looks pretty good. just some things are kind of off? Custom shiny looks cool but I believe we are only going by original shinies and such. also, I think the hoverboard is backwards and would just use it how it originally comes as in battles.
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Custom 3D Animated Renders
- Thread starter DJTHED
- Start date
Very fortunate to have a speedier turnaround this time for the priority poll (shoutouts to smokeyinferno), but Glimmora is now live on Showdown! A certain matcha-flavored fellow I mentioned last update is also live along with it. Will hopefully be getting in more updates soon so I can make the next formal update post, thank you all once again for your patience.
love itVery fortunate to have a speedier turnaround this time for the priority poll (shoutouts to smokeyinferno), but Glimmora is now live on Showdown! A certain matcha-flavored fellow I mentioned last update is also live along with it. Will hopefully be getting in more updates soon so I can make the next formal update post, thank you all once again for your patience.
hi all
pretty excited about the work I've been doing for this project over the past week, so I figured I'd share in this thread
as promised, I am also working on the other two pokemon that were featured in the priority poll. progress has been a bit slower both because I'm not really rushing to get these out the door & their models are notably harder to work with than glimmora's, but by now they are close-ish to a Showdown-ready state.
I started work on garganacl months ago (& in fact it was the first pokemon I formally worked on for Showdown) but I just could not get nice-looking output with the knowledge I had then. the oddly-shaped salt blocks produced ugly, inconsistent outlines & cast shadows all over the main body:
working on other renders in the meantime has taught me some tricks which I've used to finally clean up garg (and start work on archaludon, who incidentally has a lot of the same problems). in particular, Sinistcha's whisk-hair produced some very busy outlines which forced me to think outside the box with how I handled our 3DS-lookalike compositing setup & mesh normals in general (mostly re: how to use data transfer custom normals for nefarious Hacky Bullshit purposes)
as an aside: these sorts of issues are (part of) why less competitively viable pokemon often come first in the pipeline. higher BSTs & more broken gimmicks correspond roughly to more complicated visual designs, and more complicated visual designs mean more work for us
that's all. it's been fun working on this project for the past few months & I'm looking forward to what comes next once we finish the reg H-legal pool at Some Point™August 4th, 2025 Update
(To skip to poll information on Gholdengo, click here.)
-- Render Progress --
Completed
With these recent updates, I'm happy to say that all basic Pokémon from Scarlet and Violet are now rendered! This was a very hefty ordeal that I could not have done without the fantastic work of the render team, so I want to spend a bit of time highlighting their work.
Previous Update
New!
Priority Winner #2: Glimmora
The last poll winner was Glimmora by a narrow margin, and this render was handled by smokeyinferno! The eyes that Glimmet and Glimmora have are encased in a sort of crystal at the center of the "flower," but rendering out the emissive eyes thankfully wasn't that much of a hurdle compared to a lot of other Pokémon in Paldea.
New Renders
Phew, this was a big wave of renders, a fair amount which had a plethora of things to fix or adjust. I'll start with my solo renders first, since I've been sitting on these for a while.
This line was a lot tricker than I would have liked, mostly just for Bax. Frigibax had a unique case of me adjusting its eye expression, since its battle idle specifically has it scowling! But the real problem Pokémon was Baxcalibur, this thing had several issues ranging from weight paint issues, to adjust geometry for cleaner lines, to fixing the eyes... it was honestly something that haunted me for ages. Even now I'm not fully sure if I like the final product, but I do think it still came out very solid. I hope Baxcalibur fans are happy with this look!
smokeyinferno
Smokeyinferno once again has been on an insane pace in getting renders done, I honestly can't be thankful enough for their contributions. They would likely explain in better detail the full process of bringing these more complicated renders to life, but from doing QA I can list a few examples of things that needed adjustments so they'd look good in 3DS form:
Sinistcha: It's head whisk was an outline mess, so needed quite a bit of touch up so it could look as clean as it does now.
Nacli line: Eyes for all of them are emissive, outlines needed clean up for weird geometry on both Naclstack and Garganacl, Garganacl itself needed color balancing for its outlines to blend nicer with the white salt.
Archaludon: This one was particularly a nightmare, so many outlines to adjust, texture edits for it's chest frame, color adjustments to make the metallic look visible but not washed out...but I love how the final product looks.
Denial
One of our two new volunteers, Denial! She covered the Maschiff line for her first assignment, and these guys were honestly trickier than I expected to be! They're deceptively wrinkly dogs, so a fair amount of outlines needed to be touched up to clarify their expression and colors. I helped a bit here with some model edits, but for the first submitted work I am very happy with her final renders!
WaytooHaz3d
Our other new volunteer, Hazed! They covered both Bombirdier and the Charcadet line, both had some extra work needed to make their renders come together as solidly as possible. Bombirdier for one was a bit of scaling predicament, since we typically use a mix of the Pokémon's official "height" in game plus in game comparisons to determine how big or small we should render each Pokémon. It's hard sometimes to understand what this "height" is supposed to be, is it head to tail? Head to foot? Wingspan? It can usually be a reliable metric, but sometimes it comes down to reasonable judgement + some subjectivity. But it is important, we don't want to render Pokémon to be too big on Showdown. I also aided Hazed with some mesh adjustments and some texture editing for the eyes, to make sure the eyes are still visible at this scale.
The Charcadet line was also really complicated! A lot is going on here with the eyes, the fire, and just honestly just the sheer density of shapes in these designs. I've been very short on spare time this summer, so I was struggling to find time to help Hazed polish these guys off. Smokeyinferno came in clutch and helped wrapped this whole line up, so huge props to both of them for contributing!
-- Pokémon Animation Poll #1 --
So truthfully, part of the reason I wanted to start doing polls like Priority Polls was because I wanted to test the waters on how users would like having more community involvement with the 3D render process. I think the couple we've run so far have gone fairly well, so I want to introduce something I really would love to get all of your input on, animation votes!
For those that might not know, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet actually feature a good handful of Pokémon with multiple battle idles, typically a standard battle idle and an alternate battle idle used for swimming/floating. If you ever threw out a Pokémon on water for battle and noticed it wasn't restricted to the random pool floatie, or noticed sometimes your Scream Tail floats and sometimes stands on the ground, those are basically what I'm referring to.
Now in most cases, a lot of these animations I wouldn't really need to "decide" between for renders. Default idles are almost always disregarded in favor of battle idles, and most swimming idles wouldn't make sense for Showdown (it wouldn't really make sense to have Leafeon doggy paddling mid air, as funny of a mental image that is). However, there are some alternate idles that are really iconic or fun, and I feel especially for these cases it doesn't feel right for me to make the call on what to use for something that thousands of users will be seeing. And given the next Pokémon we need to render, I think this is a special moment I want to celebrate by bringing it to the community! So here's what you all will be voting for.
(Sample renders provided by smokeyinferno)
Gholdengo has two battle idle variants, one standard with its fists up, and another on its iconic surfboard. For me, both of these idle animations are very charming, but since we cannot have both I'd like to bring the decision to popular vote. Which Gholdengo animation do you want for Gholdengo's Showdown render?
Note that these render previews here won't be exactly one-to-one with the final output, there still might be some adjustments done to color balancing or outlines or just the slight changes that come from optimization, but these are a very close indication of what the final look would be like. Please vote on what animation you prefer!
Also, for those that have trouble voting directly on the poll in this thread, or want to share this with non-forum using friends, I also have the poll copied onto Strawpoll. Please feel free to share this, and also feel free to vote both here and on the Strawpoll if you wish.
https://strawpoll.com/e2naXxoxzyB
As for what's next, we're going to be putting full steam ahead in rendering all Paradox Pokémon. I'm very excited for this next update, it's going to likely take quite a bit of time getting all the renders ready, but I hope everyone will be looking forward to it!
the gen VIII screenrips were/are meant as placeholders for custom 3DS-lookalike renders, so you can't revert to them on showdown itself. they still exist in older versions of thesmogon/spritesrepository (and on pkparaiso.com without the outlines), though, so if you'd like you can look into writing like a tampermonkey script or browser extension that replaces the new sprites with the old:
I recognize that perhaps it is beyond the scope of feasibility, but because SCVI made brand new models for past generation Pokemon, is it possible to make renders down the line for them? I feel as though it would help give Gen 9 more visual identity, at least on Showdown. Obviously it is and should be low priority but I'm just curious.Last edited:
Should be noted that some of the older SV renders such as Corviknight, Mewtwo and Some Eeveelutions? did this already but it was switched to Home models for future renders because they were significantly easier to work with and very few mons had significant updates to their animations.
this seems like an inordinate amount of work to make renders to match a single generation's art style for 840 pokemon only to be discarded the next gen. the whole point of sticking with 3ds renders is they are futureproof, It's the same reason we have 3ds style sprite icons rather than matching gen 8's upscaled ones or illustrating SV style ones. making new animations for every single mon every single gen would be a huge load on your browser cache and showdown's storage, whereas oldgen static sprites are comparatively small.
I might be wrong but I assumed they meant new models specifically for the few Pokémon that recieved a very notable overhaul in SV - the biggest case being Charizard who looks really different
Less so trying to match the gen's artstyle but devamping this to a 3DS style similar to new mons. Still tho it'd be understandable if this is considered unnecessary work since Charizard already has a Showdown model, just fiigured i'd point out that the suggestion likely isn't to update every showdown model to gen 9 but rather take the few new models for old mons and devamp them (again tho, understandeable if that's not a reasonable ask)ye it could be fun to redo some of the past-gen animations with SV's models if/when we finish the current-gen workload. a problem which sticks out to me though is that the current-gen models & textures aren't made to look good at tiny resolutions the same way X/Y's were
like, just look at the eyes on these. SV's charizard is definitely more expressive at full gameplay scale, but even at this resolution you're kind of losing the irises -- I suspect we'd have to retool the eye textures pretty significantly to get anything besides the sclerae to show up in our render outputs. meanwhile, XY zard's big blocky eye textures show up just fine:
definitely an interesting idea to keep in mind for the future, I think. but I also kind of worry that some of the newer models will look worse than what we have nowLast edited:
Quick note frome on this topic when it comes to making renders for models that were officially reworked.
I would personally not bother doing this unless the changes are notable enough to change the silhouette substantially. There are a lot of Pokemon in ScVi that did get model adjustments, but remain mostly the same in overall shape. These kinds of changes are often just additional geometric detail, along with more detailed textures to go along with that. However, the main reason I would avoid doing renders for these reworks is because these changes do not translate well into the 3DS style. Typically the original models will fare better and have a more clear appearance, since they were designed with this type of rendering and small 3DS screen and resolution in mind.
I made a couple exceptions to this, since these exceptions did significantly change the design enough to warrant tackling these. Persian, and Mewtwo.
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It might be revisiting Persian again in particular because their textures were still using the highly detailed fur texture from ScVi in the render, and is a bit more noisy as a result than I'd like. I do have ideas on how to clean that texture up, but we'll see if I ever get the time to get to it. But either way, for both these cases, these reworks were very significant.
Persian received a massive overhaul in proportions. Head shape, neck, body and limb thickness, were all changed, which I think now fits the original 2D design of Persian a lot more as well, while before Persian felt a bit off with its design and proportions.
Mewtwo, while not as noticeable, did receive an update as well that addressed issues with its headshape most importantly. Before, its headshape felt very squashed down and didn't quite match Mewtwo's original 2D design very well, which was finally addressed with his new model in ScVi. Mewtwo did receive overall proportion updates as well, if a bit more subtle.
Anyways, my point is that while it is possible to re-render the more highly detailed ScVi models in 3DS style, it requires a ton of work. Especially because we usually have no choice but to use the ScVi models. For all the actual ScVi Pokemon, we're been using the Pokemon Home models, which are more suitable for the 3DS shading style. But these model revisions often (if ever) get updated into Home, they are stuck in the mainline game itself. So a lot of manual work is required to touch up the model to make sure outlines aren't overdrawn or underdrawn in places, and there will of course need to be a lot of manual touch up with the textures to make sure they don't get super noisy, and this gets harder the more complex the Pokemon's color palette is.
However, if I perhaps missed another Pokemon that got a more significant update than I may have realized, then I might be open to allowing other re-renders, as long as these reworks do more than just add detail with minimal changes to silhouette and proportions.
EDIT:
Also yes, I also have done updates to past pokemon, but only for animation. Here's one example of me doing this:
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Leafeon, among other eeveelutions (not all of them), received new battle idle animations in ScVi. This was a significant change, but not to their models. Their ScVi models are very similar to before, but with some extra facial geometry to replace 2D animated textures. But I didn't see any reason to get these ScVi models to match 3DS style when they have identical proportions and silhouette anyway, and their 3DS models look perfectly fine in this style as is. But their animation and stance was a noticeable and noteworthy enough change for me to go in and make new renders for them to match the new game. I am aware there are a lot more than just the Eeveelutions that got new battle idles while still retaining most of the old model that I could've done, so maybe if anyone has any ideas in mind for that, I'm open to that as well that we can tackle as a team later once we get the more important stuff out of the way first.Last edited:
