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Zelda Windwaker Textures Yay or Nay ?!

polycounter lvl 18
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warby polycounter lvl 18
i started playing windwaker with that dolphin emulator a while back.
its just one of those games i am nostalgicly in love with. i played it many times on the gamecube in lowres and shitty quality on a lowdef tv and was always amazed at the look of a lot of the textures facial expressions and fx but because of the poor image quality could never quite tell how it was done. that is actually something that happend to me a lot with the last console generation i saw something amazing and had to know how its done and desperately wanted to take a closer look but the tv quality just wouldnt do.

when i installed the dolphine emulator ( i still have my gamecube copy of the game and a wii and a gamecube controller and mmemory card to boot so its all legit !) and fiddled with the gfx settings to make it run run properly i noticed that there are a whole bunch of debug options like wireframe vertex/pixel light freecam and ... "dump textures" 0_0 i couldnt resist and had to try all of this. seeing how well all of it worked i immediately thought i am gonna disecct the fuck out of this game and look at every pixel nook and cranny. i already learend alot of interesting stuff about the game for example:

-the water is actually attached to link and always moves with you (except vertical)
-the cloth strips hanging from the pig/boar enemys weapons are not done with precomputed physics its all dynamic ( why dont modern games have cloth simulation that good ? *mindblown* )
-the stars in the sky are not done with a skybox or texture but are just a bunch of additive quads rotating on top of each other.
-the facial expressions are all done with floating alpha planes for eyes and eyebrows (that also draw in front of the hair shader) but not the mouth that is an opaque texture on the actual model (not floating) for some reason.
-there are both geometry and sprite waves at different weathers.

the textures dumping is a bit weird its not storing the textures with its original name instead it gives every textures that gets loaded a random name and drops it into a folder so every texture that gets used multiple times in the game will get dumped multiple times also you can never be sure you dumped all the textures unless you actually went into absolutely every 3d scene in the game.

that is kind of what i am doing right now trying to 100% complete the game get every treasure chart make every easter-egg happen etc to get a all the textures dumped.
that is quite a lot of work and than sweeping through the textures an deleting all the duplicates is super tedious too.

now this is something i wished someone had already done so that i could just download a big package and look at the textures but right than and there one steps into a legal gray area. obviously looking at textures cant be illegal technically you are also looking at the textures inside your legally purchased game. but uploading this and offering it for download somewhere is pretty shady. so my question to you is:

A) are you as interested in looking at this stuff and researching it as much as i am ... or at all ?

B) would you want to have this texture collection once i am done dumping them ?

C) do you think its okay if i share/upload them somewhere ?

i am really conflicted about this! on one hand the textures are really small and couldnt really be "used" for anything but research but if somebody misused them anyway somehow than i would feel horrible that i had a hand in it.

Replies

  • Andreas
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    Andreas polycounter lvl 11
    Excellent post, I've always been fascinated by Wind Waker's visuals. Would love to figure out how to go about animating textures like they do on the mouth.
  • Xenobond
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    Xenobond polycounter lvl 18
    Try out VisiPics. You can run it on the dump directory, and it'll show/remove duplicate images.
  • blankslatejoe
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    blankslatejoe polycounter lvl 18
    Huh, those are some interesting tidbits. Was the skydome was attached to link took, like the water? I had always wondered about the facial expressions and such--I bet megaman legends did similar alpha plane trickery for eyes.

    As for the shared collection, yeah, that is super shady. Fortunately it's a older game so I dunno how likely it would be anyone would go after you aggressively for it. Even with the honest educational intentions, I still wouldn't post any links publicly here.
  • cptSwing
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    cptSwing polycounter lvl 11
    Hmm.. maybe if you mash them together in creative ways it'll be seen as artistic interpretation and creation of something new, therefore not infringing on copyright? but I don't speak legalese.

    Always interesting to read this stuff, and I'd love a peek at the textures as well..
  • biofrost
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    biofrost polycounter lvl 12
    I would just post links through pm. I know of a few fan sites for other games that dump textures for games for research and fan hacks and no one ever bothers them.

    I might do this too for skyward sword, I recently have been playing it though Dolphin(my wii took a dump on me and all games played I ripped my self using a friends modded wii) and had no idea you could do this
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    I'd like to see the break down of some of the art in wind waker, you can always sort textures by file size and that should group any duplicates together.
  • divi
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    divi polycounter lvl 12
    while i would love to see the textures i personally would not dare to post other people's work, especially from a commercial product.
  • Goeddy
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    Goeddy greentooth
    ye although u got good intentions, nintendo is relentless when you do something with their stuff, you are not supposed to do.
    and i mean relentless in a legal way. even though it is a old game, i wouldnt risk it in your place.
    better keep it to yourself, or share it only with people you realy trust.
  • jimmypopali
    Sounds really interesting, the things you already found out is cool! Would love to hear about more things you find out and would like to end up looking at those textures too.
  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    ZacD wrote: »
    ..., you can always sort textures by file size and that should group any duplicates together.

    that is what i am doing right now luckily png have deterministic loss-less compression so all the textures with the same dimensions dont end up being exactly the same file-size but duplicates do.

    the dolphin directx9 plugin dumps pngs while the opengl mode only extracts tga that was a bit of pain in the ass because i moved the whole operation to a windows 7 machine with directx11 and the dx 9 dlls werent working

    i really didnt want to mix pngs and tgas or replay the game from the beginning ( i just beat the earth temple )
    so i downloaded a bunch of shady dlls and installed them and it works again so the work continues.

    now that i think about it i could have just batch converted the tgas in the end and the would have sorted in just fine.



    @Xenobond does visipics find/select the images based on actual image color comparison or based on file-size ?!



    some new nuggets of info that i found interesting:

    -the sharp edged lighting around lanterns and fireflies doesnt seam to come from dynamic lightsources i saw more than 8 of them resting next to each other on one object and without deffered lighting/rendering this shouldnt be possible with standard tnl point light sources ... so i am suspecting a geometry sphere and some stencil buffer magic
    -some of the static shadows in the game are done with deliberate cuts in the geometry+vertex colors while others are done with the same texture in 2 different levels of brightness stored in the same bitmap and than uv mapped appropriately where its needed to be dark ... why not use vert colors everywhere? i have no idea.
    -when you stare into the sun all opaque geometry becomes darker ... fake hdr tonemapping ... never noticed that on the gamecube
    -the dynamic shadow that link casts sometimes is split/ interrupted when you cast it onto an edge on the terrain below and it looks like the shadow is floating as if they dynamically generate floating decals per poly where ever it falls moved outwards the normals a bit. should look at that again in wireframe.
    -there seems to be no occlusion in the game.indoor and outdoor scenes are always separated into their own scenes
    and obviously never draw simultaneously but nothing ever disappears behind a building or large rock in the game.
    -sometimes when link walks through a door in a dungeon that has a different ambient color and light setup link maintains the light of the prior room for a second before the ambient color fades over and the cell shading direction "rotates" to the new direction this + the fact that the vertexlight/pixel lighting options in dolphin dont do anything makes me believe that the shading is done entirely in the shader and not with light sources.
  • Mark Dygert
    Facinating stuff, Windwaker is the only reason I still have a GameCube plugged in. I've never really been too into emulating games to rip them apart but some of the tricks they did back on the gamecube can directly apply to some of the mobile hardware today...

    I'm kind of ambivalent about posting some of the raw content. On one hand I would like to see it so I can learn from it, but on the other hand I don't want to see it recycled. Maybe posting some break-down shots or textures with watermarks?
  • Xenobond
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    Xenobond polycounter lvl 18
    warby wrote: »
    @Xenobond does visipics find/select the images based on actual image color comparison or based on file-size ?!

    by image color comparison
    http://www.visipics.info

    I use it a bunch when I'm cleaning up reference folders and image dumps. USed to use it when dumping textures from the N64, too.
  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    tried it and it works like a charm

    thanks man this saved me alot of hours of work =)
  • Autocon
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    Autocon polycounter lvl 15
    awesome info, always a been a HUGE fan of Wind Waker. Would love to poke around some of there files.
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    This thread needs more images!
  • seforin
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    seforin polycounter lvl 17
    adam wrote: »
    This thread needs more images!

    What the big guy said. I want to see a release of this if possible. I have all the Zelda Twilight princess Models+source textures and it gave a big insight on how they did some things (and left alot of room for question on others) I always love to see how jap' devs go about making some of there games. :)
  • bugo
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    bugo polycounter lvl 17
    It was a good resource on how they built their environments, I actually only played that game through the emulator.... :P

    I specially like the way they did the eye animations, just by having decal placements.

    One other game that got me impressed was Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles, you should take a look at that one too!
  • SHEPEIRO
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    SHEPEIRO polycounter lvl 17
    warby wrote: »
    -some of the static shadows in the game are done with deliberate cuts in the geometry+vertex colors while others are done with the same texture in 2 different levels of brightness stored in the same bitmap and than uv mapped appropriately where its needed to be dark ... why not use vert colors everywhere? i have no idea.

    i think having worked on an admittedly shit game that used similar process on the wii it would be for production reasons as well as artistic:
    -its a great way to be able to change a scenes colour scheme as all the uvs are setup... you just have to make small changes to the texture to see map wide changes relatively instantly
    -also you can change the blend between the colours by adding more pixels to sharpen the line and add subtle shift in tone between the UVed colour swatches to add to the look
  • Avanthera
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    Avanthera polycounter lvl 10
    And Shepeiro/Warby:

    Also remember that a bunch of artists were working on these over time, so perhaps early in production they did it one way, and later on they found the other way was more efficient on it's platform, or some of the artists just tackled the problem differently.

    Or, in a poly-heavy scene, I'm sure a larger image would be better than all the cuts for VC, and in a texture-heavy scene, a few extra polygons wouldn't hurt.
  • Andreas
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    Andreas polycounter lvl 11
    seforin wrote: »
    What the big guy said. I want to see a release of this if possible.

    Bang it up on a torrent, then just post the name of it and the site its on, I would advice against posting links, I don't think PC needs Nintendos attention.
  • Ace-Angel
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    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    Almost all of the characters and object load specific textures for specific events, stuff like eyes have their own textures and UV's, so they get swapped out easily during specific events (EI: Damage blends, Text Hookup, etc).

    Environment is traditional stuff of tiling your textures either via a single blend mask or separate mesh put ontop of another things, and reused down the line, much cheaper then most other options.

    Also of Vertex Colors are also stored for shadows and such.

    Sometimes, if they needed a specific 'look' in a certain section of the game, a couple of extra planes with Vertex or Textures was what they put up, not intricate full fledged unique textures or model even, just a simple copy work from other assets.

    Environmental assets was also old school a la Doom3 style, either bones of blends where used for animation, so no Vertex Offsetting expect for a few very specific things.

    It's not that hard to get your hands on a couple of modding tools and take a look at the artwork or rig-up your emulator to Wireframe mode a scene, just be prepared to see alot of 'misc' stuff, that might not make sense on why they exist until much later.
  • Tekoppar
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    Tekoppar polycounter lvl 10
    The fastest way I have found to find the textures in all that crap is to simply use Windows 7 feature filter list with dimensions. Simply check all the sizes that would be a game texture. Copy all these files to a new folder and organize after size and delete every 1kb file.

    Yes granted you will loose some 1kb textures in the process. Guess you could copy every texture that's higher then 1kb in file size and then run visipics on the 1kb files to remove duplicates and manually go trough them all to find the rest of the textures.

    I tried the first one and found 222 textures. And it seems that the texture dump does not duplicate textures, so visipics might be unnecessary to use (except if you are gonna to the above thing and remove the duplicate of the rest of the stuff).

    Don't know if this link will work, don't know how to share folders in dropbox, it's the 222 textures I found, something to share at least. https://www.dropbox.com/home/Public/Zelda%20-%20Wind%20Waker (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9876544/Zelda%20-%20Wind%20Waker/Zelda%20-%20Wind%20Waker.rar <- zipfile with all the new 1163(Should be no duplicates(old 1633textures.)))

    GZLP01_e485920d_14.pngGZLP01_a64dcb83_14.pngGZLP01_8570b101_14.png
  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    222 ? that cant be complete i have over 3000 textures in my dump folder already

    (after visi cleanup + played half way through the game ... a ton of simple gui stuff ... but no duplicates as far as i can tell)
  • warby
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    warby polycounter lvl 18
    shrew81 wrote: »
    And Shepeiro/Warby:

    Also remember that a bunch of artists were working on these over time, so perhaps early in production they did it one way, and later on they found the other way was more efficient on it's platform, or some of the artists just tackled the problem differently.

    that makes a lot of sense to me
  • Tekoppar
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    Tekoppar polycounter lvl 10
    God no, those 222 textures I got from just flying around inside the Deku Tree, the new 622 are probably from 40% of the overworld. Just did a quick dump to get something inside here.
  • SHEPEIRO
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    SHEPEIRO polycounter lvl 17
    SHEPEIRO wrote: »
    i think having worked on an admittedly shit game that used similar process on the wii it would be for production reasons as well as artistic:
    -its a great way to be able to change a scenes colour scheme as all the uvs are setup... you just have to make small changes to the texture to see map wide changes relatively instantly
    -also you can change the blend between the colours by adding more pixels to sharpen the line and add subtle shift in tone between the UVed colour swatches to add to the look

    just realised are these probably areas where day/night shift happens... so they probably either (cant remember if it blends or does it while your not there) loads different textures or has two loaded and lerps between
  • Tekoppar
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    Tekoppar polycounter lvl 10
    I think you got all the textures if you have 3000 of them. Cause I got 1163 and I have pretty much nearly been everywhere, missing some places and the test room ones.
  • Cybroxide
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    Cybroxide polycounter lvl 17
    This is an incredible resource, I've been studying these textures and trying to speculate all their possible uses for hours now. Thank you so much for doing this.
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