TLDR: this is another deep dive tutorial-esque post going over a variety of ways to acquire models and analyze them, mostly anecdotal. idk if theres a lot most of you can add to this discussion, other than specific questions about 3D modeling in general. at the very least I hope this can enlighten some of you on “how the sausage gets made”
An important part of learning any craft is to look at a final product and analyze how it might have been made. Learning how to play a song you like, either via guitar tab, licensed score, or transcribing by ear. Drawing art from a show you like, to learn the style. For a 3D artist, this usually means looking for available model downloads on various sites, or ripping them yourself, and then popping it open in blender and poking around. But how do you actually get these models? And when you have them, what should you be looking for?
Finding Models Without Ripping
There’s a variety of sites that provide already ripped models, but generally a quick google search can find a link to whatever you’re specifically after. Sometimes theres just a google drive folder with everything you need, already setup for you.
- Models Resource is okay, mostly console era stuff with hit-or-miss quality. Usually missing games or assets from games. Not a lot of modern PC titles on here.
- The Garry’s Mod Steam Workshop and SFM Workshop funnily enough are massive sources for video game models. This goes for most steam workshop places but you’ll need to use an external program such as Crowbar to download the workshop files and GMAD Extractor to convert the .gma files (SFM is fine you dont need to do this), and then finally a plugin to actually open the files in Blender such as Blender Source Tools. Its very tedious but ive found this process the most convenient bc of the reliability of the process. Note: You do not need to own Garry’s Mod in order to download the workshop items.
- Sketchfab is a place I generally avoid. People put personal (fanart) work on here alongside ripped work which makes it inconsistent, and the downloads are not always available. At the very least there is a built-in model-viewer on the website, which means you can study a bit without downloading.
- Khada Model Viewer is a really nice website dedicated to League of Legends. Here you can view every character and every cosmetic and also view each animation all from their website. There’s also a .glb model download option to view in blender. I usually use this to study game animation since its really convenient, I’ve been using it for many years but previous model viewer sites have gone down though in the past (teemo gg, mobafire’s viewer), so i do not know if this site will continue to stay up.
- Many 3D gacha games such as Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact, ZZZ, and Girls Frontline 2 will host their models officially through Chinese websites such as Bili Bili as MMD files so people can make fan work. You’ll need the Blender MMD Tools plugin to open them.
Ripping Models Yourself
This parts really complicated so I’ll keep this brief. If you want to rip game models yourself you should look up specific guides for each game, if they exist. I’ve found ripping Unreal Engine games the most reliable by using UMODEL, but it doesn’t always work for UE5 titles and you’ll also need to find an AES key in order to beat the encryption. These are usually available online, and theres another forum site with a giant thread that lists nearly every AES key for every major UE title that i wont be linking to, but it exists and shouldnt be that hard to find (unless the site goes down in the future, in that case, im sorry)
Unity model ripping is fairly inconvenient, I haven’t used a method other than UABE (unity asset bundle extractor) which typically means dumping the entire games files, which can take hours.
How To Analyze Models
Once you have your file you should be able to open up a .glb, .gltf, .fbx, etc in blender. sometimes you’ll need to use Blender v3.6 for .glb/.gltfs to avoid errors, especially if the bones come out looking weird or if the mesh is missing.
Analyzing models generally requires you to have some baseline knowledge of what a 3D model should look like. Ultimately it depends on what you’re looking to learn, but personally these are the things I’m looking for when I study another artists’ work.
- Topology
- Texturing
- Rigging (and skinning)
Topology
Topology is a little complicated, since its also related to the skinning (weight paint) process and how an object deforms, and also connected to UV maps and texturing. Each modeler is going to have their own goals for what topology they will use, so its interesting to note what their goals might’ve been but you can only speculate on that really.
I usually look for:
- What pieces are connected? Are accessories like zippers welded into the topology or are they floating?
- How are the eyes handled? Is it convex like a normal human eye or concave like most anime models where its more like an eye socket?
- What parts are clipping?
- Is the hair built as multiple pieces or one connected mesh?
- How dense is this model, vertex count wise?
Checking connectivity can be handy by using Blender’s Select Linked tool, which should grab a connected object. Sometimes certain inner/outer sections of a mesh might be separated but share overlapping vertices, so i’ll sometimes use Merge by Distance as well to join these back up. I’ll keep a backup before that modification too.
Most Marvel Rivals models contain semi-textured nude areas underneath the clothing, these are normally removed for optimization reasons by most modelers for other games. This implies the usage of a base mesh typically. Some modelers will skip this stage and model with the clothing from the get go instead.
Here you can see Magik from Marvel Rivals with a lot of individual pieces of hair. These parts are all clipping and jammed together. This seems like they used the Hair Card technique to construct this. The accessories are also modeled separately, just being tucked into the side of the hair.
Compare Magik’s hair (from above) to Hitman from DNF Duel, who has the hair welded directly into the face’s topology and avoids clipping. Most cel-shaded games avoid clipping since it can look bad, especially if they are using inverted-hull outlines. You can also note that sections of the mesh are cut out as part of a normal editting process, resulting in parts of the cheek being cut to form a rembrandt triangle when the shadows appear. You can also notice how most parts of the texturing are tied directly to the toplogy, rather than the painted look of Magik where the texturing is doing its own, separate thing.
Magik’s legs have this weird, jagged topology that doesn’t serve any purpose. These inner lines don’t add to the silhouette, don’t mark sections of the UV map, or serve a deformation purpose. Instead this seems like the result of either an automated retopology job, or remesh. This implies that the model could’ve been sculpted, and a computer simplified this region in an awkward way. Or it was hit with a decompression method such as Decimate, but this looks like remesh to me.
Texturing
Analyzing texturing can be pretty tedious. Often times you’ll have to recreate the material setup yourself, since materials (I believe) are tied directly to the graphics engine, so this information isn’t usually carried over properly in .fbx or .glbs and so on between Blender, Maya, Unity, Unreal, Godot, etc.
A lot of games will also use their own proprietary naming scheme, so sometimes you’ll encounter a unique texture file with a unique name that doesn’t apply to any standards. So sometimes you’ll have to just ignore these in your study. Just think of these as a unique shader black magic file. Or you can ask online, maybe a community member has done this work before you for that game. Some other 3D artists might have a guess, but once again some of these really are just unique to one company’s shader setup only used in one of their titles, and nowhere else.
I personally just load in a Diffuse file (sometimes labeled as _D or _DI) for the material’s texture, since this is the base-color file and should be available in 90% models. Going through the effort of recreating the material setup 1:1 in blender isn’t usually in my goals for studying, and it’s also not always possible.
Once it’s setup, I’ll typically just look through certain parts of the mesh, select a region and then find the corresponding UV/texture combo. The most important things I’m looking for are:
- How many textures does this model use? What parts need more detail, leading to them being stored in separate files?
- Are any of these textures re-used between different characters of the same game? Often times there will be shared materials (such as shared Eye textures for Valorant).
- Where are the seams on this model? What textures are connected, how do they split up the sections of the UVs and so on.
Every pocket on RED from Bomb Rush Cyberfunk reuses the same section of the image texture. There is also only one image texture.
These eyes from Kafka H:SR are contained on the same image texture as the face, but stuff like the rest of the arms are on different textures.
These are just some examples of what I look for, but I’m sure different artists would be looking for different things as well.
You can always look at the raw files too in a file directory instead, which can help analyze a material setup.
Here’s some files from a leaked beta model of Chen from the unreleased Arknights: Endfield game. You can see they have green normal maps instead of the more common blue normal maps. They also have a SDF map to control shadows, which I brought up in a previous Tsuki post on Wuthering Waves models.. They also have a variety of _M files which i believe are used as masks… ultimately this is something that is limited by your knowledge of 3D materials, but it can provide some insight. You might have some luck by searching “what is an _AO file 3d art”, but it might not always work out.
Rigging
The skeletons can sometimes be indecipherable in blender, especially if it was from an Unreal Engine Game. You’re typically missing the control bones that make animating with it useable, and the custom bone shapes etc. Sometimes the bone orientation is awkward, etc. So I find analyzing ripped rigs to be fairly difficult if not useless. Some model downloads will have custom rigs made by fans. Analyzing those custom rigs can be useful, but remember that it’s usually not the same as what the original developers used and might be missing stuff.
Usually I’m just looking at how many bones are used to animate a character’s hair, or unique overlapping things that might need physics bones or to be animated separately, like capes, jackets, etc. This usually means I’ll blindly be clicking through bones in the rough area until i find the bone that actually controls what I’m looking for, if it exists, by wiggling each bone in Pose Mode or checking the weights of every bone.
end
This is mostly what my studying process looks like, but of course I glossed over a few things. You can have a million different examples on the stuff I talked about here, because ultimately this is discussing how 3D art as a medium is made. Sometimes a character is modeled, textured, rigged, and then animated all by one guy. Other times you have a full team dedicated to making base models, individual skins, then another guy comes in to texture, and another comes in to rig, and then a final one comes in to animate- that can become a whole movie studio production essentially. The more complex ones, with 20 different materials and 50 different texture maps, tend to be made by bigger teams, but that doesn’t mean a solo artist can’t learn from the process.
I also definitely overlooked certain things for time, and also different disciplines i’m not experienced with ( a lot of the material process, and ripping ). Let me know if you guys have any questions or if you want me to elaborate on different things. I know there arent a lot of other 3D modelers on Tsuki as of now, but maybe theres something here i can share.
