Horizon Forbidden West [PS4/PS5]

[daemon1]

I'm getting some rest, maybe for a week or so. Then return to it.

[daemon1]

I'm going to start explaining the situation and what can we do about it.

First of all, data layout in this game is totally different from previous decima games.
Assets are not organized in any logical structure, and have no names. There's no such a thing like assets for characters, any specific character or robot, they are not grouped in folders with textures, models, or shaders. Nothing like this.

Instead, they are all grouped in so called "Streaming Graph".

As I understand, it was done for optimization purposes, so the game can load/use all of the assets (and there are millions) in the best way possible in terms of speed/memory usage. As a result, its hard to get anything from there. Especially considering there are almost no names anywhere.

There are 18 main big packages containing about 75000 asset groups. Then each group has individual assets inside. Groups are very different in size. One of them may have a 1000 of assets, and another one - only a few, or even one single asset. And all this is split weirdly. For example, we may have one big part of a robot in one group, and a small part of his left leg in another. Textures/skeletons may also be scattered around other groups, seemingly without any logic.

So what i did is a scan of all asset groups for skeletal meshes, and recorded their numbers. Then i searched for specific data/strings inside, and split them into 4 parts: character heads, aloy outfits, robots, and those that left. The ones left seems to have most other enemies, npcs and characters. I'm adding these lists here.

Also note Aloy's head is ABAA, her long hairs is 6AA8, skeleton/eyes/teeth is 710.

[daemon1]

Now current tool usage is very simple.
Change path in INI file to your files location, make sure oo2core_8_win64.dll is in the same folder. If you dont have version 8, use 7 or 6, just rename it. Once all done, run the tool with 1 parameter: asset group number in hex:

h2_extr.exe <number>

For version 1.00 these numbers are from 0 to 126e4 (which is 75492 decimal).

example: h2_extr.exe 00AF5
or h2_extr.exe 00af5
or h2_extr.exe af5

Tool will export textures as DDS and models as ASCII. If present, skeletons will be exported in separate files, so you have to copy-paste them to models (as it was done before for horizon 1).

During export, you can see which skeletons are used by each mesh in this form:

Mesh with skeleton 710 16

That means that skeleton is in group 710, asset 16. If thats the same group, it will be already exported. If its another group, you will have to extract that group to get the skeleton (if it was not done before).

[Sharppy]

After a few days of nodes and some help from daemon and revetix we were finally able to get a system set up to properly bake these textures.
It does require many nodes/channels to get the map. But once its all set up you can easily transition between colors. There is no other way to get these baked maps that I know of.

I know this isnt perfect and still needs fine tuned but still you can see here we were able to plug in the proper RBG channels to bake somewhat of a diffuse map. All material id's would do is point you to the correct textures that mesh is using. It wont fix this part of the work that needs to be done. This will have to be done inside of your 3D application.
Huge thanks Daemon for all the effort you put in on this one. I know you cringe at that hair screenshot I cant see what else im missing. Maybe i need a different hair mesh all together i seen there were 2 maybe I deleted the correct one. Please don't hate me I even redid the mesh entirely just to see if i had misplaced the hair and it is indeed the correct one. There is a flat looking one and a more filled hair and the only one that fits with his helmet is that hair. So this has to be right.

ALSO
Many of these textures use B channel for AO and sometimes alpha. So once you have baked maps properly use photoshop or something to pull B channel from the image and use it in the baked image.

It takes awhile to do one but once you have everything in place its not that bad to get a fully functioning model.

You can also use Unreal Engine to directly manipulate textures then bake them inside of that too. Which ever way works best for you. Here is the results of that method.

This is what the node setup would look like:

[daemon1]

Just finished animations, next is material support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE1yjoTwWLw

[jimmy12345]

Just finished animations, next is material support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE1yjoTwWLw

this is for ps4 or ps5 game?

[fillwithme]

Just finished animations, next is material support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE1yjoTwWLw

At present, can the tools on the home page support the extraction of animation? Or is a tool for extracting animation under development?

[daemon1]

this is for ps4 or ps5 game?

this is ps4
but i think it will also work on ps5

At present, can the tools on the home page support the extraction of animation? Or is a tool for extracting animation under development?

no, animation support is not published yet
i will update it soon

[daemon1]

Tool updated.

1. More asset groups supported, now only 14 of 75000 groups crash.

2. Material output.

Each model will now export "..._materials.txt" file with a list of all materials used. Also ascii file itself will have material numbers inside as a name of each submesh.

Materials will be exported to "materials" subfolder as individual files. Each file may contain several material sets. For each material there will be list of texture numbers + variables. Sometimes these variables contain important data, such as solid colors and other shader constants. Texture numbers may be either exact texture number (corresponding to texture file names exported) or texture set number. In this case you will have to guess texture numbers, because this info is not yet exported. Also some textures are not present in any sets. These are not exported yet, so you can't use them.

3. animations.

Only morpheme animations supported, which are used only for Aloy, npcs, and only one robot - mole.
These are group numbers containing them:
6b0a - aloy
99c - npcs
a935 - mole

Once exported, you will get all animations as in horizon zero dawn tool.
Unlike 1st game, forbidden west has no physics skeletons (which i used for animations), so you have to use mesh skeletons. Tool now exports these in both ASCII and SMD for this purpose.

[fillwithme]

That’s awesome

[92engineeringstacy]

Hello all,

I just stumbled upon the fact that you can apparently pull models from games and I think that is awesome and it is some amazing work you're all doing.

I'd like to learn/attempt to pull the machine models from Horizon Forbidden West. I'd like to try and 3d print a few for my bookshelf as decoration.

Is there anywhere that I could consult or read about how to use the software that daemon1 has created? I'm willing to hit my head against a wall for a few hours figuring it out if I have something to at least consult. Like how to connect the program to the PS4. Any guidance would be really appreciated.

Or if anyone is feeling super generous and would like to share the machine models they extracted I would be incredibly grateful too.

Thanks, everyone!

-Stacy

[nightwolf1982]

This is meant to be run on PC, and the instructions are right here in this thread. The biggest issue is finding the game files to work with. So far, it looks like HFW hasn't been dumped yet, so very few people will have those files (mainly those who were able to get the development version that leaked a while back).

[Petrgold]

This is meant to be run on PC, and the instructions are right here in this thread. The biggest issue is finding the game files to work with. So far, it looks like HFW hasn't been dumped yet, so very few people will have those files (mainly those who were able to get the development version that leaked a while back).

It's not the development version at all, it's a legit dump using a private PS4 exploit working on the latest firmware. So you need to know someone from the PS4 scene.

[nightwolf1982]

Regardless, the files aren't available widely yet. Wish I knew someone who had them, I really want to get a look at the models of this game.

[daemon1]

Robot animations & cutscene animations are also working now.
Tool will be updated soon.

https://youtu.be/xVrKnkZKdB8