I'm creating my own role playing game in Unity, and wanted to see how Final Fantasy was developed by observing in particular its asset creation (backgrounds specifically). I already know about the technique and how it's done (collisions with a pre-rendered bg etc.), but what I need is to get access to the background files from the game to look at them properly.

Also any idea if the source 3D scene files that were used for creating the backgrounds are anywhere to be found?
Did a designer release one or two scenes to the public at some point, or are they roaming the internet somewhere?

The holy grail for me would be to have the 3D scenes to open up in Maya/Blender, and then have the jpg/png/gif files they used in the game as the final render to see how the layers are created etc.

I don't need info on how the pre-rendered effects are done, just need to be pointed to a place where the assets are up for downloading or if someone knows that buying a pc copy will hold a folder with them for me to browse or something?

I'm not sure exactly what software Square used to produce FFVIII's backgrounds (I do know that FFVII's backgrounds were made in Softimage), but there are fanmade utilities online that allow you to view the field maps and extract them, specifically for the PC version, but there are also programs which can read the PS1 version as well (FFVIII's field maps are prerendered only in 2D by the way, not 3D - only the battlefields are). A good place to start would be here (www.qhimm.com) at Qhimm.com (scroll down a little to the FFVIII utilities).

Hopefully this has helped. :)

Ye that's a great place for me to start :)

I kind of guessed that the game disc's themselves wouldn't render the field in 3D, because they were just pre-rendered images and there'd be no reason to hold the 3D Scene data on the game (why have the source 3d files, when you have an image representation?), but I had hoped that they leaked online, or one of the dev's shared a scene's 3d assets for dev diary reasons or nostalgia digging for fans :(

Or maybe someone knew a square employee, and has the files for one particular scene; I'm hoping for miracles if I'm honest in that area :P

This is what I expected to happen though, someone would have a link to the assets ripped from the game so I can just view them :) Thanks!
You're correct by the way, FF7 used softimage xsi in its infant years. I'm pretty sure square's studio used the same 3d modelling tool for 8 and 9, then moved onto autodesk maya for 10 if what I've heard is correct.