Pokémon Model Ripping Project

[KPlaceholder]

Hi all,

I want to use the Pokémon models in Unity. However I had some issues with them and I believe figuring out how to solve them is simply out of my reach. I signed up on this forum with the sole purpose of asking for help with this.

Besides these issues, I'd also like to share the way I process the models in order to use them in Unity to receive recomendations on how I can optimize it, because I feel it's highly inefficient. My fan-project is going to need a huge lot of Pokemon models and this process is just too slow to do with every single Pokemon.

This is how I proceed:

Spoiler

From the compressed file that I downloaded from the original post of this thread, I extract the model, texture and desired animations bin files, always from the Sun/Moon folders. Then I open Spica (the folder where the bin files are is not the same where Spica runs, if that matters), and use the Merge option to load the three files, in this order: model - texture - animation. Once all three are loaded, I enter the Skeletal Animation tab and, for every animation I want, I click on it, hit play and then save, so I have one .dae file per animation (Isn't there a way to export all animations at once...?). Also the textures are exported with the export button, and mirrored with an utility someone posted a few pages earlier.

When I have all .dae files, I import them to Blender and save them as .blend files, which then I drag to the Project Explorer tab in Unity. When I have all models in Unity, I set their scale factor to 0.25 (1 is too large), and then highlight the ArmatureAction animation and duplicate via Ctrl+D. This creates a copy of the animation outside of the model, so I can rename it properly and put it in the animations folder. I do this for every single animation. When all animations are ready, I delete all copies of the model but one, which then has its DefaultTake and ArmatureAction animations removed to keep the assets unclustered.

Once this is done, the next step is to create the Animation Controller, to prepare the materials using the previously extracted textures, etc. I don't think much improvement can be made at this point.

Now I wish the only problem with that procedure was that it takes time to work; but the problem is, it straight-up doesn't work. So far I have done this with three Pokemon: Haxorus, Garchomp and Aggron. I only got Haxorus working. I'll detail the issues in a spoiler:

Spoiler

All three had weird artifacts in their animations (specifically the idle animation). In the case of Haxorus it just turned out it happened on frame -1, and thus I could safely ignore it, as all animations start on frame 0. I wasn't that lucky with the other two.

The first time I attempted to use the Aggron model, its left leg disappeared altoghether for a frame mid-animation. Deleting the problematic keyframes just corrupted the animation further. This issue happened in both Blender and Unity. Strangely, when I repeated the process again, this no longer happened, so I'm guessing it was an occasional bug with Spica (which by the way I'd like to, at least, be able to predict as I don't have the time to check if every single Pokemon is exported properly).

However, now Aggron has a more consistent problem with the bottom part of its feet and middle toes. In Blender, nothing happens with them when the model is in a T position, but just as I hit play these faces disappear. I don't think it's a normals problem because if it were the faces should be visible from the inside of the feet, however they are not. But they aren't deleted either, because highlighting the armature in the hierarchy resets the model to a T position and the problematic faces just reappear. As expected, saving it and then importing to Unity also causes the faces to disappear. Importing the .dae directly to Unity has different but equally unavoidable artifacts with the feet.



Garchomp is far more broken than Aggron however. Importing its .dae file to Blender breaks the animation completely. For some reason however, importing the .dae file to Unity displayed its animation perfectly. When I compared the armature hierarchy in both programs, it turned out that an awful lot of bones were missing in Blender. Unlike the problem with Aggron's leg, this problem is very consistent no matter how many times I repeat the process, and have no idea how to restore these bones nor why they are deleted from Blender while Unity recognizes them perfectly. Saving the .blend file and then importing to Unity results in a completely empty model file, with no mesh, no child objects, no animations, and not even an avatar. Nothing.




Please note that while I could work directly with the .dae files, I need to be able to modify the models in Blender and reuse the original animations with the modified models. As far as I know .dae and .blend files can't share animations because the hierarchy of the bones is slightly different: .blend models bones are all children of an object called "Armature", which is absent in the .dae models. I believe this cannot be changed as I haven't found the way.

Perhaps I should state that all animations are displayed correctly in Spica, so I can't really figure out where the actual problem is. Google didn't help much either.

Note that Haxorus, Garchomp and Aggron were merely samples, my point is not that I want to fix specifically the issues with their models but rather I'd like to be able to prevent (or at least predict) these issues altoghether. What I'd like to achieve is to rest assured that any Pokemon I want to use will work properly in Unity and, if possible, Blender. A collection of already processed, ready to use .blend/.fbx files of all 802 (804?) Pokemon would be inmensely appreciated. But as I haven't found that, I need to get this working.

Also consider that I haven't read all the 130+ pages in this thread, I have only read a few of these pages which popped up when I was googling for a solution to these problems. If any of this has been addressed previously, feel free to point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance.

I actually noticed that the exporter was producing some NaN values for zero length rotations and fixed that. Can you try again with the lastest version of the tool?

I tried to re-import Garchomp and Aggron after downloading the latest version of Spica. Aggron is now working perfectly! Unfortunately, Garchomp wasn't that lucky, as it's still as broken as before.

I suspect that's actually a problem with Blender, otherwise I don't think Unity would be able to get the bones working either. Would anybody with Blender please try to save a Garchomp model in .blend format and see if its animations are working correctly to see if it's just me?