Viewing TMD & VDF vertex animations?

[GameDev1995]

Hi,

I'm a dev working on an official port of an old ps1 game, I don't have access to any source code of the original title so we have to remake the game from scratch while gathering resources where we can. So far we are doing pretty well with this however progress is halted to a crawl whenever we have to deal with animated objects or actors.

To create animations of said characters I have to record gameplay of the motion and eyeball the keyframes by hand which can be really difficult due to angles and timings. Is there a way currently to at least view a packaged TDM model along with its vertex animation commonly known as VDF? Would be a nice bonus if I could export those models in their idle poses too.

I have tried PSXPrev but the application causes the animated TDM models to become a distorted mess, here is an example of that:


Any help would be appreciated!

[gwald]

I'm sure you guys have the Sony PSX SDK, there's a win3 program that creates the VDF files.... but all it is is vertex differential information, aka vertex animation. I don't know if Sony animation program can play just TMD & VDF animation only.... I think it requires the full working set up, ie multiple models that create the VDF.

TMD (look it up in the file format PDF) keeps all it's model verts in a single section separate from the faces and normal information.

I would suggest helping the development of that application and fix/implement the VDF feature.

[gwald]

I was recently told about this project, https://github.com/dezgeg/VdfViewer/tree/master
It plays devil dice character and animations, I dont know how they converted the TMD to obj.
It requires SDL1.x
Also
https://github.com/conhlee/tmdout

The artist tool cdrom has an app called mimewave which creates .VDF files


https://archive.org/download/ps1_sdks
latest in Jap:
PlayStation Artist Tool - 2D & 3D Graphics Tool (Japan)_redump.zip
In Eng:
Graphic Artist Tools - Release 1.8 (Japan)_DTL-S220_redump.zip

The Jap. version is the best and can be seen here: https://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic. ... 353#p23353

There's also reverse engineering projects of games that used VDF, ie parappa the rapper: https://github.com/cuckydev/OpenPara/bl ... sh.cpp#L78

Hi,

I'm a dev working on an official port of an old ps1 game, I don't have access to any source code of the original title so we have to remake the game from scratch while gathering resources where we can. So far we are doing pretty well with this however progress is halted to a crawl whenever we have to deal with animated objects or actors.

To create animations of said characters I have to record gameplay of the motion and eyeball the keyframes by hand which can be really difficult due to angles and timings. Is there a way currently to at least view a packaged TDM model along with its vertex animation commonly known as VDF? Would be a nice bonus if I could export those models in their idle poses too.

I have tried PSXPrev but the application causes the animated TDM models to become a distorted mess, here is an example of that:


Any help would be appreciated!