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Showing posts with label Casual. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Casual. Show all posts

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:

This is Francis. Say hello to Francis.

And that's all I have in terms of updates on this book for now! Let's hope we see some good news soon...


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.

All prices shown are in USD

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...

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)

Friday, June 20, 2025

The Return of my Skytubing

 I'm real bad at motivating myself to finish the projects I deliberately start.



I finally finished a new video, and I realized I haven't shared my new channel here yet, so now would be an opportune time. Well, really I finished my video last night but it was already past 11pm by the time the thing rendered and I could post it. So I put off making a blog post to the next day, even though I constantly have the urge to stay up every night until I get to the point that I can hear birds singing out my window.

Also, this video is a speedpaint! So I figured I'd post the drawing here too!


I actually drew this way earlier in the year, I think maybe around January actually? But I recorded a speedpaint of the whole thing, and while doing a video entirely consisting of me doing improv as I read book reviews, I wanted interesting background footage that wasn't just Skylanders gameplay. I think the speedpaint worked quite well! I wonder if it keeps people watching to see the end result 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

That's a lot! How did I get the money for this anyways despite not having a job yet? Eheh... Don't worry about that.

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.

A lot has happened since I last posted, a lot in my life has changed, and I'm still trying to work out what I'm doing with my whole... existence? It's been wildly stressful, and since I'll be in college I'll probably have less time to post as a whole. I have a laptop now, so maybe I could post a bit more frequently as I move around?

And if you're wondering, from my first ever post, I still do not have the land trophy. It forever eludes my grasp...

Forever grateful for those who read my posts, thank you for being here with me!

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...


And- wait what's that... A new game coming up? Waiting with bated breath to see what they do end up revealing... No matter what it is I'll most likely be happy and probably be first in line to buy it, love you guys Toys for Bob! Unless it's COD since I don't play games like that too often...


Toys for Bob is also celebrating Spyro Community Day! The image of Astrobot with Spyro makes me really happy, hehe... Happy Spyro Day to everyone reading this post too!






Monday, July 15, 2024

It feels like christmas morning!

Wow, it's sure been a while since my last haul post huh? I've been occasionally acquiring more Skylanders for a few months but nothing I've deemed enough to post about so far, until yesterday at least...

So here's a post compiling a while of a few more Skylanders!


The earliest one here is the Red Drill Sergeant who I got at a yard sale I think in May? I call him Fruit Gummy Drill Sergeant instead of Red since red it is a bit boring. Speaking of fruit gummies I miss the old Skylanders fruit gummies...

Next is the group of Swap Force characters on the right, purchased off of ebay with some money I got from an online survey. Night Shift, Free Ranger, Legendary Zoo Lou, and the Tower of Time. Now I can 100% Swap Force too! I was missing a spin swapper for the longest time. And the Tower of Time too.

Next is the case on the left which I actually got for free yesterday! It came with Pain-Yatta, Grave Clobber (one of my favorites!), and Dr Krankcase! There's more figures in the case + a Golden Queen that were duplicates of Skylanders that I already owned. A few more new ones I got from the case (not pictured) were Kickoff Countdown, Star Strike (I only had her lightcore), and S3 Trigger Happy, which I actually did own already but boxed, so it's nice to have a duplicate that I can display.


And with that, I have the new case up on my wall, now in charge of the important task of holding duplicates that I will probably paint or sell, or hopefully even trade-off. And now I have a quickshot sensei too! I've actually been replaying Imaginators and Swap Force, hoping to get that sweet sweet 100%, I only need the physical level packs for Imaginators and I'll be on my way! (Oh yeah, and a dark sensei...)

Friday, July 12, 2024

Whoops haven't uploaded these her but guess who's finally making Skylanders content on youtube? Hehe...


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...


I ordered A Spyro clock since my parents kept mentioning how I needed an alarm for the mornings. I managed to set it up properly and it works pretty well, I wish that the alarm sound was customizable or even Skylanders themed in some way, but it's a normal-sounding beeping that will gradually get faster until you wake up. The portal can glow and change colors, it turns off automatically after a few minutes. It took me a while to figure out but the alarm switch is on the back as a tiny little on/off-switch.

To everyone looking into this, there's a number on the bottom, ( Target 074100466F16973608-12/13 )


A small Skylanders keychain that I got, I think it's a flashlight of some sort since there's a little clear plastic piece with a tiny LED inside of it. But it uses these strange little circular batteries that I don't have and don't actually know what they are? But I carry it around now since the little portal can click in, similar to the 3Ds portals, though it is much much smaller than any 3Ds portal. Occasionally when I click it, sometimes it glows a faint blue for a moment, probably from the batteries left in by the previous owner.


A 3Ds case and stylus! (The case is more visible in the next photo) I like my 3Ds a lot, and I play Skylanders on it super frequently, and since I lost my previous stylus I decided that I could get a funny little Skylanders stylus to go with the case I ordered. There are multiple different 3Ds styluses actually, all with a little Skylander on top, from my memory there's also a Spyro and Terrafin stylus. The little Skylander on top bobbles around on a (pretty flimsy) spring, very cute. If only mine didn't break after two weeks... Now I have a normal stylus with Skylanders text plastered onto it and a super tiny Gill Grunt.


And here's a bit of a look at all of these things together, The Spyro clock has actually been waking me up consistently for a few days now. And again the Stylus is a bit flimsy, and the Gill Grunt snapped off... But that's okay since he fits beautifully on the tiny portal keychain at least. I also actually already owned a 3Ds case, one with spaces for game chips and accessories and everything, but this new one is also nice for simple carryability and getting bullied, 8/10 overall. Still a bit sad about Gill Grunt snapping off.

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!


On the ground

In the sky for real!

All the funky control panels

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!

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!

ScorpHoot LoopWrecking BallWash BucklerWildfireDinorangFiestaPop Thorn

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?

Messing around with a tiny bit of perspective on my design of Trigger Happy

Yes. I have a Skylanders self insert, what else would you expect from a rabid Skylanders fan? I would like to expand on my character some more someday. Most likely in some sort of insert fanfiction... I may be cringe, but at least whatever I'm doing makes me happy.

More perspective practice on Dive-Clops

Hugo running from my poor attempt at drawing a sheep

Dive-Clops Flarewolf
TerrafinCountdown
These are smaller doodles from my school notes, these are all drawn from memory since I can't use my phone in class.


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.

Blender Render of Lava Lance Eruptor with a basic lighting setup

For this particular instance I'm going to be using the WiiU models that I ripped. And I'm going to be using Eruptor since he is a good instance for having all of the textures I need to cover.

First thing's first, import the DAE of the Skylander you're using (yes, this tutorial is for beginners too) and you might have a fully textured model already. If it doesn't have textures already hooked up then... oops. First thing might look nice already but it doesn't have any of the extras plugged in, you're going to have to do that yourself.

No extra textures plugged in yet...

And the Shading tab in the top of the screen is where most of our work will be carried out.


As you can see, those blocks below are nodes, and that large green one is where everything will be plugged into. Add more image texture blocks and find the textures that correspond to your part.

These are the textures we are using, in reading order we have the Color, Composite, Normal, and Emissive maps

Just plugging these in directly won't do much, a lot of these have prior setup required. Let's start off with the composite since there isn't too much difference from adding it unless it's a metallic prop.
Add a Separate Color node and connect the composite, and plug the green channel to specular and the blue channel to metallic. One of the more simple node setups. 

Now for the emissive:
Plugging in the emissive right now won't look correct, you have to add a color mix node.


Add a color mix node and place it with your regular body color and emissive texture. Connect the emissive to channel B and connect your regular body to channel A. (Don't disconnect your color from the base color! One texture can connect to multiple nodes.)
Now set your color mix node to Multiply and the factor to 1.000 and now the result good for plugging in! You can adjust the emission strength to your liking for however bright you want the lava to be.

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.
(Click to enlarge the images if you need to understand this step better)

Now add a Normal Map node from the vector node section and plug the curve output into that node. The normal can now be properly plugged in!
Before and After adding the nodes

Have fun messing with your models now!
Spyro Dive-Clops