Custom 3D Animated Renders

Which Pokemon Should Get a Render Soon?

  • Glimmora

    Votes: 28 50.9%

  • Garganacl

    Votes: 19 34.5%

  • Archaludon

    Votes: 8 14.5%
  • Total voters
    55
  • Poll closed .

March 24th, 2025 Update​


Heyo, first of hopefully more updates along the way! I know it wasn't too long ago I did the last update, and most likely these updates won't be on a regular schedule. But since things are picking up and a few things have been organized since my last message, I want to make today the first update.
First things first, let's talk about completed and upcoming renders!

-- Render Progress --​

Completed
annihilape.gif
cyclizar.gif

It was a long time coming, but thankfully now I can happily say that Annihilape is on Showdown! I was hoping to have them live back when Reg H was still going on (was planning to have them go up along with Maushold, haha), but unfortunately Annihilape needed some adjustments that pushed them back a bit. I hope people enjoy though now that it's finally here.
Cyclizar is also now live! It took a bit of trial and error to get the lineart just right, DJ and I went back and forth on making the models lines just right so that they stay consistent during animation.
cyclizar-markingedges.png

(In order to make the lines stay consistent, we sometimes have to go into the model's mesh to mark certain lines as "sharp". This will tell the compositor to thicken the lines around those edges.)
(Initial Render)
cyclizar-back.gif
(Final Render)
cyclizar.gif

Flamigo was also just uploaded, handled by one of our new volunteers smokeyinferno !
flamigo.gif
I saw some of the renders Smokeyinferno was showcasing in the Smogon Dev Discord, and was very impressed at how much they were able to emulate the style just from DJ's old tutorials. I am very thankful for all their work so far, and want to highlight that here.

Upcoming

Next, I want to mention our other current volunteer, 0tneb ! They have been super eager and active with making renders. They picked up a lot of the workflow very quickly, and have a bunch of renders done that I am helping with finalizing. The Pawmi line, Fidough line, and Klawf are all being handled by them. I hope to have these all uploaded to you all soon, and thank you again 0tneb for all your help so far! You've been a great help and I am excited to get your work out to the community.
pawmi.gif
pawmo.gif
pawmot.gif
Klawf.gif

(Note that these are still being finalized, so some details might not be one-to-one with the final result!)​
Smokeyinferno also has some renders soon to be uploaded, including Hisuian Qwilfish (which was missing for over a year now, oops). Will be looking to get these live soon along with the Pawmi line this week!
qwilfish-hisui.gif
squawkabilly.gif
Since I cover a lot of QA, more of my render-making time now is focused on render review or optimizing. But I am still developing renders when I can. It'll need a few adjustments, especially for the eyes, but here's a preview from me for the Baxcalibur render I am working on!
baxcalibur.gif


Okay, onto the next topic, our first Pokemon Priority Poll!

-- Pokémon Priority Poll #1 --​


This is my first time creating a poll on Smogon, so hopefully if I do this correctly it should be active a little bit after I post this update. We're going to have three Pokémon for the poll: Kingambit, Garganacl, and Archaludon. All three of these Pokémon are a bit later in the to-do list for certain reasons (whether that's just their game ID being very down the list, or having some technical issues that are put to the side in favor of finishing other Pokémon), but they are also Pokémon I know are popular or have high usage for one reason or another (either from Smogon, VGC, or both). I will have this poll open until Friday midnight, EST. Whoever gets the most votes will be pushed up in priority and will be released ASAP!
I'll also be conducting a copy of this poll on Reddit in r/stunfisk (hopefully as soon as I understand how polls work). I will be editing this post later to include the link if you also want to vote there (or also just share the poll with friends that might have Reddit but don't have a Smogon account).

That should be it for now, next post will likely be the results of the poll.
 
Hey everyone! Been a while since I've said anything here.

As you can see, Thoth has helped take over a lot of what this project has been under doing my leadership over the last... many years. They've been involved directly contributing to renders you may have noticed slowly being implemented on showdown for the last year, and now they are at the point where I'm confident of letting them handle a lot of the heavy lifting for leading this project, and where I now no longer hold that responsibility.

It's also probably been pretty obvious that, especially before bringing in Thoth, things have been very, very slow. And, well, all I can say really is that life got busy. It's been like this for a while, too. Some of you may even remember that I formerly had an Artist Alumnus badge as a sign of me moving on before Gen 9 came out. And then, of course, in typical me fashion, I sort of jumped out of retirement once Gen 9 dropped to start building momentum of getting Gen 9 renders done. And while I was able to sustain that momentum for a little while, I had to slow down again, because I needed to manage my time with other priorities I have. And a lot of that came down to managing my burn-out. My job is in a similar field to this project. I do 3D Animation, Rigging, and other generalist game development stuff as a job, mostly revolving around Blender. And this project also does a lot of those kinds of things too, also in Blender, though in different ways. It's become exceedingly important for me to make sure I don't burn myself out, because if I burn myself out working on this project, the quality of my work for my actual job goes down a ton too since the type of work is generally in the same field to the point my brain thinks of them as the same. And ultimately, for obvious reasons, I had to start dramatically reducing how much time I dedicate towards volunteer projects that involve this type of work.



Going back to the OP post for this thread, you'll see the initial post date was at the start of 2015. So just over ten years now this thread has been around. I was in my last year of High School during that time. And I made this thread originally just to make renders for existing Pokemon with custom or altered battle animations, just for fun. It was just something I was trying out at the time, since I was getting into Showdown during the X/Y/OR/AS era, this was also around the time my interest in taking 3D animation seriously was getting started. I didn't really have any long term ambitions with this project initially, but then it started getting a lot of attention not long after I started the thread. People really seemed to like the idea of doing custom animations for some Pokemon, and keeping their X/Y shading style.

So I kept going... for a bit. I eventually stopped as my interests starts shifting elsewhere for some years. This thread at this point was just something for fun, after all. Even though I was taking some requests, I didn't necessarily feel like I had any obligations I had to take. While some of my renders were being implemented even back then (most notable ones being Typhlosion, Gardevoir, and M-Absol), they weren't something expected from me. I just did it because I thought it'd be cool.

Quite some time passed with no activity here. In that gap I had spent a brief amount of time being involved in the CAP 3D rendering stuff for Smogon's Create-A-Pokemon project. But here at least, not much was going on. That was until Gen 8 came around. Everyone knows of the Dex-it controversy, of course. And before the game came out, I was inspecting the models from screenshots from pre-release Gen 8 footage to see any signs of the models changing at all, which according to some translated statements from someone in GameFreak's leadership seemed to indicate that the Dex-it was happening because models were getting changed. There was some debate of this translation was properly conveying what the original Japanese statement was trying to say. But ultimately to most people, it was assumed they meant that they re-did all the Pokemon models when transitioning to Pokemon games being in HD on the Switch. However, I saw many, many signs that all Pokemon that existed in prior games appeared to share the same exact models, just through observing screenshots and spotting verticies that were placed the same, model deformation oddities that appeared the same, and posing and animations that appeared the same. This eventually led to me, once the games came out and extraction tools were made, to extract the models from the game and compare them to how they were in previous games, which proved that the overwhelming majority of returning Pokemon shared the same exact models, just with higher resolutions textures and such.

I bring this up because, this path to investigating Dex-it also eventually led me to coming back to doing renders again. I was already extracting models from the new game. And I was also keenly aware that with the new games being on Switch would mean that the visual style of the game, how things were renderred differed a lot with how the 3DS games looked, which would then mean that Gen 8 screen captures of the new Pokemon would differ extremely with how the 3DS screen captures that Showdown has been using for Gen 6 and 7. Plus they would be a lot harder to optimize as GIFs since the shading style was less flat, and outlines were nowhere near as prominent, meaning details would not show as well with the lower GIF resolutions required to work with how Showdown currently presents the Pokemon sprites/renders in battle. There was a problem here, and I also knew that I had the skillset to help solve it, and get back the consistent look that worked during the 3DS era. So, I re-booted this thread and repurposed it to render out the new Pokemon from the new game into the 3DS shading style that matched how all previous Pokemon looked like from the 3DS era. The Gen 8 rendering project got pretty far, but I didn't quite make it to the end. There are still some Gen 8 Pokemon that you'll notice stick out quite a bit. This is something Thoth will be revisiting later once Gen 9 is taken care of.

And now in the Gen 9 era, history sort of repeated itself again. I came back immediately as the new gen came out, made some renders for a while, then dissappear for reasons I've mentioned earlier. I didn't really like how I couldn't really see these to the finish, so I eventually asked in this thread if anyone was interested in helping out so that it was just my sole responsibility to get these all done. And, well, we're here now with Thoth helping take over a lot of my responsibilites. With that said, I'm still going to be around, I'm still giving input for QA for the renders when I can, and also knowing myself, I'll probably be back in full force for a little bit once Gen 10 (Or Pokemon ZA perhaps..? Depending on how many new Pokemon/Forms there are I suppose.) comes out to kickstart the momentum for the renders (as well as helping problem solve new potential issues that could come up with any new Gen for dealing with extracting 3D assets and their animations and such), and then eventually stopping to get back on track with life priorities. But at least I'm not the sole responsibility anymore.



I appreciate those of you who have been patient with this project. There's a lot more than it seems that goes into a project like this. You can't exactly drag and drop each Pokemon from a raw export and render them out, there's a lot of manual work that goes into making sure the Pokemon appears consistent with what is expected from the 3DS rendering style. It's sort of an artform in of itself to do this. And there's a lot of problem solving that goes into this since working with raw exported model and animation data has led to issues that can be very tricky to solve that require very unintuitive solutions that are hard to find out unless you already have a LOT of experience working with raw extracted game assets in 3D software. And I appreciate how much dedication Thoth has given to learning the workflows for this project for the past year, and I trust them to carry out this project for years to come!
 
Last edited:
OnSecondThoth said:

March 24th, 2025 Update​


Heyo, first of hopefully more updates along the way! I know it wasn't too long ago I did the last update, and most likely these updates won't be on a regular schedule. But since things are picking up and a few things have been organized since my last message, I want to make today the first update.
First things first, let's talk about completed and upcoming renders!

-- Render Progress --​

Completed
annihilape.gif
cyclizar.gif

It was a long time coming, but thankfully now I can happily say that Annihilape is on Showdown! I was hoping to have them live back when Reg H was still going on (was planning to have them go up along with Maushold, haha), but unfortunately Annihilape needed some adjustments that pushed them back a bit. I hope people enjoy though now that it's finally here.
Cyclizar is also now live! It took a bit of trial and error to get the lineart just right, DJ and I went back and forth on making the models lines just right so that they stay consistent during animation.
View attachment 725304
(In order to make the lines stay consistent, we sometimes have to go into the model's mesh to mark certain lines as "sharp". This will tell the compositor to thicken the lines around those edges.)
(Initial Render)View attachment 725305 (Final Render)
cyclizar.gif

Flamigo was also just uploaded, handled by one of our new volunteers smokeyinferno !
flamigo.gif
I saw some of the renders Smokeyinferno was showcasing in the Smogon Dev Discord, and was very impressed at how much they were able to emulate the style just from DJ's old tutorials. I am very thankful for all their work so far, and want to highlight that here.

Upcoming

Next, I want to mention our other current volunteer, 0tneb ! They have been super eager and active with making renders. They picked up a lot of the workflow very quickly, and have a bunch of renders done that I am helping with finalizing. The Pawmi line, Fidough line, and Klawf are all being handled by them. I hope to have these all uploaded to you all soon, and thank you again 0tneb for all your help so far! You've been a great help and I am excited to get your work out to the community.
View attachment 725311View attachment 725309View attachment 725310 View attachment 725313
(Note that these are still being finalized, so some details might not be one-to-one with the final result!)​
Smokeyinferno also has some renders soon to be uploaded, including Hisuian Qwilfish (which was missing for over a year now, oops). Will be looking to get these live soon along with the Pawmi line this week!
Since I cover a lot of QA, more of my render-making time now is focused on render review or optimizing. But I am still developing renders when I can. It'll need a few adjustments, especially for the eyes, but here's a preview from me for the Baxcalibur render I am working on!


Okay, onto the next topic, our first Pokemon Priority Poll!

-- Pokémon Priority Poll #1 --​


This is my first time creating a poll on Smogon, so hopefully if I do this correctly it should be active a little bit after I post this update. We're going to have three Pokémon for the poll: Kingambit, Garganacl, and Archaludon. All three of these Pokémon are a bit later in the to-do list for certain reasons (whether that's just their game ID being very down the list, or having some technical issues that are put to the side in favor of finishing other Pokémon), but they are also Pokémon I know are popular or have high usage for one reason or another (either from Smogon, VGC, or both). I will have this poll open until Friday midnight, EST. Whoever gets the most votes will be pushed up in priority and will be released ASAP!
I'll also be conducting a copy of this poll on Reddit in r/stunfisk (hopefully as soon as I understand how polls work). I will be editing this post later to include the link if you also want to vote there (or also just share the poll with friends that might have Reddit but don't have a Smogon account).

That should be it for now, next post will likely be the results of the poll.
Click to expand...
They are looking amazing so far
 
Apologies for the radio silence from my end for a while, April was a rough month for me.
But good news, Kingambit is finally live on Showdown, along with another Pokemon line snaking about the UU ladder. Will post a proper update in the coming weeks when I regain some spare time, but for now wanted to at least give this message.
kingambit.gif
 
OnSecondThoth said:
Apologies for the radio silence from my end for a while, April was a rough month for me.
But good news, Kingambit is finally live on Showdown, along with another Pokemon line snaking about the UU ladder. Will post a proper update in the coming weeks when I regain some spare time, but for now wanted to at least give this message.
kingambit.gif
Click to expand...
I love the look of these, the metallic texture looks so good on there, I hope to see a certain dragon and loaf of bread soon

1f.gif
 

June 11th, 2025 Update​


Hello everyone, my sincerest apologies for the delay in written updates. Things outside of Showdown have unfortunately been a bit hectic, so my pace has been a bit behind what I would have liked for render completion. However, we're regaining ground and have a few developments within the team, so I wanted to at least write a small update this time to still keep communication going, and also get the next priority poll rolling as we're nearing the end of all the non Legendary/Paradox Pokémon in the game!

-- Render Progress --​

Completed

This time around we have a good amount of renders dropping. Would like to have more in-depth details regarding some of the work that went into making these renders, since a few were quite interesting, however Smogon seems to be giving me difficulties uploading my own GIFs and images not sourced from URLs. So no behind the scenes images this time unfortunately. For now then I'll keep details summarized.
hydrapple.gif
kingambit.gif

Previous Update
bramblin.gif
brambleghast.gif
wattrel.gif
kilowattrel.gif
shroodle.gif
grafaiai.gif
toedscool.gif
toedscruel.gif
klawf.gif

New!​


Priority Winner #1: Kingambit
kingambit.gif

The first poll winner was the Supreme Overlord themselves, Kingambit. This truthfully was a daunting one to complete, Gambit is a Pokémon design that was not meant for smaller screens like Showdown or the 3DS with its mesh the way it is. In order to make them as clean as possible for this style, we needed to do a mixture of texture editing as well as mesh editing. The red circles on their vest plus the gray chevrons on the knees were given a thicker outline in the textures to make sure they still pop from such a small scale. The ribs were also thickened to prevent the outlines from completely washing them out, as they were way too thin to actually look coherent in the 3DS style.
I covered all the initial set up and camera positioning, plus the texture edits. DJTHED helped with the mesh editing, plus did a lot of nice extra compositing work for the metal to help it match with Bisharp and just really make them pop. I honestly am really happy with how this one turned out, and I hope it's the same for the players.

New Renders
Since my last update post, a ton of renders have thankfully been completed. I would not have been able to do so without all the help from the new contributors.

dipplin.gif
hydrapple.gif
toedscool.gif
toedscruel.gif
bramblin.gif
brambleghast.gif
shroodle.gif
grafaiai.gif

smokeyinferno went on an absolute roll and knocked out a bunch of renders while I was caught up in other tasks. The Dipplin line, Toedscool line, Bramblin line, and Shroodle line were all covered by them. I covered what I could to assist with QA, but they really took the lead on these renders with even the more technical nuisances that can be a pain. Toedscruel alone was quite cumbersome, as it required some IK to stabilize the limbs, slight animation adjustments so that the arm limb wasn't covering its face, outlining the eyes to help ensure they didn't blend into the shadows, and more. There's a lot of details I could note, but without being able to show before and after shots it loses a bit of clarity. Hopefully I can do an edit to this post later, but I will at least mention that Grafaiai's expression was also set to its "squinting" expression in its texture set. This is the expression it has in its HOME idle and in its key art, but curiously, is not actually done for it's SV animation idle! I did really like the choice from smokeyinferno to include it anyway, and I'm glad they did.
0945Grafaiai.png
1107.gif

Grafaiai tends to squint in its idle pose, but does not in battle in SV. Strangely, this doesn't seem to apply for Pokémon HOME.​

wattrel.gif
kilowattrel.gif
klawf.gif

As for me, I covered the Wattrel line, plus finished up the optimizing for Klawf that 0tneb had started last update.

Upcoming


baxcalibur-gif.725317
Baxcalibur and the rest of its line is also nearly complete, I've honestly just been very back and forth on whether there's some visual improvements I can still give to it, or if I should just optimize it as it is now. I want to be sure it looks as good as it can be before it hits servers, but it has been lying around in my To-Do list for way too long at this point. I'll aim to get them done before I pick up any new guys, so I apologize for the hold up on the big axe boy.
I also have a few other renders from smokeyinferno to review, which includes the Poltchageist line, so I should be ready to have those uploaded soon.

Important note, we also have a few new volunteers! Will give their proper introduction next update once their renders are live, but I hope players will look forward to a few new Pokémon lines on the horizon.

-- Pokémon Priority Poll #2 --​


Kingambit was our winner last time, so Garganacl and Archaludon are placed back into the poll. For the third slot this time, I'll be throwing Glimmora in there as well. Just as a reminder, all three of these Pokémon will be done at some point regardless, this is just to see what players would like to see sooner rather than later in priority! All of these have also been started in some capacity, but have one or two extra details that cause them to be trickier to complete (Garganacl has some annoying outline issues due to its geometry and has some emissive properties to include, Archaludon has some wonky animation keys to manually fix with scale edits and/or IK, and Glimmora also has some emissive properties with the eyes).

This will likely be the last priority poll for a bit, since we'll be nearly done with the base Pokémon. However, I have another type of poll planned for a particular Pokémon once we finish the rest on our To-Do list. I hope everyone will enjoy the new renders as we continue our best efforts to finish them all up.
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/wAg3QzNEMy8

This is all for now, will hope to have the next update in reasonable time.
 
First off, fantastic work from you and the others regarding the new 3D models! I've seen the Kingambit and Hydrapple models used in OU a few times, but knowing that one of my favorite Pokemon from this generation, that being Kilowattrel, now also had a 3D model for Showdown is incredible, and kudos to you all for that!

With that said, I genuinely do believe that you have nothing to apologize for. You aren't being paid to do this, you and the others are taking precious time out of your day to do something for a niche audience on the internet. Do not apologize for not putting it out at a reasonable time or rarely posting updated, everyone on here knows that you and the others are doing god's work and we all can wait for updates. So please, stop apologizing for doing nothing wrong. I look forward to whatever gets models next, personally I'm looking forward to Baxcalibur and Sinistcha and I do hope that Garganacl wins the poll this time around.

Genuinely though, fantastic job and I hope you keep up the great work. Just don't beat yourself up over not getting it done sooner, take as much time as needed :)))
 
DAMN these new 3D models are sick as hell! I'd like to make a suggestion if gholdengo isn't already being worked on. In ghold's sprite it's surfing, so I was wondering if that could be reflected in the 3D model too. Maybe it could look something like this?
 

Attachments

  • Gholdengo (1).gif
    Gholdengo (1).gif
    2.5 MB · Views: 11
allegroMJ said:
DAMN these new 3D models are sick as hell! I'd like to make a suggestion if gholdengo isn't already being worked on. In ghold's sprite it's surfing, so I was wondering if that could be reflected in the 3D model too. Maybe it could look something like this?
Click to expand...
It seems like the idle battle animation (the animation used for the renders) doesn't have it surfing, unlikely unless there was a good idle animation of it surfing somewhere.
The example you provided seems very active compared to something like :sv/Aggron: or :sv/Lokix:

1749918027925.png
 
allegroMJ said:
In ghold's sprite it's surfing, so I was wondering if that could be reflected in the 3D model too.
Click to expand...
that is the plan!
Runo said:
The example you provided seems very active compared to something like :sv/Aggron: or :sv/Lokix:
Click to expand...
I think the example provided is just overactive bcz it isn't a battle idle -- gholdengo has a surfing battle idle (used when fighting on water) more in line with the rest of the prerendered battle sprites
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top