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Shield Pose

Shield pose requires some extra steps to make work correctly. It's not fun but also not impossible.

This guide is based on Fray's notes on shield animations. It's recommended to also read through his guide before starting.

ShieldOn, ShieldOff

Create your shieldOn and shieldOff animations and import over your character. Keep default flags (0xA0000000).

Place the last bone where the shield will be: The last frame of your shieldOn animation will be used for the neutral shield pose.

Animation Frames (Blender) Duration (Blender)
shieldOn 1-5 4
shieldOff 1-13 12

Preparations for the shield pose file

The shield pose is its own file with its own rig. This rig has 1 extra root bone compared to your character rig.

  • Open your shieldOn animation in your 3d editor, clean up to only have the last frame
  • Start from the last bone renaming all to bone+1. So if your last bone is 25, change it to 26. The last edit will be bone 0→1.
  • Create a new bone without any transforms and name it 0.
  • Make 0 parent of 1 (your old 0). So now you have a new root bone.
  • Get the last bone (grab bone, which is the shield position) and change parent from 1 to 0

Your structure should look like this:

Image title

For all shield pose imports, use this new base.

Base shield pose

Delete all model parts from your file (save as a new file!) and export your model as shield_base.fbx. So this should be just the final frame of shieldOn but with the modified bone structure.

Angled shield poses

Using the modified bone structure, we have to create 8 FBX files. Each one is 1/8 of the 360 degree rotation you can do while shielding.

1. Right → Top-right
2. Top-right → Top
3. Top → Top-left
4. Top-left → Left
5. Left → Bottom-left
6. Bottom-left → Bottom
7. Bottom → Bottom-right
8. Bottom-right → Right

Start by animating the 8 keyframes as listed. Each section must have 45 frames. So you'll have keyframes at 1, 46, 91...

Fray made an interactive graph to calculate shield positions that follows Smash 64's shield angle positions.

Image title
This is the second position, Top-right.
Here, bone 26 is my shield position bone.
Do not add extra frames in any section.

After you have your animation ready, let's export (save a backup!):

  • Delete all sections leaving only one of them. For example, 1-46 for the first file.

  • Export as FBX. Name each FBX from 1 to 8 while you go for each part.

    If using Blender, uncheck "Add Leaf Bones" and under Animation set Sampling Rate to 45. This will make it so the exported file has only the 2 frames we want, without extra frames in-between.

Importing

Here you're expected to have already imported your shieldOn and shieldOff animations.

  • In GE, open your character's shield pose file
  • Click on Import Different Rig and import your shield_base.fbx (base shield pose)
  • On the bottom right, on the Special Parts, you'll start with Misc 00 selected. Click on Import from Obj If Added and import shield_base.fbx (base shield pose) again.

Now, note that in the Misc Part selection we have Misc 1..8. These are the shield angles.

  • Select Misc 01. Click on Edit tracks.
  • Click on Reset all commands to delete everything that's there.
  • By the bottom part, click on Import Animation from .obj. Import the correspondent fbx file for section 1.
  • Close the window, and you can cancel both save prompts that might open up.
  • Repeat the process for all 8 parts.

Other notes

Files

  • Note that shieldOn and shieldOff might have different Internal File Table Offsets.
  • Editing the shield pose changes things in the characters' main file.
    • In the main file, the shield pose is listed at 0x2D8..0x2F8. It's a linked list with 9 entries.
    • This linked list has entries in the format XXXXYYYY, where XXXX * 4 is the address of the next entry in the list, and YYYY is the data.
    • If your main file is not synced with your shield pose, you can copy the data of all entries from a working main file to the new main file to make it work with the shield pose.

Issues

  • If your shield pose is too large (should be around 30 kB or so) it means your section files had extra frames other than the first and last. I think this can lead to the game not loading at all, too.
  • If at any point of shielding the shield position or the model itself gets rotated, you have some extra rotation on bone 0 or the model object itself. Check that, re-export and re-import what you changed.
  • If you model's parts "explode" ingame, it means you didn't edit the bone structure properly or accidentally used the unedited one.