Pokémon Model Ripping Project

[sum1]

Spica saves the models/animations as .dae (which is basically fbx), use Neosis to convert to fbx, and they should import just fine into Unreal Engine

I've just tried this with the latest versions of SPICA and Noesis. In SPICA, I bulk exported (with both model & animation boxes checked) into a .dae. Exported the .dae into .fbx with Noesis. Then imported into Unreal Engine and into Unity. The models import into the engines, but the animations were nowhere to be found. I don't think the animations were actually put in to the file exported by SPICA.

Am I missing something?


My earlier post:

I tried using the program "SPICA" to get the Sun/Moon animations from .bin format into something usable. Is this possible? The side menu's export button would only export textures. There's an tickbox in the batch exporter, but it still didn't seem to do anything with the animation files (models and textures are still converted). I attempted this with a few different pokemon including Floatzel, Alolan Vulpix, Hat Pikachu , and Rockruff with similar results. I had intended to use them in Unity.

Windows 7 64 Bit.
Proper .NET frameworks installed.
.bin files were from KazoWAR
SPICA version: "lastest automatic build for Windows" (the link on SPIKA's github page.) 
The 2 OpenTK .dll files were placed in same folder

I've seen this video of the animations in Unreal Engine, I'm not sure how they did it.
Am I missing something? Ohana3ds and EveryFileExplorer didn't seem to work either.

[TehSe7en]

Spica saves the models/animations as .dae (which is basically fbx), use Neosis to convert to fbx, and they should import just fine into Unreal Engine

I've just tried this with the latest versions of SPICA and Noesis. In SPICA, I bulk exported (with both model & animation boxes checked) into a .dae. Exported the .dae into .fbx with Noesis. Then imported into Unreal Engine and into Unity. The models import into the engines, but the animations were nowhere to be found. I don't think the animations were actually put in to the file exported by SPICA.

Am I missing something?

If you are using SPICA, it's a little bit more complicated to export animations, you have to "merge" the animation file with the model file in SPICA, select the animation so that it begins playing, and save the file as .dae, that should include the selected animation, you'll have to save the animations independently (one by one)

[mattpub]

That is good to know TehSe7en. I was surprised that I had never tried to .dae to .fbx before because I don't remember it working. I indeed though I had tried it and it didn't work. Now I know why. Thanks
So I guess I'll be using Ohana for the model and textures and SPICA for the animations.

[Worldslayer608]

Has anyone thought about recording a little video tutorial on all this? Might help move the project along faster if people have access to something like that - rather than reading 128 pages of thread where information is pretty scattered.

Food for thought.

[gdkchan]

Hi, does anyone know how I can re-import the 3D models edited in Pokemon Sun/Moon. Or if Spica will have that function later as well as the first Ohana3DS with Pokemon X/Y & OR/AS.

Sorry for my bad english

Not supported atm but It's a planned feature but I wonder if theres demand for it.

Spica saves the models/animations as .dae (which is basically fbx), use Neosis to convert to fbx, and they should import just fine into Unreal Engine

I've just tried this with the latest versions of SPICA and Noesis. In SPICA, I bulk exported (with both model & animation boxes checked) into a .dae. Exported the .dae into .fbx with Noesis. Then imported into Unreal Engine and into Unity. The models import into the engines, but the animations were nowhere to be found. I don't think the animations were actually put in to the file exported by SPICA.

Am I missing something?

If you are using SPICA, it's a little bit more complicated to export animations, you have to "merge" the animation file with the model file in SPICA, select the animation so that it begins playing, and save the file as .dae, that should include the selected animation, you'll have to save the animations independently (one by one)

This is correct, theres a batch export option on the file menu that is supposed to export several animations at once if you use the DAE format but tbh I didn't tested it recently so maybe it broke on one of the recent commits. It will be removed in favor of a CLI tool anyway.

Has anyone thought about recording a little video tutorial on all this? Might help move the project along faster if people have access to something like that - rather than reading 128 pages of thread where information is pretty scattered.

Food for thought.

I think that a list with locations of stuff inside the files would be nice since they don't have meaningful names.

[TehSe7en]

Hi, does anyone know how I can re-import the 3D models edited in Pokemon Sun/Moon. Or if Spica will have that function later as well as the first Ohana3DS with Pokemon X/Y & OR/AS.

Sorry for my bad english

Not supported atm but It's a planned feature but I wonder if theres demand for it.

Oh there is a lot of demand for importing models back to the games! But since people don't have that option yet, noone really cares :/ (those busty player models sure have a lot of downloads!)

[gdkchan]

Hi, does anyone know how I can re-import the 3D models edited in Pokemon Sun/Moon. Or if Spica will have that function later as well as the first Ohana3DS with Pokemon X/Y & OR/AS.

Sorry for my bad english

Not supported atm but It's a planned feature but I wonder if theres demand for it.

Oh there is a lot of demand for importing models back to the games! But since people don't have that option yet, noone really cares :/ (those busty player models sure have a lot of downloads!)

fwiw importing models to OR/AS (and maybe X/Y?) is already somewhat possible. For example, I imported Juliet from the game Lollipop Chainsaw into OR/AS some weeks ago.

Spoiler

It needs more testing, and also support for the containers that have bch models inside (MM/GR/...) that also have other specific data. Creating the Pokémon specific animation files is also necessary, since changing the model without changing the animations is not that useful (except for static models).

[sum1]

Thanks for the help! I was able to set up a scene in Unity with pokemon walking around!

Though I'm still having some difficulties:






The textures exported from SPICA don't seem to work correctly with their models. For Rockruff, I was able to substitute the body texture with the one from models-resource and it looked fine on the model, but any eyes & mouth textures still looked wrong on the SPICA model. Comparing the textures from the two sources, it appears that the the models-resource textures have 2 eyes per section as opposed to 1 eye, the mouth is whole rather than half, and the body was just mirrored across.

Also, the models are partitioned into multiple meshes all named something like "optmesh2Node". For the animation to move the model in Blender, I had to join all the meshes, then parent the armature to the resulting mesh. Though, after joining, textures would not show up at all. The parenting/joining steps didn't seem necessary in Unity; it animated fine without joining(still had the same texture issues).

In addition, I'm trying to find a way to use the models from models-resource with the animations exported through SPICA.  In Blender, simply playing the "walking" animation action on the models-resource Rockruff resulted in the bones moving totally wrong. Swapping out the armatures seemed to work a bit better, but the model didn't seem to move along with the bones correctly and the mesh would distort weirdly(like inflating the face).

So my questions are:
How do I fix the appearance of the textures?
What's the best way to handle the multiple meshes?
How do I use an animation on another model?

I'm still kind of new to this stuff. Any help appreciated!

[TehSe7en]

big ass post

I have no idea how blender works, but your textures are like that because when exported they are not ready to be used, pretty sure it's explained all over the internet, the way pokemon sun and moon applies textures is that they mirror the texture to the other side of the mesh, so all you have to do is use your prefered image editing program and mirror the texture (there is a small program somewhere in this thread that does this automatically)

Multiple meshes are no problem at all, as long as the skinning is done correctly, it doesn't matter the slightest

For the animations, it's obvious that the models exported and uploaded to models-resource are not compatible with the animations exported with SPICA, maybe the models were exported with an older version of Ohana3ds, so you'll have to export the models from SPICA and apply the animations to those models

[Random Talking Bush]

For the animations, it's obvious that the models exported and uploaded to models-resource are not compatible with the animations exported with SPICA, maybe the models were exported with an older version of Ohana3ds, so you'll have to export the models from SPICA and apply the animations to those models

(EDIT 2: There was an image here. It is gone now. Photobucket is garbage, don't use it.)
Animations work fine for any of the models I've uploaded, the only thing is they'll re-orient their axis back to being Y-up instead of Z-up.

(EDIT: I'm an idiot, ignore this post.)

[TehSe7en]

For the animations, it's obvious that the models exported and uploaded to models-resource are not compatible with the animations exported with SPICA, maybe the models were exported with an older version of Ohana3ds, so you'll have to export the models from SPICA and apply the animations to those models

(EDIT 2: There was an image here. It is gone now. Photobucket is garbage, don't use it.)
Animations work fine for any of the models I've uploaded, the only thing is they'll re-orient their axis back to being Y-up instead of Z-up.

They do work fine, if exported with Ohana3ds, but animations from SPICA will not work, at least it didn't for me

[Random Talking Bush]

They do work fine, if exported with Ohana3ds, but animations from SPICA will not work, at least not in 3dsmax

Whoops, I'm an idiot. For some reason I was thinking the other way around (animations from Ohana, not from SPICA).

[TehSe7en]

They do work fine, if exported with Ohana3ds, but animations from SPICA will not work, at least not in 3dsmax

Whoops, I'm an idiot. For some reason I was thinking the other way around (animations from Ohana, not from SPICA).

Apparently they are exported differently (and are not as shaky), the bones are positioned in slightly different ways, Ohana's animations are a bit on the alzheimer's side

[sum1]

Ok, Blender just doesn't seem to work well with anything. The meshes of the SPICA models break apart from each other during animation; showing visible gaps between them. Joining the meshes stops the breaking, but the model still distorts itself weirdly; most noticeable is squishing of the head & face. Same problems with all the SPICA models that I tried. I wonder if it's an issue with parenting; because the meshes weren't parented to the armature when first imported. 
None of these problems occur in Unity.

Hat Pikachu Breaking:



Rockruff head squishing:






(I still need to figure out eyes/mouth)

[gdkchan]

Ohana's animations are a bit on the alzheimer's side

I think you meant Parkinson?

None of these problems occur in Unity.

I tried loading an animated model on Blender, and found two issues with the exported DAE that was preventing Blender to load the model properly. I already fixed both issues (well, I fixed one and added a workaround for the other one). Anyway, animations should work in blender now, so try the lastest version of SPICA.

---

For those interested in the overworld animation from Pokémon X/Y (and maybe OR/AS too, but mainly X/Y), you probably noticed that they have... issues.

So on the old version it looked like this:

Spoiler

not very good. I used to call this issue the feet issue because it only seems to affect the characters feet.

Some technical talk you may find boring

I decided to look closely into this issue recently, and by analysing the animation key frames, I noticed that the affected bones had some weird values on the translation, even through they still seemed to be valid values, and not just garbage. After some time thinking I concluded that they were most likely absolute (or world) positions of the animated bone, without rotation. Bones are usually represented in local space (that is, the position and rotation are relative to the parent bone). But it turns out that the old animation format used on Pokémon actually supports both!

So, the problem seemed to be something easy to fix. Just transform from world to local space and it should work. It ended being not that simple through. For all bones that had the "world space position" flag set, I had to build a transformation matrix up to the parent bone. By calculating the inverse of this matrix, I was able to transform the position from world to local space (relative to the parent bone). This kind of worked, but also kind of didn't, because rotations were still missing, so I still had stuff moving to weird positions, but it was already better. So the only thing missing was calculating the euler rotation of the new bone, and doing that was just a matter of finding the rotation between the bone and it's parent. Finding said rotation can be easily archieved by doing the cross product between the vectors to find the rotation axis, and an dot product with an arccos to find the angle. With this we can easily build a quaternion, and by transforming our bone position with the inverse of this quaternion, is possible to "unrotate" it and keep only the translation, that is what we want. The last step is attaching the rotation we just calculated to the parent bone, and we should have a working animation!

So after the above fixes the animation looks much better:

Spoiler

A video tag that work with direct video urls would be nice
https://gfycat.com/EvergreenCraftyAlligatorgar

I think they are correct now. But if anyone find issues just let me know.