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Donnie, can you explain a bit what you exactly have done here and how long did it take you? Would be interesting if others can help with the multiplication of other faces maybe. You have not edited the face textures directly from what I have read on Paul´s Discord?! Will it be possible in the future to edit the textures directly or is it too early to say?
in frostbite engine - EA stores meshes as .chunk and .res files.
.chunk files contain the actual geometric data of the meshes, like vertices, polygons, bones and etc.
.res files contain god knows what - not only that but the problem is that the FIFA 17 .res files are much more different than any other .res files in other FIFA games.
The process in Frosty Editor when you import an FBX is it has to interpret the .fbx mesh into these .chunk and .res files.
Frosty Editor can already correctly convert the .fbx into the .chunk file.
It cannot, however do the same for the .res file - because I'm assuming the Frosty Editor developers just didn't spend time to understand the structure of the .res files in FIFA 17.
There are 2 main reasons why FIFA 17 crashes if u import an fbx into it:
1. .chunk files size cannot change - that means that if the fbx you are importing has more vertices or other geometric data - the .chunk file that Frosty editor generates will be bigger than the original. Again, I'm assuming the developers just didn't figure this part out with letting the game know that the .chunk file size changes. Note however that the actual .chunk file generated is completely correct.
2. ,res files are basically broken in the sense that Frosty Editor doesn't really know how to change them in a correct way and when it tries to - it will crash the game
Now, onto how I managed to get the Mbappe face into the game.
Here's the thing - the .fbx for Mbappe I exported was out of FIFA 23.
If you were to export any fbx of a head(only the head, not hair or anything else) out of FIFA 17 - you'll see each of them has the same amount vertices both for the head and the eyes. That means for example Messi's mesh file contains 5471 vertices(for the head), 396 vertices for the eyes and an X amount of polygons, and also Ronaldo's mesh contain 5471 vertices and again 396 vertices for the eyes and the same amount of polygons.
Bottom line - all meshes in FIFA 17 will have the same amount of each geometric data type - whether vertices of polygons and etc.
This same thing is true for FIFA 23 and any other game(I think). Except with a caveat - FIFA 23 faces will have 5471 vertices for the head but for the eyes they'll have 512 vertices in each mesh. Now, do u see where I'm going with this? It means that the FIFA 23 meshes contain MORE geometric data than the original FIFA 17 meshes. What does this mean? It means that the .chunk file will be bigger - so the game will crash.
The key thing I did then it simply import the FIFA 23 Mbappe fbx into Frosty Editor - and remember Frosty Editor already generates correct .chunk files.
Now, obviously the .chunk file is bigger than the original one. Here's a key thing however - notice how for the head both the FIFA 17 and FIFA 23 meshes have 5471 vertices each. All I had to do it take the .chunk file that Frosty Editor generated - extract only the head geometric data.
Again - the head geometric data will be the same size between the original .chunk file in FIFA 17 and the .chunk for Mbappe Frosty Editor generated because both meshes have the same amount of vertices for the head.
After this all I had to do was take the original .chunk file -import the new .chunk head geomtric data instead of the old one. That meant that the head now had the shape of Mbappe. Obviously the eyes are still the old ones - of the old mesh. It's technically possible to get Mbappe
s eyes in as well but that would require decimating the mesh in Blender which I didn't do.
Either way the result u can see in the picture above.
The only problem is that in the match itself the texture is broken and this is because of the incorrect .res file that Frosty Editor can't correctly generate.
Only paulv2k or FIFER(or anyone with a significant years of developer experience) could figure out how to generate the correct .res files. I can't do it because I'm a noob programmer.
So, I suppose it'll be possible to import faces and make them look normal in the match but that would take paulv2k or FIFER developing a tool for FIFA 17 or patching Frosty Editor - which literally might not ever happen. The faces imported with my method will normal in the main menus but not in the match itself.
This isn't even talking about the hair which is way more problematic to import in.
