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Monday, March 30, 2026
Rift to Skylands turns 3!
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Archiving Clutch: Part 3 | The Finale.
It's finally here... It happened.
My copy of Clutch has now been fully archived and scanned!
That took way too long... But it was very, VERY worth it in the end to have the art book fully public! Of course I would also like to credit the archivist I worked with, Joey Wawzonek/Detchibe! Do be aware that they post 18+ material occasionally, this is just a mandatory disclaimer since it is all a part of archivial work.
... It's not required, but if you do use the scanned material in anything it would be really awesome if I would be credited as Aquaileron, due to the amount of work I had put into getting this book out there for everyone (this is a 3 part post series!) thank you in advance.
I'm looking at you, Skylanders Fandom wiki.
Everyone reading this post (Hello to approximately like 3 people I love you all) can finally go check it out here!:
No more missing pages, blurry text, or cut off photos! I sound like a salesman trying to pitch something like this, lol.
Thank you to all readers once again! Happy new year, First post of 2026!
Saturday, August 2, 2025
Archiving Clutch: Part 2
Hey so it's been a moment right? I've been reaching out to quite a few more book companies, same loop as last time, I either get ghosted or have to politely decline absurd prices. So the lowest I've managed to find someone willing to scan my books for is about $465, which isn't too bad, and it's leagues better than the $5,000 price I was given my another archival company.
So I'm sure no one is asking, but I'll give it anyways, here's all the prices I've been hit with! (In $USD)
$3,000, $5,000 by one company stating that their order minimum was that absurdly high, $600 (leagues more affordable than a lot of the others), and again, $465 which is the best offer I've been given so far.
So this cuts me down just a little over $100 from the previous best price I was given, does that mean it'll be archived soon? Unfortunately not since my job currently pays me in pocket lint, and I have to save up for college and college supplies regardless. Before anyone brings up my Youtooz post, I had specifically set aside those funds since the September leak so that doesn't count B)
I've also tried reaching out to friends and friends of friends to see if anyone I may be very loosely connected to has a book scanner and would be willing to get it archived. I have a sneaking suspicion that book scanning is only supposed to be this expensive for large scale projects, but for some reason I must be looking in the wrong places.
So this whole journey has been a bit of a nightmare for me! I'm not giving up on releasing this book (yet) despite the fact it's been a month now of scrambling to get this out there to no avail. Maybe a few more book scanning and document archival firms later, we'll finally see a light at the end of this miserably long tunnel. And for now enjoy this photo of my kitten that I accidentally sent one of the firms when they asked for photos of the book:
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Archiving Clutch: Part 1
As my friends and Skylanders modding community know, a month back, I came into possession of an authentic copy of Clutch, the Skylanders Superchargers developer art book. And ever since then I've been on a bit of a wild goose chase just trying to find an affordable way to scan this thing.
Now let's start back at the first point, me coming into possession of the book. For anyone reading this that doesn't know the significance of Clutch, this book was only ever given out to developers who had worked on the Skylanders games. Which means this book was never available for retail sale anywhere, making this one of the most highly coveted pieces of Skylanders media ever. And as the self-proclaimed #1 Skylanders fan, I found a way.
Some people might already know about the already existing archive but once you look at it, the photos are blurry, incomplete, ordered incorrectly, and some pages are missing as a whole. In total the book has 310 pages while the archive only has 287, which include photos of the special sleeve it's included in.
So my goal over these past two months off and on, has been trying to find a suitable way to get this book scanned, full pages and full color, once and for all so the art can be archived forever, and other fans can finally have a good look at the contents. Sounds easy enough!
It's not. It's really not.
Over the time I have been spending looking into the digitization of this book, I've contacted a few book scanning companies, and each time they either flat-out ignore me (that can't be good for business...) or I end up getting smacked in the face with absurd prices.
That costs much more than I paid for the book, mind you!
So far I've been Sierra Oscar Lima... (That's pilot speak for shit outta luck.)
In the meanwhile, I can't even truly afford a large-scale digitization project due to the fact that I'm trying to save up for college, and my paycheck doesn't really cover much. So now what? There's a second method I could go for, destructive scanning. It's a lot cheaper and hell, I could even do it at home for free, but I am adamant on not destroying such a rare book at the moment, and I would hate to see the spine ripped out.
I'm intent on releasing everything in this book to the public, but at this rate, it's going to take a while. I've been racking up small amounts of money from art commissions but it's not really enough to cover anything. I flat refuse to pay $650(USD) to scan a book that didn't cost nearly that much, but if push comes to shove and in a few years time I can't find any other solution, I might just have to bite the bullet.
It's a bit rough putting in the effort to preserve this book properly. Right now I'm taking the full cost of the project. The book, the time spent researching these scanning companies, and probably the scanning cost too. I've been wondering time and time again if it's even going to be worth it, I am not receiving anything in return, which I don't care too much about really, but when it comes to the fact that I'm shouldering huge costs and sacrificing time to release a single book, it's a bit disheartening.
Still, at the time of writing this post, I'm sure I won't give up just yet. I've been reaching out to a few more book scanning services, document firms, and the like. Maybe I can get Clutch into the clutches of the Skylanders community, but unfortunately, that won't be anytime soon.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Endless Model Ripping Shenanagins
Now as you may know from some old posts, I really love ripping 3D models from games, well...
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...
After I worked on a few other projects I came back to Skylanders Imaginators back in December.
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.
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
- /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
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
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)
Friday, June 20, 2025
The Return of my Skytubing
I'm real bad at motivating myself to finish the projects I deliberately start.
Also, this video is a speedpaint! So I figured I'd post the drawing here too!
I wonder if anyone from any future Youtube videos I'll make will see my blog, that would be nice, it feels like talking to a brick wall in here.
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
The Big Haul
I've graduated college, and am hoping I get hired at my local convenience store this summer for some extra cash, but guess what! We're so back on this blog and I'm finally gonna be posting my hauls again!
So now it's just a matter of what's on the menu since my last Halloween post...
And in order from right to left! We have:
- Thrillipede (Yes, the GREEN one)
- NIB Riptide
- Soda Skimmer
- Buzz Wing
- NIB Nitro Soda Skimmer
- Series 1 Flameslinger
- Series 2 Zook
- Nightmare Express
- Series 1 Wrecking Ball
- Series 2 Chop Chop
- Wallop
- Skylanders Swap Force 3Ds
- Sea Shadow
- NIB Riot Shield Shredder Life Trap
I've already rearranged all of my new figures in their proper shelves (at the time of this post I had done it last night, two hours after opening my packages). I've been meaning to do a new collection tour post eventually, since I've rearranged a lot of my stuff and have some new bits of merch to show off too!
With that all being added to my shelves, all I need to finish up my SSA collection are S1 Wham-Shell and S1 Hex! For Superchargers I need Bone Bash Roller Brawl, Double Dare Trigger happy, and the Gold Rusher. I have the Crypt Crusher but it's NIB so I've been thinking to buy a duplicate for display purposes, which is what I did with the Sea Shadow in the photo.
(Psst, they call it the Sea Shadow because it's literally barely visible in my photo...)
And my Youtube channel? Any updates there? Uhh... I'm just a little bit lazy...
Saturday, May 31, 2025
Where I have been?
Wow I haven't uploaded at all for over half a year... This seems like one of my usual hiatuses but this time I have some other things I want to talk about. Yes this is a wee off topic from the main Skylanders stuff but this is my blog and I can talk about what I want eheh.
Today, the day I'm posting this, is the day I graduate from high school.
But I really can't believe it, I started this blog back in my freshman year of high school. It honestly sounds a bit crazy to me. It's so odd to think I'm an adult now. It's pretty obvious that there's a bit of a mental maturity gap with me, since I so vehemently refuse to ever let go of Skylanders.
I've had a lot happen in the time I haven't post. While I'm adjusting to the sudden change dropped on me, I have been hard at work on lots of Skylanders projects. I've been working on several fangames, alongside working on the Quicksilver Vault Skylanders Wiki. I've still been collecting figures slowly. I have also started up my new Youtube channel since my old one had to be deleted, I don't want to go into details with that one.
Sunday, September 8, 2024
I'm back! And so is Toys for Bob!
Wow look at that! September already? Well I'm back in school again (For my last year too!) and with that Toys for Bob's site is finally back up! Well what did they do exactly? It's really just a site revamp...
Monday, July 15, 2024
It feels like christmas morning!
Friday, July 12, 2024
Sunday, July 7, 2024
My Skylanders Spending Woes
So whenever I get money, it also comes with a hard choice, to either save my money for potentially infinitely more useful items in the future, or buy more useless Skylanders merchandise. Of course, though the decision was hard (it wasn't) I have come to the conclusion that I need more useless Skylanders merchandise. So why not make a makeshift funny little merch review? Alongside this I suppose I should make a new tag...
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Skylanders... In the sky?!
Whoops I forgot to post here in a bit didn't I? Good news is that I have a few posts in the backlog I need to finish and I have a lot more to talk about, also I've been working on some videos in the very very back... But I have been considering a career in aviation, today I got to fly a plane, a real plane! (As a co-pilot I must note.) I took Boom Jet with me actually, and I took quite a few photos!
Of course, I still want to pursue my career in game development, but I hope that I can be a pilot someday. And become the best pilot in all of Skylands... Boom!
Monday, June 10, 2024
Friday, June 7, 2024
Further art shenanagins and freedom from school!
What, the last day of my Junior year? Next year I graduate...
What better way to commemorate than to post a few MS Paint doodles that I made with my mouse since I was too lazy to take out my drawing tablet?
Featuring my designs and takes on random Skylanders!
Tuesday, May 21, 2024
My doodles
I have a lot of random Skylanders doodles laying around my room and in my notebooks, so why not upload some here?
Monday, May 13, 2024
A followup birthday post???
So a package arrived late for my birthday, lo and behold, the Power Blue Splatter Splasher! Still with its box too! (Ignore the staples... it came like that)
As for the Scarlet Ninjini, I managed to snatch that up on my own thanks to some wild circumstances.
So our school held its annual art show in April, and a kid that I faintly knew was interested in buying some art from me, and I knew this kid had Skylanders before due to a conversation I somehow remembered from many months prior. So I instantly, instead of taking money, I asked for a Skylander, and bam, I give him my art and a few days later I come home with another Skylander in my collection!
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Skylanders Superchargers and how the models work
To all the potential tech and 3D model nerds scrolling my page, or if you've stumbled upon my Skylanders rips online, (which haven't been approved to The Models Resource yet at the time of writing this) I've decided to make a post explaining Skylanders Superchargers models and how to properly set up the nodes in Blender! This probably works for the models from other games but I haven't gotten around to ripping those apart yet.
And the Shading tab in the top of the screen is where most of our work will be carried out.
Now for the normals which are the most important texture, even if you don't want the other textures, I would recommend adding the normal map. Skylanders has a strange problem with normals where the red channel is inverted, but luckily Blender can fix it no problem with one extra step! To fix the normals add a RGB Color Curve node and plug in the normal, flip the red channel in a straight line.












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