The VG Resource

Here's a tutorial for ripping models from LBP 1/2/3/Vita (and all of the in-betweens such as HUB and Prehistoric Moves) (None of the tools used in this tutorial are made by me) This is my first tutorial so there may be errors

Requirements: 

• Toolkit (Requires Java 11)
  
• Unpacked files of the LBP game you want to rip from (I can't provide these for potentially obvious reasons) 
  
• Blender 2.8+
  

NOTE: Later Blender versions after 2.8 are very likely to mess up the mesh data and will try to correct them inside the rest pose, this doesn't always work and will result in models such as PS4 Big Toggle having a slightly messed up appearance, this can also be quite inconvenient for modeling costumes. I would recommend simply using Blender 2.8, and saving the models inside a blend, and then opening it in your preferred Blender version.

Step 1: Download Toolkit, the source code can be found here, but compiled builds can be found on the GitHub Actions page.

Step 2: Open it

Step 3: Open the data.farc and any patch farc (File Archive) and blurayguids.map (File DB, on LBP3 PS4 this is orbisguids.map) PS4 has the farc split into chunks so open all of those, and you can open the patch .map if you want to rip update content such as DLC.



Step 4: Find a .mol (model). In this example, I'll use Sackboy's PS4 model.



Step 5: Export the model, Right Click >> Export >> Model >> glTF 2.0 

Step 6: Import the exported .GLB into Blender. I would also recommend setting the View Transform to standard for the textures to have the correct colors. 

Step 7: Fix materials, toolkit will try to texture your model automatically but this can have errors, some textures will be read incorrectly as other textures, for example for PS4 Sackboy the AO texture is read as the base color texture. 

The materials will also be imported with metallic set to 1, while you can adjust the PBR values to your needs, I would recommend setting Metallic to 0 and Roughness to 1. 

You can see on the dependencies tab all of the .gmat (material) files it uses, find the .gmat you're looking for, and the dependencies tab will show the textures it uses which will help fix it. It's also worth mentioning that the cwlib branch of toolkit can decompile .gmat files into .cg files which are readable, you can use those to grab any colors and other values such as UV Scales.



Fix AO, Toolkit doesn't apply the AO correctly so we'll need to fix that 

Node setup:
 



Step 8: Your model is hopefully ready, if you're working with a costume, make sure to parent your costume pieces to the main Sackboy rig.

Additional steps:

Sackboy skin material setup: For Sackboy and the other characters by addition, some skins will be patterns and some won't be tiled, for patterns set the UV scale to 3x3, for non-tiled skins use 1x1, PS4 Sackboy's default brown knit skin is 8x4.

Textures: You can export .tex files from the loaded .map by right-clicking on a .tex file, then Export >> Textures >> PNG/DDS

Also, textures are stored inside the exported .glb file so make sure to export those

Credits

•  ennuo
  

update 08/21/24: changed some info around because blender has changed a little and so has toolkit

Where can I find PS4 files?