[Tutorial] Ripping Guide for Animal Crossing New Horizons

[MPMOT]

How do I preview .zs in Toolbox?

[thezebradude1]

How do I preview .zs in Toolbox?

Export the .zs file itself, and import it back in.

I'm guessing you might ask about how to get model itself as well, so I'll say ahead of time...
Do the same for the .BFRES file.
You'll be able to see it's contents from there.

[MPMOT]

My contribution so far. I have no idea what to do with his glasses and forehead.

[thezebradude1]

My contribution so far. I have no idea what to do with his glasses and forehead.

Ahh, of course. Raymond. 

I see you're using Cycles as a basis for rendering in Blender...
I'm more familiar with Blender Render myself, but I see that you're mixing the _Mix textures, as a dodge, with _Alb.
I believe that's what is causing this odd coloring to occur with the forehead and glasses.

You might want to remove those _Mix textures for now and attach the _Alb texture directly to the Diffuse BSDF.

[Darkliger01]

Hey guys. I'm trying to get the models, using the new guide. In the command prompt, I entered the command line and it says "[WARN] prod.keys does not exist", even though the prod.keys file is in the same folder as the game's nsp and the hactool program.

Why does it say that?

[thezebradude1]

Hey guys. I'm trying to get the models, using the new guide. In the command prompt, I entered the command line and it says "[WARN] prod.keys does not exist", even though the prod.keys file is in the same folder as the game's nsp and the hactool program.

Why does it say that?

I had trouble with that as well.
Apparently, you're supposed to make a new directory in your C: (or some other letter for the main) drive (Ex. C:\Users\User\), named ".switch" without the quotes.
Put your prod.keys there and it should work.

[dany1994gus]

Guys please. when I open any model in Switch toolbox, it won't let me see the textures nor extract nor replace, it hangs or closes. Download the Directx you mentioned for that problem, but when you install it it tells me that I already have the latest update. What a way to de-update or does it work?

[Darkliger01]

Hey guys. I'm trying to get the models, using the new guide. In the command prompt, I entered the command line and it says "[WARN] prod.keys does not exist", even though the prod.keys file is in the same folder as the game's nsp and the hactool program.

Why does it say that?

I had trouble with that as well.
Apparently, you're supposed to make a new directory in your C: (or some other letter for the main) drive (Ex. C:\Users\User\), named ".switch" without the quotes.
Put your prod.keys there and it should work.

I'm still getting that error.

[thezebradude1]

Hey guys. I'm trying to get the models, using the new guide. In the command prompt, I entered the command line and it says "[WARN] prod.keys does not exist", even though the prod.keys file is in the same folder as the game's nsp and the hactool program.

Why does it say that?

I had trouble with that as well.
Apparently, you're supposed to make a new directory in your C: (or some other letter for the main) drive (Ex. C:\Users\User\), named ".switch" without the quotes.
Put your prod.keys there and it should work.

I'm still getting that error.

I thought that might of worked...
Then again, I used a combination of the old and new guide to update my ripped assets, so...

Anyways, the way I did it is that I followed the old guide up to around step 2, where I extracted the base game .ncp file.
For the update .ncp file, I followed step 2 again. After pressing 1, I pressed 1, again, where it asks how I want it to be extracted, and in this case all files from there will be.
You'll be able to get the .tik file and the update .nca file this way.

Then, afterwards I followed the new guide under Base + Update, skipping ahead to step 3. Do that, and well... remember to have the base game and update .nca files in the same folder, and while using CMD to cd to the folder containing "hactools.exe" and of course the mentioned .nca files.

If that doesn't work, just stick to the old guide. You'll have most of the games content right then and there, well... unpatched that is.

[Username123]

Hey guys. I'm trying to get the models, using the new guide. In the command prompt, I entered the command line and it says "[WARN] prod.keys does not exist", even though the prod.keys file is in the same folder as the game's nsp and the hactool program.

Why does it say that?

I had trouble with that as well.
Apparently, you're supposed to make a new directory in your C: (or some other letter for the main) drive (Ex. C:\Users\User\), named ".switch" without the quotes.
Put your prod.keys there and it should work.

I'm still getting that error.

From my understanding, you should be able to just ignore this because you already specified the path with "-k prod.keys". "$HOME/.switch/prod.keys" is only optional if you don't want to specify the path every time, but then you also have to remove "-k prod.keys" from the command. But if hactool really couldn't find the keys it would say "Invalid NCA header! Are keys correct?", so most likely something different is your problem.

[Fobwashed]

I think I have some, if not, most of the texture maps figured out... I looked into them for a bit.

- _Alb -> Diffuse/Base Color

• RGB Channels - Diffuse
  
• Alpha - Specular
  

- _AlbGry -> Gray-scaled Diffuse/Base Color
- _OP -> Alpha

- _Nrm -> Normal

- _Mix -> Mask

• Red Channel -> Cavity
  
• Green Channel -> Roughness
  
• Blue Channel -> Ambient Occlusion
  

- _Mtl -> Metalness

- _Emi -> Emission

Some notes...
- I thought _Mix would be a bit of a stretch for specular. It looked like it was used for masking. (I used some Smash Ultimate textures as reference.)

• Also, I assumed that the red channel was metalness, before I saw some dedicated _Mtl files.
  I realized then that cavity maps weren't in the normal's alpha, like Ultimate's, but instead said red channel.
  
• Yes, that does mean _AlbGry isn't metalness.
  

- _Nrm and _Mix typically have white alphas. I'm not too sure of what they do in this game...
- _Nrm zero their blue channels despite having data for them.

• This is also the case for _Mix, but for their green channels (sometimes).
  

I just wanted to provide some sort of reference for said textures, and correct @Username123
Though I might be wrong as well... I just had a hunch for some of the texture maps he listed since I didn't look into some of them, yet.
(I was using Switch Toolbox to see about these textures, btw.)

Hey! I've been scratching my head trying to figure this out for a couple days now and I'm at a point where it feels like everything outside of the nrm and alb files are changing from object to object. For example, if you look at the IdrObjATM.Nin_NX_NVN.zs (the nook atm) the red and blue mix channels couldn't be the cavity and the ambient occlusion because they're both incredibly dark and would render the model nearly black. The alpha on the alb is also solid white which doesn't really seem like a specular map. In this particular model (and a number of others) the green channel seems to be the ambient occlusion (or cavity, they seem to serve identical purposes), the red channel appears to be the metal (as it's applied to the parts of the machine that you'd assume are metallic), and the blue channel would be what I'd assume is specular because of how the areas you'd expect to be reflective are represented. This was one of the first models I thought I had figured out but when I automatically tried to apply those settings to other models, they were completely wrong. And don't even get me started on how absolutely different the player character and its hair models use the textures because those are COMPLETELY different from any of the furniture going so far as to use the alb RGB for opacity on the skin sections of hair. This entire thing is bonkers. Maybe at best, different categories of objects use identical mapping but across a variety of things like buildings, furniture, walls/floors, and especially the player character and NPCs, it feels like they're all different =\

[thezebradude1]

I think I have some, if not, most of the texture maps figured out... I looked into them for a bit.

- _Alb -> Diffuse/Base Color

• RGB Channels - Diffuse
  
• Alpha - Specular
  

- _AlbGry -> Gray-scaled Diffuse/Base Color
- _OP -> Alpha

- _Nrm -> Normal

- _Mix -> Mask

• Red Channel -> Cavity
  
• Green Channel -> Roughness
  
• Blue Channel -> Ambient Occlusion
  

- _Mtl -> Metalness

- _Emi -> Emission

Some notes...
- I thought _Mix would be a bit of a stretch for specular. It looked like it was used for masking. (I used some Smash Ultimate textures as reference.)

• Also, I assumed that the red channel was metalness, before I saw some dedicated _Mtl files.
  I realized then that cavity maps weren't in the normal's alpha, like Ultimate's, but instead said red channel.
  
• Yes, that does mean _AlbGry isn't metalness.
  

- _Nrm and _Mix typically have white alphas. I'm not too sure of what they do in this game...
- _Nrm zero their blue channels despite having data for them.

• This is also the case for _Mix, but for their green channels (sometimes).
  

I just wanted to provide some sort of reference for said textures, and correct @Username123
Though I might be wrong as well... I just had a hunch for some of the texture maps he listed since I didn't look into some of them, yet.
(I was using Switch Toolbox to see about these textures, btw.)

Hey! I've been scratching my head trying to figure this out for a couple days now and I'm at a point where it feels like everything outside of the nrm and alb files are changing from object to object. For example, if you look at the IdrObjATM.Nin_NX_NVN.zs (the nook atm) the red and blue mix channels couldn't be the cavity and the ambient occlusion because they're both incredibly dark and would render the model nearly black. The alpha on the alb is also solid white which doesn't really seem like a specular map. In this particular model (and a number of others) the green channel seems to be the ambient occlusion (or cavity, they seem to serve identical purposes), the red channel appears to be the metal (as it's applied to the parts of the machine that you'd assume are metallic), and the blue channel would be what I'd assume is specular because of how the areas you'd expect to be reflective are represented. This was one of the first models I thought I had figured out but when I automatically tried to apply those settings to other models, they were completely wrong. And don't even get me started on how absolutely different the player character and its hair models use the textures because those are COMPLETELY different from any of the furniture going so far as to use the alb RGB for opacity on the skin sections of hair. This entire thing is bonkers. Maybe at best, different categories of objects use identical mapping but across a variety of things like buildings, furniture, walls/floors, and especially the player character and NPCs, it feels like they're all different =\

Well... crap.
Honestly, it’s the first I heard to hear of inconsistencies with texture maps.
I mean, there is 30,000+ models from first glance, so I guess there’s that... 

Maybe a spreadsheet is in order...
(and I’ll just... go ahead and edit my previous post to reference Blathers as a basis, then...)
Thanks for clarifying, though. It’s quite interesting, yet confusing to note.

[MPMOT]

Some textures weren't exported very well and some not at all.

E.g. when importing a shirt in blender, it just becomes a cross on the bottom, while a trench coat doesn't have an exported model at all.

[MPMOT]

I give up.

[crocoduck]

Hey guys. I'm trying to get the models, using the new guide. In the command prompt, I entered the command line and it says "[WARN] prod.keys does not exist", even though the prod.keys file is in the same folder as the game's nsp and the hactool program.

Why does it say that?

It said the same for me, but i continued anyways and ripped a large part of the models without a problem/corruption errors. It's my first time ripping too. I am missing some textures tho, and idk if thats because of my prod.key or it'll be fixed by doing the procedure again (anyone's had this before? I am a bit confused).

Note: I have opened the fbx. with autodesk software and not blender because some rather fancy rigging stuff might be not understood by blender. but so far the rigs are working and skinned properly.