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!
