Hacking Mii Part Models Rippable?

[WACOMalt]

So I have heard that some secretive people are trying to rip models from smash bros brawl. I assume they will be successful, as people like that usually figure stuff out pretty fast.

Anyways, I have been trying my hand at a few ideas on how to rip a 3d model of my mii character. I have graduated college in computer animation, so I do know how to work with a model and clean it up if I could get it, but that is where my skill ends. I know nothing about writing tools to get the vertex data or anything like that.

So I got an idea...

A long while back I had used a program I think called dxripper. It will take any direct x 3d object on the screen and dump it to obj or some other formats. I used ot on smash bros brawl in dolphin way back when, and it worked really well. (The only problem being the characters were never standing in T pose. as it dumps them exactly as they are on the screen, in whatever pose)
Dolphin can be set up to use direct X for it's graphics, so I decided to try to load a game that has miis in it, and do a 3d grab of that.

Well.. I have found no way to get dolphin to show miis in any of the games that use them. Apparently it IS possible to run the mii channel on wii, and I could re create my mii from scratch. but there are problems with this too (missing eyes/mouth) and I cannot find the mii channel wad though, so there's THAT issue.

The Mii format has already been hacked and figured out, and there are many PC mii editors, though none of them actually show you your mii in 3d (there is a really good 2d one though) That means the positioning of parts from the mii file has already been figured out.

So if I get this right, that means, if we could only just rip the models for the different mii parts, we could fairly easily use those, plus the positioning data in the mii files to reproduce a perfect mii model copy on PC.

The mii part models are in quite a few games aside from the mii channel. I am sure the models must be in each game separately. This would explain why nintendo hasn't updated the mii channel with new styles. If they did, the older games without those models wouldn't be able to show your miis properly.

So, is there any game out there that has miis in it that we can read the model files from? if so it should be possible to find the mii part model files.

So I ask if anybody knows more about this, and could help me? I know wii games are all different on how they store the models, but surely one of the games that has been figured out has miis in it and could have the parts dumped from it.

I read in a dolphin compatibility thread that in dolphin wii sports would load miis off of the wiimote correctly if you had them. But I honestly think it was a typo and they meant to say it wouldn't... I have had no luck with it.

If anyone is interested in this, or could help, let me know!

 

[WACOMalt]

Bump. Does anybody know where I can find some more info on ripping wii models?

or what the mii channel's title id is so I could download it with NUS Downloader?

 

[Luigi728]

No, you can't.
It's not downloadable, its a part of the systemmenu. If you dump the systemmenu then you might be able to extract it.

 

[bdr9]

If you look in almost any Wii game with the program WiiScrubber you can get a wad of the Mii Channel. I have two. They're called RVL-NigaoeNR-v4.wad.out.wad and RVL-NigaoeNR-v5.wad.out.wad.

 

[WACOMalt]

No, you can't.
It's not downloadable, its a part of the systemmenu. If you dump the systemmenu then you might be able to extract it.

Not entirely accurate, Not downloadable via NUS downloader, but anyone could host the mii channel wad if they wanted.

I did manage to rip v5 from my wii fit rip. and I got that to load in dolphin. Also I dumped my wii's filesystem, and put that into dolphin. When I launched the mii channel, it immediately wanted me to make my first mii, which I did (which is hard as some heads, all eyes and mouths and stuff dont show) but once done, it loaded my mii channel and all of my miis were there from my wii!

I find that spantacular.

Also, I had read you could only boot the wii system menu if it was a dump from v1, but I managed to get my dump of v4.0U to launch. I was having controller issues though, and it seems it will only work if you only use the real wiimote. (my wiimote won't work right on my pc, so I was stuck) if I revert the controls to mouse control, it does not load.

So, having that work, I decided to try my "3d ripper dx" program. but though it works on most other programs, it will not load dolphin, even with it set to direct x output. It may be a vista x64 problem, so I will try on my parents computer (XP 32) on that you can use system wide monitoring where it will look for any direct x stuff that gets loaded.

I will try that, and also I have another idea. There are ways to expand wads and get the files that are in them right? if so, can I get the model files? (which I believe should be sxs files or something like that. Can anyone point me to a place where the people were trying to dump models from brawl?

 

[WACOMalt]

ok, so after trying (in vain) to get at the files inside SZS files, I can't get anything worthwhile (or anything at all for that matter) szstools don't work for me, I get a rarc from yaz0dec, and then rarcdumper fails to extract anything from that.

carc files are even worse, as yaz0dec doesn't give me anything from them.
I tried with narctool2c and that gave me a narc, and then that couldn't get extracted. Some error about there being -1 files in the narc.

If anyone can get 3dRipper DX working I can totally get you a copy of the mii channel, and every file you need for it to show my mii in there.

From everything I have read, it seems a ton of people have sucessfully ripped models from szs, rarc, carc, and narc files.

I would love to be able to get the models via reverse engineering, but if not, a rip of my own mii will work for now.

Any insight please anybody?

And do you think that each wii game has a copy of the parts? or do you think the games all load the part models from the wii itself? I think each game that uses miis has the models, and just loads your mii file to assemble them. (as the mii files on your NAND are simply positioning and color info)

I'm about to give up here, I would love someone to give me some guidance. Maybe the folks who figured out so nicely how to load the gamecube szs files. (since they are the exact same format)

 

[dashxdr]

I'm about to give up here, I would love someone to give me some guidance. Maybe the folks who figured out so nicely how to load the gamecube szs files. (since they are the exact same format)

Ok I was interested in looking at Wii Fit Plus mii model data, and was able to achieve some success. I used a recent ubuntu linux machine and a windows machine. Here are the steps I followed:

1. From a wbfs file containing the wii fit plus game I extracted all the files with wit ( URL: http://wit.wiimm.de/

   wit extract wiifitplus.wbfs out

2. Inside the new directory out/ is a directory files/Common/HealthKokeshi and there is a file common.carc inside there. Unpack that with yaz0dec available here (URL: http://www.amnoid.de/gc/ )

   yaz0dec common.carc

3. That creates a file "common.carc 0.rarc" and we use wszst from (URL:http://szs.wiimm.de/wszst/ ) to extract that to a subdirectory

   wszst x *.rarc

4. That creates a directory tree "common.carc 0.d/" and inside that is a G3D directory with a file ava_bodyA2.brres which we can view in the brres viewer (a windows exe) mentioned here (URL: http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-15384.html) and downloadable here (URL: http://www.mediafire.com/file/zdr4chm4m3pzyj7/brresviewer.rar)
5. When we run the brresviewerv4.exe we can load the ava_bodya2.brres file, and then we can view the model. It is a body without a head. We can export that as a .psk file (unreal engine) which can be imported into 3dsmax or blender or whatever. I loaded it in blender and was able to rotate the different body parts around using the bone pivot control points (I'm not particularly experienced with 3d modelling). The critical data seemed to be there.

That's as far as I got. Hope this is useful, even though it is like 6.5 years after the original question...