .xml file? haven;t really use FFTORGASM before how do i actually convert the spreadsheet and patch it ?

EDIT** : hey thanks a bunch got it working already, didn't know patching with FForgasm could be tht easy.. btw is 08 and 09 the only untouched values to mod? is there other values which are safe to use?

[RavenCurow]

IIRC 12 and 17 in the unit bin are also safe as those models are never used. Not sure on 17 though since that is Teta's portrait location as well.

[dgcool]

I hope someone can still help with this (PSP version): I just went through the whole process of changing sprites with ShiShi and then doing the fftpack (FFTEVGRP+CDMAGE) pack/repacking. Now I see all the correct sprites in combat AND in the unit selection screen but NOT in the formation/character overview area. Any ideas? Thank you!!

[Nyzer]

Shishi now edits formation sprites too. IIRC just check the second tab for 'em.