Intro

Hello, this is a tutorial/reference for the base level process of porting, ripping and preparing a League of Legends asset for your 3D software of choice (most notably and unfortunately Cinema4D in my case).

Recommended Tools/Installs

• Obsidian
• Lol2dae
• Riot File Translator for Maya
• C4D/Blender/Maya 2018(This program works best)
• PaintNET/Whatever program opens .dds files.
• League of Legends

Porting .WAD to .skn

Open Obsidian. You'll be greeted with this screen:

Click File -> Open and navigate to your League of Legends folder and follow this path:

Inside, you'll see a giant list of champion data available to be poked and prodded. For this tutorial specifically, we'll be using Ahri. *Make sure ONLY to use the regular wad.client files and not something like en_US.wad.client. You should be greeted with this tab.

Rummage through each file for whatever skin you want. For now, I'll be using Classic Ahri, which would be found in "base". To extract the files, check the little checkbox next to your skin of choice and hit File-> Extract Selected. If you're having trouble finding the skin you specifically want, feel free to search through each skin folder and they should each have splash arts available.

Select whichever folder you want to extract to and navigate through all the subfolders that have also been extracted. Here, you'll find several .dds texture files and a .skl and .skn.

Lol2dae (.skn to .dae)

This is where either Lol2dae or Riot File Translator is going to kick in. For this tutorial, we will be using Lol2dae.

Open Lol2dae and you'll see an ancient prompt box that looks like this:

Hit the little ... box next to mesh file and locate the .skn file and open it. Once that's done, check the checkbox on "include skeleton" and hit "Convert".

By default, the output directory will be in the same directory as the .skn file you loaded. So, go locate the same directory and import the .dae file into your 3D program of choice.

Texture Conversion/Loading Textures

Now, if you're a degenerate and use Cinema 4D like myself, you'll probably see this exact screen and wonder "what happened to the textures?" Well, those textures need to be manually loaded, but don't worry it's really easy.

Simply load up your program that can open .dds files with ease and load the texture that doesn't have all that 2x/4x crap on it. Typically these texture files are 512x512 or 1024x1024. If you've been following along and are using Classic Ahri, the file will be ahri_base_tx_cm.dds.

Convert the .dds by saving file as .png. Now, go and load the texture up into your 3D program and voila. We have a colored in Ahri!

Texture Touchups

Now, League models are notoriously ASS because well, you don't really need to see them up close. We're gonna fix it up as best we can without going too crazy.

I use a texture upscaling program known as Waifu2x. I also use the actual program itself but there are several websites that can accommodate you and for this tutorial, that's just what we're going to use. http://waifu2x.udp.jp/ with these settings will make that muddy old 512x512 texture into a less noisy and more pleasing 1024x1024

Reload your texture in your 3D program to the new upscaled image and you should see instantly noticeable results.

Congrats, you've rescued Ahri from her ugly textures and successfully ported assets from League!

Have any questions? Reach me on my twitter at twitter.com/Coombot3D or alternatively my Discord: Coombot#6969

Thanks and have fun.