04.12.2007 ZELDA TWILIGHT PRINCESS 3D MODELS RIPPED

Facepunch Studios appears to be a gathering for gamers with ambitious 3D projects, and the group yielding the most interesting results lately is the Twilight Princess crowd. It started when "??UnKnOwN??" ripped some of the 3D models from the game, but kept excited members in the dark as he or she cleaned up the 3D meshes and enhanced the quality of the character textures. Just recently though, member "DONOTWANT" came out of nowhere with 40 different character meshes ripped for download, and the fanboy floodgates have been unleashed.

What this all means, is that if you have 2D and 3D manipulation software, like Photoshop and 3D Studio Max, you can do whatever the hell you want to the Twilight Princess characters. Anything. I just opened up a few of them in 3D Max and checked out a few of their textures too, it's the real thing. And if you're into making mods, you could easily rig the models and animate them in Garry's mod. Ok, it's not that easy, rigging each polygonal vertex can be a huge bitch to do well, and coding always gives people headaches, but getting your hands on these kind of files is the hardest step in the process to making Link fight G-man or finally beating the shit out of Midna with the gravity gun. Expect some convincing April Fool's jokes to pop up next year! If I have some free time tonight I'll mesh around with the files more, but grab the winrar downloads before they disappear. If any of you are interested in pursuing this further, lemme know and I'll try to decently rig the models for you this weekend. Any Twilight Princess fight animation requests?

Update: We're all greedy little Zelda lovin' bastards, and I'm already getting a bunch of emails that the downloads in the other sites' forums aren't working anymore. Their servers must be getting slammed, keep checking back if the downloads aren't working for you. Or, feel free to upload the winrar files on another site and help point others to alternate download locations. Thanks for being patient.

Update 2: Just added over twenty pictures from the Facepunch Studios forums - you can see Link, Midna, and others in various poses below. People have the characters in rigging editors, are working on collision detection, and even throwing some of them into Garry's mod. And there's already a slightly NSFWish picture too, so be warned. Also, I'm being told you can also download the 3D files here.