Larsenv's GC/Wii Graphic and Texture Ripping Tutorial

[larsenv]

Larsenv's GC/Wii Graphic and Texture Ripping Tutorial

Hi, I'm Larsenv and I wanted to make a tutorial on how to rip graphics for Wii Games based on the way I rip my graphics. It's fast and efficient and works on Linux, Mac, and Windows. This is the way I rip my stuff as well.

I wanted to make this tutorial since most rips/tutorials I see here say to use Dolphin for texture dumping. That takes a while to do and more time to find the sprites or textures you want out of hundreds or thousands of dumped and unorganized textures. So I wanted to write this.

Also, I might update this over time.

Tutorial

Main Guide

GC/Wii Games

Method 1 - Wiimms ISO and SZS Tools (recommended)

You Will Need

A Wii Game to rip from (obviously)
Wiimms ISO Tools
Wiimms SZS Tools

Steps

Step 1: Preparing

Linux

1. Download the tools from the site and get the latest version and unpack it.
   
2. Open up "Terminal". You should see something like this.
   
3. Type in "cd" followed by a space on Terminal, then go into your file explorer and drag and drop the extracted Wiimms SZS Tools folder to the Terminal then hit Enter. It should look like this.
   
4. Type in "sudo sh install.sh" then hit Enter. It will prompt you for an administrator password, so make sure you're the administrator user of the computer. It won't show anything is typed, but when done entering the password hit Enter to install. Your Terminal should look like this.
   
5. Since Linux distributions behave differently, I'd double check and make sure you can directly run the tools instead of supplying the path to the tool. Try typing "wszst" and hit Enter. If it says something like "command not found", type in "sudo cp ./bin/* /usr/bin/", hit Enter and reenter your password if asked. Now try typing in "wszst" and if you get something like this, you're fine.
   
6. Repeat steps 3-5 but use the Wiimms ISO Tools folder instead.
   

Mac

1. Download the tools from the site and get the latest version and unpack it.
   
2. Open up "Terminal". You should see something like this.
   
3. Type in "cd" followed by a space on Terminal, then go into Finder and drag and drop the extracted Wiimms SZS Tools folder to the Terminal then hit Enter. It should look like this.
   
4. Type in "sudo sh install.sh" then hit Enter. It will prompt you for an administrator password, so make sure you're the administrator user of the computer. It won't show anything is typed, but when done entering the password hit Enter to install. Your Terminal should look like this.
   
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 but use the Wiimms ISO Tools folder instead.
   

Windows

1. Download the tools from the site and get the latest version and unpack it.
   
2. Open up Windows Explorer and find the unpacked directory for Wiimms SZS Tools.
   
3. Run windows-install.exe.
   
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 but use the Wiimms ISO Tools folder instead.
   

Step 2: Extracting Games

1. Let's do a quick double check to make sure we're on the same page...
   You have Terminal open? Great. (If using Windows, please run "cmd" and to run the programs, go and drag and drop them to the command prompt, they're found in C:\Program Files\Wiimm\WIT\ and C:\Program Files\Wiimm\SZS\. You'll have to do this every time so replace the program name with the program path.)
   
2. Now that we've double checked, let's start extracting Wii Games (Let's try Wii Sports shouldn't we?). Enter this in the command prompt/Terminal accordingly:
   
   Code:

   wit EXTRACT <game image path> <output directory> -ovv
   Wait for your game to extract... This might take a while.
   Hopefully at the end it'll look like this.
   
3. Cool! Your Wii game has been extracted. Now let's explore the files.
   Here's what I see.
   The .carc files store pretty much all of the stuff for this game, so let's extract them.
   
   Code:

   wszst xx /Common/*/*.carc
   This will extract all of the .carcs for this game.
   

Step 3: Mastering the Tools!

Wiimms SZS Tools can extract all of these graphic files or archives, and most of them are found in Wii Games.

SZS, U8, WBZ, WU8, PACK, BRRES, BREFF, BREFT, KCL, KMP, MDL, PAT, TEX, TPL, and BTI.

Different games have different file formats and such, so here's some more ways to extract stuff.

Imagine you have a game which has these paths for the files:

Code:

/files/GameData/Layout/Games/ (Folder would be filled with U8 archives with a .szs extension and TPLs with a .tpl extension.)

Code:

/files/GameData2/Layout/Other/AdditionalData/ (Folder would be filled with more U8 archives with an .arc extension.

Code:

/files/GameData3/Layout/Other/ExtraData/ (Folder would be filled with even more U8 archives with an .szs extension.

Here's some various commands to extract these.

Code:

wszst xx /files/*/*/*/*

This would extract everything in /GameData/Layout/Games/.

Code:

wszst xx /files/*/*/*/*/*

This would extract everything in /GameData/Layout/Other/AdditionalData/.

However, if I did this:

Code:

wszst xx /files/GameData/Layout/Games/*.szs

...it would extract every .szs file it would find in the path /GameData/Layout/Games/.

To extract the TPLs, you could do something like this:

Code:

wimgt d /files/GameData/Layout/Games/*.tpl

It would extract every .tpl file it would find in that path.

Do you understand how to do this now? Awesome.

Step 4: Making Sprite Sheets

Use Daxar or Ploaj's tools here.