Endless Model Ripping Shenanagins

Now as you may know from some old posts, I really love ripping 3D models from games, well...

Here we are.

Grave Clobber is the first Skylanders Imaginators model ripped, uploaded June 20, 2024

Doom Stone is the last Skylanders Imaginators model ripped, uploaded May 7 2025

Yeah you read that right, a 10 month timeframe just to rip every Skylander. In all fairness when I did my first Skylanders batch it was small and I quit for a few months to work on other games...

(Said 'other games'. Neopets: The Darkest Faerie, and Prey the Stars)

After I worked on a few other projects I came back to Skylanders Imaginators back in December.

Chop Chop, uploaded December 13 2024

To be honest when uploading the Skylanders I did it in a completely random order, just uploading whichever ones I wanted. Though all the swappers I did last (except for Free Ranger) because they're such a pain to work with. They keep their parts in separate files.. 

Ex: Free Ranger is stored as

• legs_stormbird
• body_stormbird

Which is annoying to deal with. It means I have to extract two separate files, run them through my scripts, stitch them together in one folder... You get the point.

Two files, two sets of textures to extract too, which is such a huge pain since I have to do a lot of the texture stuff manually, which honestly I think was the longest part of my model ripping process. Though I feel like the singlehandedly worst model I've ever had to deal with in my life was Fake Crash.

Fake Crash, uploaded December 16 2024

He had... An absurd amount of textures. It still haunts me... In total, his final .zip file (before the split I'll talk about later) contained 34 textures.

There was also one, teeny tiny roadblock that came up during model ripping. And by "teeny tiny" I mean this took me several weeks to fix. You see, The Models Resource primarily accepts .DAE models. The problem with this, is that I didn't know that Blender didn't automatically make paths relative. For those reading this that don't know what a relative path is, basically when you open up a model, you want all of your textures to be applied to it already, right?

What you're supposed to have in the file would be:

• Texture.png

But what Blender thought would be funny to do, with no way to automatically do this whatsoever, would be to have all of my textures be stored like this:

• /D:/MySkylandersFolder/I have a ton of folders here lol/more text to illustrate how bad I am at organizing folders/ColorMap,textures@!actors!Skylanders!Character_C`tga,111out.png

Which. I feel like shaved years off of my life actually. The ONLY way I could fix this, would be to manually open the .DAE in a notepad editor, find the texture path, and correct it by deleting all of the folder names at the start. Oh, and by the way, that also didn't fully work. Because of all the absurd characters in Skylanders texture names. I would have to take ColorMap,textures@!actors!Skylanders!character_C`tga,111out.png and shorten it down to character_C.png which also couldn't be automated in any way, so I had to go through about 60 finished rips at the time, and manually change, every. single. texture name. And I had to go through every single model, every prop, every weapon, every effect, and manually change the texture name in the files there too.

Also, from that point on, I had to make renaming every texture a habit while ripping models.

And I did this, with every single model. Not to mention, textures wouldn't be automatically applied to each model either! I had to manually look at, and apply the appropriate textures to every single model I ripped. Ripping one Skylander would take be about 20 to 30 minutes. Multiply this by 181 and you get...

Well, I averaged it to about 25 minutes per model, and that brings us to 4,525 minutes, or in better terms, about 76 hours of my life was spent in total working on Skylanders models alone. Not including me fixing the texture paths, and not including the split.

I wish I could tell you I stopped there, I really wish I could. But at this point, this has gotten personal, this game hates me. Imaginators truly hates me and I hate Imaginators. This was a war.

"Frog Man" rip, uploaded May 8 2025

That's right, I couldn't stop at just ripping every Skylander, could I? No, this was a war I couldn't win, but I scrambled anyways, I fought till my last breath, and what did I get from it?

Nothing, actually. It's not like The Models Resource gives you anything for uploading models. This was all technically pointless. But honestly I did it cause I wanted to. Cause who's gonna stop me? Activision?

Legal disclaimer if you are Activision please do not DMCA me, this is not an invitation and for all intensive purposes, is a joke.

Well. While writing this post I ran into a... mild issue. It turns out I needed to split the composite maps into multiple textures. Which I was never told about beforehand, and had never been an issue in the past. I will now probably have to spend a month of work again just to rezip. Every. Single. Model.

...Again.

After a while of arguing talking with the staff, they eventually allowed me a compromise that I still have to split all the composites, but I'm allowed to keep the original files in-tact.

As of the time of writing this post, Grave Clobber and Flarewolf are already available for use! Since they were the very first two I worked on.

So if you ever wanted to mess around with Skylanders models... Well they're there now, go nuts. Make my effort worth it. Go forth and make cool junk B)