Koikatsu porting for cuties like u

Things you NEED:
1. Koikatsu: https://sukebei.nyaa.si/view/2782638
2. Koikatsu PMX exporter: http://tstorage.info/01lt41g2ocd1
3. Ninja Ripper: https://www.mediafire.com/file/z1w91t5keytvq3r/ninjaripper1.7.1_with_new_script.7z
4. A decent image editor. I use paint.net. GIMP is probably better. This is really important since a huge part of this is texture editing.
5. Blender, CATS plugin, Unity, VRChat SDK etc... obviously (the stuff you'd need for any MMD avatar upload).


Some background


Koikatsu models are giant monstrosities of unoptimization and my Blender 2.80 runs super slow with one loaded. There's a TON of shape keys and it starts with like 900 bones. The .blend file for my Koikatsu was 150 MB.

You can find Illusion game cards here: https://illusioncards.booru.org/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=koikatsu
You can also edit everything whatever way you want too, of course. You can even load outfits from other cards while keeping everything else the same. Getting lots of outfits is super easy with Koikatsus and will be explained how at the end.

The most difficult part of porting Koikatsus is fixing the textures. Most details will not be present on the base textures and we'll need to add that detail in from other textures. The hardest of these are probably the recoloring of the hair and plopping on the nipples. I'm not sure if there are other difficult things, as I haven't run into them yet. This is NOT a GIMP tutorial so I basically tell you "then, you fix the colors" a few times, without any details. You gotta just kinda wing it and try to manipulate it to look like you want it to.


The actual guide


Getting ready to launch
1. Unzip Koikatsu.
2. Unzip the Koikatsu PMX exporter to the BepInEx folder in your Koikatsu folder.
3. Unzip Ninja Ripper and put it anywhere.
4. Open Ninja Ripper and select the Exe target as Koikatsu.exe in your Koikatsu folder. Nothing else needs to be changed.
5. Click Run in Ninja Ripper.

Loading and extracting
1. Click "Char Maker" -> "Female" (or male but then you'd be gay). If you exit the char maker, restart the game, as everything won't export.
2. Wait a bit for it to load. It loads much slower with this stuff running.
3. Next to the "BGM OFF" button at the top is a little file icon. Click it to see your cards. Your card folder can be found in your ..\Koikatsu\UserData\chara folder.
4. Select the card for the character you want to export and click "Load" at the bottom.
5. On the right side of the Koikatsu UI make sure to check "Disable blinking", set "Gaze Direction" to anything other than "avert" and "camera" and set the eye adjustment tuning to 0, and also set the "Pose" to the next pose, "Bouncing". If you see your character in a T-Pose, that means you have everything right to this point.
6. Next to the "BGM OFF" button at the top you also have the current outfit type. Select the outfit you want to export. You can leave the "Clothing State" on "auto" in the top right. The extractor will extract all layers for the current outfit.

Before exporting, take note that GIRLS DO NOT HAVE A PP. You can add one if you want of course somewhere in all those Koikatsu options. Body I think? Idk I don't use one. That being said, make sure that every setting is the way you want it to besides clothes/accessories. Clothes/acc can be added and removed, but they're placed on your body so you dont want that body to change later. Save your card if you make changes!!!

7. Move the camera a little bit upwards and then click the "export" button in the top left. The default export location is C:\koikatsu_model\####.
8. Press F9 to extract the textures with Ninja Ripper. The default export location for these textures is C:\Users\(You)\NinjaRipper\_NinjaRipper\...
9. Check to make sure that those 2 folder above are now full of stuff. The Koikatsu export folder should contain a .pmx and some texture files, while the Ninja Ripper export folder should contain lots of .dds files. You might notice the Koikatsu export folder has faded colors while the .dds files are full color.

Blender
1. Open up Blender and import the .pmx file.
2. Before clicking "Fix model", make sure your "Fix model" options are all enabled except for "Combine Same Materials" (just in case). You'll combine materials manually and atlas manually, too. This may take a minute.

3. First major issue: The eye settings (size stuff) will not export from Koikatsu. You can compare by looking at your Koikatsu window and then at the .pmx in Blender). You'll notice the white reflections in the eyes also aren't there.
Let's fix the white highlights first. In your Koikatsi export folder you'll see that you do have your eye texture (maybe two), but it's a bit faded. We won't use the one in that folder. Go to your Ninja Ripper folder and find your eye texture. Notice that Ninja Ripper rips things upside down!!! Then, find the highlights that should be there too. Windows should naively be able to show you the .dds preview, but if not, you need to go through each .dds file one by one. Placing the whites on the eyes should be trivial as the image size should be identical throughout the eye textures. Simply overlay the white highlights over the eyes using an image editor, and save the result as a png, or whatever image type you want to use for your final eye texture. We won't worry about assigning the texture in Blender, so save that texture for Unity later.
For fixing the eye size, find the eye material in Blender and click "select". This should select all the verts that are assigned to that material. Now enter UV editing mode, and stretch the eye in whatever directions you need to get it to match as closely as you can in Koikatsu. You'll start to notice that from here, some changes are quite subjective.

4. Second major issue: Your hair has no color at all. You'll notice in this case that your hair didn't even get exported in the Koikatsu export, and you can't exactly find anything that looks like hair in the Ninja Ripper folder either. The Hair will come as green .dds files, often in long, repeating vertical lines, but not necessarily. It may help to select the hair materials and look at their UV maps to try to find matching green .dds files. Remember: Ninja Ripper .dds files are all upside down! Once you've found one of the hair .dds files, you need to manipulate the colors to try to match your own desired hair color. This is extremely subjective and any advice I give you wouldn't be accurate for whatever hair color you wanted. Just try to keep in mind that this green .dds file is essentially a gradient of shading, so you can use that to your advantage to recolor it to any color you want! Make sure you keep track of the changes you make so that you can do the same for the other hair textures and have the colors all match.
The color baking stuff Dal did is just as subjective and gay and I hate it. Do mine instead.
The other green textures you see are involved in detail map stuff we'll talk about later.

5. Third major issue: You have no nipples on the body texture. There's no nipple material either. You have to literally place the nipple texture on the body texture. Take note that the nipple texture is much larger than the body proportionally so you need to scale the nipples down (or scale the body up) to get things to match in relative size. You can use the UV map for the body to help you accurately place them, or just eyeball it. Oh, and of course, the nipples have no color either. You'll need to do some sort of image manipulation just as with the hair previously in order to get a natural looking color. Reminder: the Ninja Ripper .dds files are UPSIDE DOWN! Don't put your nipples on upside down.

6. Other things that aren't on textures directly (but have their own) or have no color but you can manipulate: Eyebrows, make-up, mouth line, shine.. The most important of these is probably the eyebrows and the mouth line so that you can atleast look mostly normal.
For the eyebrows, they have their own texture and simply need to be recolored like the nipples, hair, etc. Easy!
For the mouth line, You'll see a mostly blue, some green, and little bit of red face .dds file. If you do Color-> Components-> Decompose on this file in GIMP you'll get a red, green, and blue channel. Red is shine/highlight, green contains the mouth line. Manipulate these to the colors you want and overlay them with the original face texture to get these features back. You can export each one individually.

7. Non-texture related notes:
You have a lot of shape keys. There are separate shape keys for mouth, teeth, and tongue movement for your future visemes. I'm not sure what the "fix koikatsu shape keys" button does, but you can create shape keys from a mix of the mouth and teeth ones (I didn't use tongue) for Ah, Oh, and Ch, and then generate visemes as normal from those.
For blinking and eye tracking, these actually work fine, but again the eyelashes and eyes are on 2 different shape keys. You'll want to create a new shape key from a mix of these two to create your actual single blinking shape key for use with the CATS plugin generating blinking/eye tracking.
If your eye tracking clips through the whites of your eyes, do the usual thing where you move the eyes forward or whites back, or change the movement range.

8. Misc notes
A lot of the textures need cutout or transparency to work.
This thing for adding detail stuff: https://imgur.com/a/sPWLeTw
Dal's video sucks but here's a link: https://youtu.be/402YVC8fsGY

I'll edit this if I'm not gay. If you have any questions or stuff to add: nabutso#3918


Oh yeah and to add ANY OUTFIT YOU WANT EVER from Koikatsu, just get ready to export like normal, but load the OUTFITS ONLY from ANOTHER CARD (or just make an outfit of course) and export. Import into Blender, use Fix Model, delete the meshes and materials that would be duplicates with your original model, export the .fbx, then import the .fbx of the outfit to your real model, and use "Merge Armatures" with "merge all bones" enabled. THIS WILL TAKE A WHILE if the thing you're merging is large. My maid outfit took 45 min. The rope took 5 min. This inflates your .blend file, probably because of shape keys. Mine is 700 MB :^). Idk how to fix it, prolly shape key shit tho.