Good news, everyone! I have come upon this other tool pmgプチツールず, which has a functionality to take as input a .frm and a .pmg, and produce as output a .mqo, for editing with Metasequoia, and hey that's what I have been using! Moreover, in this format, I can also apply the textures directly from the game, and thus get the exact 3D model straight from Mabinogi!
Well, now that I can do that, there are a few things from Mabinogi that I got interested to consider exporting to a workable papercraft model. One of them is the imp. Imps are cool. Banner Imps are even more awesome.
Here's a video of an imp beating an imp in Mabinogi. Sorry, this is the most close-up video of an imp I could find. Also, it kinda shows how stupid Mabinogi is.
You might be wondering why this blog post is tagged under "My Designs", whereas the 3D model of the imp is really ripped straight from the game instead of being recreated from scratch by myself. Well, I still had to go through several tedious steps, such as resizing the 3D model; deciding if and how to simplify the given 3D model for easier papercraft model building (I made no such revisions in this one); slightly fixing the 3D model (to look better or to make certain parts fit better for the papercraft model); joining disjoint surfaces (so that there shall be glue tabs, and so that the pieces will fit together perfectly); supplying better textures (some the default texture files referenced to in the .pmg just sucked); and deciding how to cut the 3D model into pieces in Pepakura Designer.
This is the 3D model of "imp01_mesh.pmg" straight from Mabinogi. I have not applied the texture files referenced to in the .pmg, but hey it's colored primitively anyway. I guess the simple one-color texture data, as a placeholder, are also in the .pmg.
Here is the output to Pepakura, after the steps I have done as mentioned above. It's not difficult to build, but I still wonder if I could have simplified some pieces and made it still look good, but I didn't. The amount of detail in this model, and perhaps also because of the belly, kinda reminds me of Ninjatoes' Homer Simpson papercraft model.
Now, onto the physically building the model to make sure things are okay. I had originally intended to borrow some glue tabs of the hat piece to connect to the hair piece, but then I realized that won't work; those glue tabs are needed to enforce the hat's shape with its bottom piece. So now I have already cut out the pieces and there are no glue tabs to connect the hat and hair pieces. Oh noes, what to do? Ninjatoes' "butt joint" technique to the rescue!
By design, the arms can only be attached to the torso at a few different angles and still have the shoulders lined up in a way that make sense. Here's one possible alternative I had considered.
Well, it's done now. The belly area is rather wrinkly because I messed up and didn't do so well.
Another thing: It was really bugging me how the skin color printed out on paper doesn't look like it on the monitor, though in the end it does work out somehow. Moreover, I am aware that on Mabinogi there are imps with different skin colors, although I think that only applies to the Giant Imps in Fiodh Intermediate Dungeon for 4. Anyway, the skin color I have used here has the RGB value (234, 171, 118), aka Hex value #EAAB76. For the .pdo in the download, I have enabled permission to swap texture files, and I have included a nifty skintones.jpg which someone else made. So yeah, give that a go if you like.
You may now download this Mabinogi Imp papercraft model at the Downloads section of this blog.
