cyberface tutorial?

[thesport]

Does anyone out there have a cyberface tutorial they could send to me? I tried to download it from this site, but it doesn't work.

Anyway, if any of you guys out there have a copy send it my way to the below address:

thesport@thesportsmansion.com

Thanks

[Andrew]

I believe someone posted one in either the Patching Issues or Patch Requests forum. Try a keyword search of those forums.

[thesport]

well...I ran the search and I didn't find what I was looking for. Can anyone maybe e-mail me the method that is used for creating these cyberface patches. I want to get started on the 2003 NBA draft picks.

If anyone cares to explain it to me, plz send their explanation here, thesport@thesportsmansion.com.

Thanks again.

[Andrew]

Which tutorial did you try to download from the NLSC?

[thesport]

the one at the top of the d-l list for cyberfaces...the one from court 9.

[tcrock]

Here one I got from Court Nin9
Just copy, paste, and print hope it helps

Court Nin9 NBA Live 2003 Fan Site http://www.court9.netfirms.com
NBA LIVE 2003 Cyberface Tutorial
By Bjorn Cura (cairo09)

STUFF YOU NEED:

1. EA Graphics Editor. (www.sportplanet.com/nbalive)
2. a good photo editor (Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro)
3. a nice pic of your custom player ( the clearer and bigger, the better). For best results, use a pic facing directly towards the camera
4. a database editor
5. and lastly, some computer know-how J (I can’t provide you instructions here telling you how to open and close files, or the basic things you do with common computer or windows programs)

CUSTOMART FEATURE:
For patches to show up in the game, you need to activate the customart feature for NBA Live 2003.

Open the file “EA SPORTS/NBA Live 2003/main/xstartup.cfg” with notepad.
At the bottommost part of the text file, change customart “0” to customart “1”.

CREATE YOUR PLAYER:
In Nba Live 2003, you can: patch an original (included in the released game) player and a CREATED player. We will concentrate on patching created players because patching the original will come easy once we learn how to patch created players.

Load a roster of your choice wherein you want to add a created player. As an example, I will create an ANTHONY GOLDWIRE (this player is likely available with a ROSTER PATCH so I’d skip this step J )
After you’ve specified everything for your player (name, height, weight, looks, gear, ratings, etc.), save this roster so you could load them after we edit a few stuff a little later. Make sure you save it in a separate or new slot so you could always load the original in case you don’t want that player anymore.

CHOOSING YOUR PLAYER’S HEADSHAPE:

For your player to look accurate in the game, looks will be based upon the existing graphics found in the game. That means you have to choose among the existing players the headshape you want for your player. For example, Anthony Goldwire has a rounded face so I chose to use, say, Nazr Mohammed. Keep in mind that you SHOULD DISREGARD THE SKINCOLOR because it will all boil down to editing the bitmap file later on.
After you’ve decided which headshape to use, we will now extract the necessary files for your player’s cyberface and headshape using the EA Graphics Editor.

UNDERSTANDING THE NAME ABBREVIATIONS:

Run the EA Graphics Editor. Click the “OPEN” icon at the top left, and then browse, look for the file “EA SPORTS/Nba Live 2003/render/xplayer.viv”.
Once you have opened this file, you will see an alphabetical list of players included for the 2003 game, with their respective EA abbreviations.

Example: Nazr Mohammed -- take the first 2 letters of his first name, and then the first 5 letters of his last therefore his abbreviation is “namoham”.

You can avoid the hassle of looking for your player by using the “Find Graphic” option found under the “TOOLS” pull-down menu. Simply type the previously explained abbreviation, then press enter, and notice the name of your player already at the top of the list on your left side.
Once we’ve found our player from which we would base our custom face from, we are ready to extract the needed graphic files. Double click the name of your file (in my case the “namoham.viv”) on the left side. EA Graphics Editor will then show us the files found for this player graphics.
EXTRACTING FILES USING EA GRAPHICS EDITOR:

There are at least 4 files we need to come up with a custom face. In my case these are the ff:

namoham.fsh
namoham_loda.o
namoham_lodb.o
namoham_lodc.o

To make things quicker, I’ve provided a “SHAPE FILE” or “*.fsh” file, for you to avoid the trouble of extracting. There are some technical stuff that need to be specified when extracting a shape file, which I am not very knowledgeable with, so I suggest you use the shape file provided for you in this tutorial. Instead we will extract the 3 remaining files…
Highlight the “namoham_loda.o” on the left side using your mouse. Upon doing this, you will see an “EXTRACT” (an arrow pointing right on a paper) icon at the top. Click this icon and a dialog box will appear…
We will now rename the file from “namoham_loda.o” to “angoldw_loda.o”. Browse a folder wherein you want to extract this file (I suggest you make a new folder named with the abbreviation of your custom player) and then click “SAVE”.
The same process goes to the other two files except that the “_loda” will become “_lodb” and so on, depending on what file you’re already extracting.

SAVING A GRAPHIC TO BITMAP:

We did not extract the “namoham.fsh”, but what we’ll do is we will save this graphic to bitmap format, so we can overlap our custom face on this graphic later on.

Double-click the file “namoham.fsh” found on the left side of the EA Graphics Editor. Then click “BHED”. The cyberface for Nazr Mohammed will appear on the right side or what they call the “picture child” or something like that
Once this graphic has appeared, we are ready to save it to bitmap format. There are two “FLOPPY DISK” icons found in this program, and in this case we will use the small one with an arrow pointing downwards. Click that arrow and then a pull-down menu will once again appear. We have a choice as to what format we would like to save it. Choose “Save as BMP”. Then a dialog box will appear…
To avoid confusion type the abbreviation for your custom player. In my case it’s “angoldw.bmp”.

GRAPHIC EDITING USING A PHOTO EDITOR:

You can use any photo editor, depending on what you’re comfortable and accustomed with. You will most likely have poor results using poor programs such as Windows Paint. But if you’re excellent with it then PRAISE YOU!!!! I recommend using Adobe Photoshop or JASC Paint Shop Pro because it has all the features (layering, opacity, selection, etc.) we need to come up with a good face. I cannot provide you with a step by step procedure on how to use these programs, but I will provide you pointers on how to make your own face.

- Open the bitmap that we have previously saved (angoldw.bmp), and a picture of your custom player using your preferred photo editor.
The objective here is to make sure that the eyes, nose and lips of the pic will exactly overlap the cyberface’s. Try using the OPACITY feature of your editor to sort of have that transparent effect and in turn see your pic at the same time the cyberface you are trying to edit on, while stretching the overlapping layer.
You can utilize the old way of overlapping by selecting one by one the eyebrows, eyes, nose, upper lip, (teeth), lower lip, etc.
If the picture you are copying from is, for example, smiling, it is recommended that you choose a cyberface that is also smiling. Because once you run the game with your patch and just overlapped a smiling face on an emotionless face, you will most likely get two sets of teeth - one while the mouth is supposed to be closed and one when the mouth of the cyberface is actually open. If you can’t bother looking for a smiling cyberface, you can try altering your original picture by making it look like his mouth is closed. All it takes is a little ingenuity.
if the angle of your player’s picture is not the same with the cyberface you have chosen to overlap to, try using the “mirror” feature (when your pic is facing a little to the left but the cyberface facing a little to the right). Remember that the cyberface WILL ALWAYS be the point of reference. Don’t try altering the angle because the headshape for this cyberface was designed specifically for that face, if you, for example, mirror this cyberface instead of the pic you’re trying to copy from, you will have a horrible cyberface!
Adjust the colors so that your cyberface won’t appear to have a mask on. Do a little blending of colors here and there. If, for example, you are working on a white player and you have chosen to overlap on a black player, you need to save a new cyberface (using EAGE) that corresponds to your desired color. After you’re done overlapping, transfer the custom face to the cyberface of your desired skintone, keeping in mind of the position of the face you overlapped previously.
There are a lot of techniques on how to come up with a cyberface and from the way I’ve been typing here, I don’t think I can recall all of ‘em. All it takes is for you to be knowledgeable of the editing tool you’re using. And just remember that whatever you come up with, you will never be sure how it’ll turn out in the game unless you try it out. So don’t concentrate on this too much just yet. You have yet to import it into the game. As far as editing, you’re on your own now!

CREATING YOUR UPDATE FOLDER:

Go to folder “EA Sports/NBA Live 2003/render”. Create a new folder and name it as “xplayer”. Open this folder and create another folder. In my case I will name it “angoldw”.
In my “angoldw” folder, I will move my files that I’ve extracted a while back (*.fsh, *.o)
Now, we’re ready to IMPORT our cyberfaces to a SHAPE FILE.

IMPORTING GRAPHICS TO SHAPE FILES

Using the EAGE, open the shape file (*.fsh) you have moved to the update folder we have created. In my case, I will open “angoldw.FSH”. After that, you will see a text at the left side of the program that says “BHED”. Double-click this text, and a graphic will appear in the picture child.
Now, with the graphic open in the picture child, click the icon that looks like an “arrow pointing to the left” or what is called the IMPORT WIZARD icon. Then a dialog box will appear.
Choose the uppermost option under “Action” which says “Import an existing external file into the current open image”, and then click “Next”.
Now you see a preview of the shape file we have opened. Click “Browse” located on the right side and look for the BITMAP file you have edited, and then click “Open”, and in the next dialog box click “Next”.
Upon doing this, a dialog box will tell you “Data processing complete!”. Click “Finished” and we’re done importing graphics. Notice that the picture on the right has not changed. Don’t fret J Try double-clicking the text “BHED” again and another graphic pops out with the picture we have imported.

DATABASE EDITING

This step is probably the trickiest part of the process because a lot of the times, one small mistake might ruin the game (crashing back to windows; loading failure; etc), or your patches won’t show up the right way or won’t show at all. Unless you’re experienced with database editing or you have someone to assist you on this, I suggest you create a back up file. We are going to edit a file named “players.dbf”. Go to “my documents/nba live 2003/saves/xxx” (xxx represents the folder wherein you have saved the roster for your created player. Copy this “players.dbf” file and then paste it somewhere where you will be able to find it later on, in case something goes wrong.

I do not know where exactly in the Internet you could find a DATABASE EDITOR. I’ve downloaded mine years ago over at NLSC, and it’s gone now. Try using search engines because there are a lot out there. Just see what suits you. There are available TOOLKITS over at NLSC though, that are Windows-based and are quite simplified and easier to use. Try using that. DO NOT use Microsoft Office Excel, it won’t work.

Well, since I can’t provide instructions with a specific editing software, I will provide with the values you need to change for your patches to show up in the game. There are basically three immediate values we need to edit. These are COLOR, ISCREATED, PLAYERPKG.

COLOR tells the game what skintone your player has. Though some patchmakers provide “custom skincolors” for their players, I think it’s also important for you to know this one, to save you from the hassle of exporting and importing which by the way is quite a hassle Anyway, under the COLOR column, skintones are represented by numbers. They are the following:

0 - Keith Van Horn, Dirk Nowitzki
1 - Peja Stojakovic, Wally Szczerbiak
2 - Darvin Ham, Kenyon Martin, Mike Bibby
3 - Reggie Miller, Alonzo Mourning
4 - Ray Allen, Allen Iverson
5 - Michael Jordan
* Opposite these values are examples of the players with the same skintone value

Under the ISCREATED column, just erase the value “T” to “F”. That’s True or False.

Under PLAYERPKG column, erase the original value and simply type the “player abbreviation” of your created player. In my case it’s ANGOLDW. To explain things further, the value you have erased under this column is a combination of the different appearances you see when you create a player. Each letter of a value is like a human gene and one value is like DNA J and they are only applicable to created players. Now that you have edited this column, the game will now look for graphic file containing the name, in my case, ANGOLDW. Thus your patch will now show up. J

DISPLAY AND PLAY

Now, we’re ready to look at the result of this tedious process!J You HAVE TO LOAD THE ROSTER you have edited before you check, or else you’ll see the same created player. After that, the game will DISPLAY your work, and if everything turns out right, then you’re ready to PLAY J Enjoy!!!
Thanks to Gene Hart-Smith for constantly imparting his knowledge; Mico Pena for the support and “guidance” J; Patrick Lee (wherever he is) for letting us all in on this since the 2000 title, I wouldn’t know a sh*t if not for this guy’s tutorial J

Disclaimer

This tutorial was created to assist NBA Live 2003 afficionados regarding custom player editing, and is not made for profit. Duplication of this or any part of this document should not be made without written permission. The author is in no way affiliated with Electronic Arts or EA Sports.

[BodyBump]

try ultranix cyberface tutorial.... its a flash tutorial.. you can download it n his site... www.ultranix.web1000.com

[junior]

[madskillziverson]

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