Remaking Yuffie - How to import without losing animations?

[Anvirol]

I wanted to take a shot at remaking FF7 character models, but before I'd actually spend some time on modeling I've got some questions:

I've imported Yuffie model with ASCII Importer for 3dsmax7. Works fine, but seems like any animation data wasn't imported.

(Yuffie is standing in the frame 0 pose)

Is there a way of getting the models into 3dsmax without losing animations?

Of course I could animate the character again by myself, but I dont see a way how FF7 would be able to play the correct frames for each animation from my exported model.

So is it a lost cause to even think of FF7 PC version with remade characters?

Edit:
Used Unmass and biturn to get the models from battle.lgp then converted battle skeleton to .ASE.

 

[kini]

very nice work, any chance of a tutorial i would love to copy what you have done.

 

[Anvirol]

Already done by TallgeeseIIII in here:
https://www.ff7catalog.com/threads/1585/

I just merged Yuffie with the dojo scene and added 1 light, shadows and hit render. Haven't actually done any 3d-modeling yet.

Why I made this thread was because I really need to find out how to handle the animations.
As I see it, there's 3 choices how I could make animated remakes of FF7 characters:

1.) Import FF7 models with animations intact (seems like it's not possible since biturn seems to lack support for animations)

2.) Make new and similar animations myself using the exact same frame numbers that the original FF7 models use. (but finding out those exact frame numbers will be difficult)

3.) Someone modifies the FF7 game to use the frames that I've used for my animations. (Probably hard as hell without the source code of this game.)

Any experienced people out here with some advice?