Patreon Peeks 48: Putting Hats on Pikmin 3's Bosses (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Today I wanted to show you a bit behind the scenes of creating this year's April Fool's video. Because like any What I Love video, a deceptively large amount of work goes into its production: this one was around two months in the making!

I had been learning a bit about modding Pikmin 3 for the past few months, and the idea to make an April Fool's day video only came about after I proved to myself that I could edit the models of Pikmin 3 in the first place. To that end, I dumped the files of Pikmin 3 Deluxe, and used a conversion tool the Switch modding community has developed to convert models from the Switch-legible format to something workable in Blender, like a .dae file.

Once a model could be imported into Blender, I could model each hat on their head and simply parent it to the model's skeleton. Hats are thankfully simple in this regard because they don't necessarily require the addition or subtraction of any bones: modding tools are very finicky about keeping skeletons intact, so that they can properly play all the model's animations.

The fun came in the details. The Armored Mawdad came first with a novelty fishing cap, for which I edited a public domain denim texture with a hand-drawn embroidery of a Puckering Blinnow, another Pikmin 3 enemy.

Each model in Pikmin 3 uses more than just a color texture like this: for each model I also needed a texture that defines the amount and color of specular light a surface reflects, and a normal map that creates an illusion of minute roughness and bumps on the surface. It's a common practice in modern video game rendering engines, and this taught me a lot about extrapolating those textures from the original one! Here's what those look like for this model, as an example:

This was the process with each hat model. The Vehemoth Phosbat got a soft winter beanie, the Sandbelching Meerslug got a mining helmet (for which I was very pleased I could get Pikmin 3's shaders to make the headlamp emissive!), and the Scornet Maestro got a marching bandleader's cap. I had some fun designing the insignia on that bandleader's cap, of the Maestro itself:

With the Quaggled Mireclops I knew I needed a larger-than-life hat, so I decided on a giant foam cowboy hat. But it seemed like any hat approached the limits of what I could mod onto that boss, it had so many polygons and moving parts already that the modding toolbox I used couldn't accept the new hat-wearing model without sacrificing some texture integrity and misplacing some parts. That's why you only see it buried in the ground in the video! (Not to mention it's so large that the camera can scarcely even capture the whole thing with its hat)

Conversely, the Plasm Wraith was so well-behaved in accepting a hat edit that I continued with a monocle and bowtie to complete the look. None of these models affect the gameplay of the boss battle at all, but they certainly look silly. All that was left was to craft a video about it playing it off as if this was completely normal gameplay footage.

The criticisms in the video are true, by the by. The bosses do have health caps in the game, as well as the literal caps they're now wearing. But it was fun to play both obvious jokes and legitimate information with the same straight face, so to throw an extra goof in the video, I added lines to the script where I rated each boss's health caps on a list of tiers, each of which was labeled with a colored shape. The tiers were utter nonsense, I just picked random colors and shapes and then narrated as though they were entirely serious and I had been using this tier system for years. I'm very amused it had some people looking through past videos of mine to find other references to it: mission accomplished.

After the fact though, I had a fun evening in Blender imagining if the tierlist was not nonsense: how would I organize it? Just for fun and because it looks pretty, I've made an official ranking system that judges two criteria at once on a scale from 1 to 11. This chart goes left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so if something is rated a 1 in both criteria, it gets a pink pentagon. If something gets an 11 in both criteria, it gets an acrylic catenoid. So, if I ever need to rank... I dunno, skateboard tricks, I suppose I can use this. :P

One last note: this video was assembled entirely without using Adobe products! Textures were made in Clip Studio Paint, models assembled in Blender, gameplay screen-captured from Yuzu, and video composited and rendered in Blender as well. My transition away from Adobe is not yet complete, and I'll probably need more than just Blender to sequence video because it's not the most intuitive or feature-packed compositor... but I'm pleased that this process was still up to my standard, effects and all. I hope you all found that video sufficiently silly, even if you aren't too familiar with the Pikmin series. It's probably not the last Pikmin modding video I'll be sharing, I have some non-joke edits to the game in the works!