Brawl model extractor

[Ike Lawliet]

Hi. Just to clarify-
I've spoken through IRC to Stack Smash, and this is the truth about Syntax Error. The rumors aren't true. Syntax Error's web host was fearful of Nintendo taking legal action, and so they told Syntax Error to cease. Nintendo has never yet gotten involved in these specific Brawl matters.

On a side note, the hacker going by Leon also claimed to have been shut down by Nintendo, but later revealed that this wasn't true, and that he simply felt like stopping.

 

[JCentavo]

He speaks the truth about the Syntax Error situation. I remember reading info similar to what he said.

 

[metaXzero]

Knightcrawler. MLG is NOT going to sponsor and host modded Brawl tourneys ever simply because of the risk of being sued. Using modified versions of a game for corporate sponsored tourneys MAY open up some legal vulnerability to them. It may NOT, but MLG will not take that chance. Plus, they got regular Brawl under their wing (even if it's not being used this year). Doubt they'd want 2 Smash games...

The Roy project started as a fun side thing by it's creator. It wasn't made thinking "I want to make a character that will be used in tourneys and taken to the highest level". It was simply "I wanna put Roy in Brawl and make him fun to play in Brawl+". Tourney use of Roy wasn't the prime intent (nor is it for every other characters made in the future).

I doubt everyone who plans to make characters plans for them to be in tourneys. For the most part, it's going to be like textures (showing them off, wanting to make others happy, and recognition).

 

[mariokart64n]

mariokart64n, I'm gonna TRY to be swift because these long posts we've all been making have been sorta taking up the thread. Let's try to wind this conversation down, and only bring up points if they're new.

Sony doesn't own their employees. They couldn't threaten him with a lawsuit for doing something in his free time. Anyway, Square Enix owns Chrono Trigger, not Nintendo or Sony.

Go to my last page and go to my link for legal help. If you think you know more about what a copyright covers than a lawyer, fine. Just know that courts go by what's actually written in law, not what you think *should* be law.

If you based a new model off Roy from Melee but it was DIFFERENT, you'd own the copyright to that work. Don't be ridiculous about two people by chance making identical models, the only way to do that would be to purposely copy the work. Copying by hand and copying automatically are still both copying. The courts wouldn't side with you, that's for sure. You can distribute anything about any character as long as the work is not copyrighted, just can't make money off it if you don't also own the intellectual properties.

SmashBoards would get in trouble because they're owned by the MLG. If the MLG ever hosts a tournament with a modded copy of Brawl, they'd be making money off illegally distributed copyrighted work. So yes, if you distribute it on your own message board, SmashBoards is unlikely to get in trouble now. But if the MLG hosts a tournament with a modded Brawl, they could get in trouble then. And if any tournament with a modded Brawl is advertised on SmashBoards, the same is true. Don't you want to see Roy in a national tournament? Isn't that a big part of what you're doing? Don't you want to see the best players do the most amazing things with your character?

Even if you lock the model and the only key is found on a Melee disc, you're still distributing it. It'd probably make Nintendo less likely to go after you, though.

Anyway the thing I don't understand is why people are going to all this trouble arguing with what IS THE LAW just to be lazy. Wouldn't you rather have a higher-quality model in your game anyway? And wouldn't you rather feel safe about it? And be able to see your work in tournaments?





Yes, that's why you can rip them and do whatever you want personally. You did not buy the right to redistribute the models, though.



Yes, precisely. As long as existing models are edited enough to not be similar. Very nice model there.

summary of what I think your saying
-you are swift
-you hate reading long posts, but love writing them
-sony has no control over its employees??
-sqaure is not owned by sony??
-courts go after people by the book! orly
-text induced eye cancer... (<_<) !


your saying re-create roy it's legal. I say, no. its no more legal then recycling roys model from melee. , it's still a form of infringement of Nintendo's intellectual property.

that chrono project for example. recreated characters.. had to be stopped by sqaure over intellectual copyright. the project was none profitable but was still shutdown.

also this happened 10 years ago.. by a totally different company.. so I dont even know that example was used by anyone before...

and with that ES site, that proves it. Nintendo would never sue it's fans. if they did, I'm sure we'd all know about it already.

even though I found your new arguments dissatisfying, ultimately I'll do what ever I do in my own privacy. though I wanted to show a second side to your arguments, so that we don't SCARE the crap out of the modders and developers we could possibly have here.

there is a legal risk, but not much more then the average person encounters from every day to day action. kids download music.. photocopy books, copy articles off the computer.. copyright is all over the place people!.

if this community is that scared about modding nintendo games, maybe they should send a letter to developers that created melee and brawl. ask them for permission to use models from melee in brawl.

EDIT

I agree with everything metaXzero said. you shouldn't be using mods in any sort of tournment. maybe to show off.. but mods here should be for private use only.

if you guys run around trying to piss off nintendo.. then yeah bend over and get ready for what you deserve

 

[KAZECoyote]

I can't weld them since the eyes polygons and the rest of the face are different objects, I tried attaching the face and the eyes, but the textures got messed up and the skin lost it's properties.

The principal problem here is having the need to convert the model into a editable poly. Though there's a flip option in editable mesh it doesn't work correctly, the model ends having a lot of holes.

When you convert it to a editable poly, does it become deformed? if so, convert it into an editable patch first, then poly, flip it, then back to mesh.

 

[-BigSharkZ-]

Wow, I didn't reply here in a while and this has become a huge conversation about laws. I only see walls of text, too lazy to read everything XD.

 

[metaXzero]

mariokart64n. I'm not saying mods shouldn't be used in tournaments. I said a corporation like MLG isn't going to host and sponsor those tourneys. The people of Smashboards host Brawl+ tourneys and side tourneys these days with various textures, but MLG will not ever have Brawl+ on it's roster (unless Nintendo ever comes up and endorses B+). And I was saying that most don't make models for the sake of tourneys. Tourney use of character mods is something that will have to be debated in the future.

 

[NeoZ]

SE owned by Sony? wut

summary of what I think your saying
-you are swift
-you hate reading long posts, but love writing them
-sony has no control over its employees??
-sqaure is not owned by sony??
-courts go after people by the book! orly
-text induced eye cancer... (<_<) !

SquareEnix is in no way owned by Sony, why did you think it was?
And it's true that unless they are violating their contract, a copyright law or something, Sony can't control what it's employees do during their free time.

 

[Poxag]

Wait I thought this thread was about model hax? and watup Ike LOL!!

 

[Poxag]

at Knight crawler, none of my models were ripped from games except for a few brawl trophies. most of them are taken from facepunch studios and its obviously not illegal to distribute those. so yea im not worried bout getting sued, but I cant do stuff with models so I need somebody to rig them for me, PLEAAASSEEEEE!!!!!!!

 

[Poxag]

Dammit It just read the whole conversation about laws and once I got to the end I realized that absolutely nothing important was said, I dont care if its legal ot not, most of us use emulators or do some other kind of hacking, I just want to beat the crap out of pikachu with rorschach falcon

 

[...:::VILE:::...]

^^^ what he said. Texture hacking isn't illegal guys? Getting pictures from the internet and using them as reference or even on the texture, is that legal? No, now if you are afraid of getting sued, get out of here and talk about model hacking.

 

[Pharrox]

Pharrox, what features are included in this beta?

The beta I'm referring to will not be publically released. It will only be capable of doing dae->brres in the most limited ways.

So does a dae to brres converter exist yet?

no

still wondering, is there a free program that will work with this?
also, will more of the sdk be needed?

You might want to try blender, but I'm really not sure. Also, no part of the sdk is used with this. No extra files will be needed, and it is all perfectly legal.

My question is, can we use Assist Trophy models?

If you can get them to line up with an existing character's joint data I don't see why not.


I know I keep promising an update soon, but problems just keep coming up. I just loaded my first ever model created mostly with the program. It was just a simple brres->dae->brres loop, but it shows I am getting close. I need to fix the inverse bind matrix data, and there seems to be a problem with multi-weighted vertecies as well. The geometry looks good though.


EDIT: SUCCESS!!! I have extracted a model, converted it back, and extracted it again with working geometry and (seemingly) correct vertex weighting! Will test the results in-game after I get home from work today.

 

[...:::VILE:::...]

The beta I'm referring to will not be publically released. It will only be capable of doing dae->brres in the most limited ways.



no



You might want to try blender, but I'm really not sure. Also, no part of the sdk is used with this. No extra files will be needed, and it is all perfectly legal.



If you can get them to line up with an existing character's joint data I don't see why not.


I know I keep promising an update soon, but problems just keep coming up. I just loaded my first ever model created mostly with the program. It was just a simple brres->dae->brres loop, but it shows I am getting close. I need to fix the inverse bind matrix data, and there seems to be a problem with multi-weighted vertecies as well. The geometry looks good though.

Haha, your last statement proves some people in the SS IRC wrong, they said you are lying and this will never happen. Well as we can see, Pharrox is the real deal.

 

[Dragonrage]

Why would Pharrox need to lie anyway? He came up with the original method of texture hacking, he already has a reputation unlike that ****** who claimed to have a working Roy reconstructed from 'scrap data'.

Those guys apperantly don't know what they're talking about.

 

[...:::VILE:::...]

Why would Pharrox need to lie anyway? He came up with the original method of texture hacking, he already has a reputation unlike that ****** who claimed to have a working Roy reconstructed from 'scrap data'.

Those guys apperantly don't know what they're talking about.

Thats what i said, they had some lame rebuttal.

 

[fortwaffles]

SUCCESS!!! I have extracted a model, converted it back, and extracted it again with working geometry and (seemingly) correct vertex weighting! Will test the results in-game after I get home from work today.

Congradulations! if it all works well, are you gonna release it publicly? if not, how soon do you think it will be? i can't wait to have me and my friend james as playable captain falcon costumes!

 

[Msingh0]

Shouldn't you able to insert new characters? like instead of replacing, use wii scrubber on an iso to insert brres, pacs, pcs files? make a new file for everything that a normal character uses, sure it would take a while, but it would be well worth it.

 

[mariokart64n]

you can use Wii codes to patch brawl to read files off an SDcard. you can just drop the files as is on the card. no ISO packing needed whatsoever.

however there is an app for Wii that lets you read ISO's off of any USB device. but it has to be formatted into the WiiFileSystem

also the character slots are hardcoded into the DOL, so we have to work inside the restrictions of what character slots we already have.

 

[Dark Sonic]

also the character slots are hardcoded into the DOL, so we have to work inside the restrictions of what character slots we already have.

There are a few extra character slots though right (for alloys and such)?

You won't get to have 100+ new characters, but I think you can get 4 or 5

 

[Poxag]

so are u gonna post a video of an edited model or a pic?

 

[Pharrox]

Aaannnnnnnnd...it didn't work.

I can extract it fine with my converter. William's converter works fine as well, but when I try to load it in game it crashes. So I guess there will have to be a few changes. Anyway, just to prove that this IS real, here is the .pac generated with the new program.


www.shockz.us/brawlstuff/FitPikachu00.pac

 

[NeonTogepi]

Aaannnnnnnnd...it didn't work.

I can extract it fine with my converter. William's converter works fine as well, but when I try to load it in game it crashes. So I guess there will have to be a few changes. Anyway, just to prove that this IS real, here is the .pac generated with the new program.


www.shockz.us/brawlstuff/FitPikachu00.pac

ash'd it and got this error, if it helps:
Currently Unsupported Format. EOF Invalid.

 

[Pharrox]

Thanks, I found that when I tried to use ssbextract on it. I fixed it but I must have uploaded the original file. 0x6b should be 0x60. I generated the model but inserted it into the .pac manually, that was an oversight on my part.

 

[...:::VILE:::...]

So the only error was the EOF thing? Lol than so it worked?

EDIT: Nvm, didn't read properly.

 

[fortwaffles]

Yeah, i tried experementing with pikachu's model files once, i tried extracting one from one costume (just the model itself) and importing it into a different pikachu costume. I set it to FitPikachu01.pcs, and the game froze. i forgot to take it off, and i was at a tournament yesterday (at a friend's) and he sed we could use my copy for the music and tex hacks. well, we had 4 random CPU's and one happened to pick the dang red pikachu, neer the middle of the tourney. I forgot about it cuz it was about a month or two ago i did the experement, so the game froze, and we had to restart the tournament :/ i got 2nd though XD

 

[leafbarrett]

So these models can be loaded via SD card? :D

And does anyone know of any good tutorials on how to edit the models, etc. in Blender, or should I just scour YouTube/Google?

 

[mariokart64n]

I hate blender, but it gets really good reviews <_<

 

[Knightcrawler]

metaXzero. No, I don't think tournaments are anyone's MAIN goal, but it is A goal.

Mariokart64n, when half your post is wrong at face value and the other half is just insults directed at the other person, I think you might need to rethink your argument.

Congrats, Pharrox. Can't wait to see the first modded model! :-D

 

[metaXzero]

^As it stands, no character (which is just Roy currently) was created with "a goal" being use in tourneys. Some people saw the project and thought it'd be cool if if it was seen in tourneys, but the initial goal (and continued) was just a fun and balanced Roy in Brawl+ (Roy in vBrawl is trash). Custom characters for tourneys would have to be debated down the road and no matter how well-made they can be, I don't know how we all feel about user-created characters as tourney legal. Custom stages are already a debated topic...

 

[...:::VILE:::...]

Yeah, i tried experementing with pikachu's model files once, i tried extracting one from one costume (just the model itself) and importing it into a different pikachu costume. I set it to FitPikachu01.pcs, and the game froze. i forgot to take it off, and i was at a tournament yesterday (at a friend's) and he sed we could use my copy for the music and tex hacks. well, we had 4 random CPU's and one happened to pick the dang red pikachu, neer the middle of the tourney. I forgot about it cuz it was about a month or two ago i did the experement, so the game froze, and we had to restart the tournament :/ i got 2nd though XD

Hmm weird, i got a lucas model injected into a ness's .pac file. It worked like a moveswap.

 

[-BigSharkZ-]

Lol, I like how this project is going, but why are you working on this alone, Pharrox? You work way too much, like I used to do, and it's not a good thing. If I could help in any way, I would be glad to. Also, something nice is that you will be able to use those models online, because you didn't change the moveset or anything. You only changed the model and textures. The other people would see you normally, of course. After this, all we will need will be stage model hacking and sound effect hacking then SSBB will become MUGEN. Super Smash Bros. MUGEN, hehe.

 

[Pharrox]

The main reason I haven't asked for help (and I haven't released source code) is that I'm pretty much making this up as I go along. While it gets things done in the end, it also leaves me with about 3,000 lines of code that even I can't make any sense of, let alone anyone who would isn't completely familiar with the model format. And debugging all that is just...ugh. I went back and rewrote the model import portion today. I'm going to just try to import a mdl0 and the export it right back out using the same data to create a (almost) perfectly identical file. Once I get that I'll modify the collada portion to fill in all the same values instead of calculating them as I try to write the new one. I've started cleaning the code a little now, so if you have C++ knowledge and you want to help out with the coding, just let me know.

 

[nonameboy]

Hello friends,
I'm new here and I have read this entire thread,
just want to say thanks Pharrox and all others ...

keep up the good work

 

[fortwaffles]

Hmm weird, i got a lucas model injected into a ness's .pac file. It worked like a moveswap.

i think i didi it wrong. idk, everytime i try to do something like that, i basically take the data, and add 0's after it to fill in the right size, but it always freezes for me :/

 

[nonameboy]

this is a test render with light aplied made in 3ds max . looks like his face as small errors. The body seems to be allright

 

[-BigSharkZ-]

@nonameboy

That is because all of his models for eyes are placed there. Just remove all of them and keep one if you want to take a good picture.

@Pharrox

I sadly have no C++ knowledge, sorry.

 

[mariofanpm12]

Screw putting in new models. In the very least, I say we should just edit the models of old characters to look different, like Melee Ganon or Ocarina Link.

 

[Roller]

Screw putting in new models. In the very least, I say we should just edit the models of old characters to look different, like Melee Ganon or Ocarina Link.

With all the effort required to adjust weight, and attacks and everything, it wouldn't be worth it just to make a character "look" different. If you want that, use textures.. They actually have a pretty good ocarina link already.

 

[Lucania]

this is a test render with light aplied made in 3ds max . looks like his face as small errors. The body seems to be allright

Hey! How did you flip the normals? and which smoothing tool did you use?