[MrWhitefolks]

I have to apologize for my late response, but a 14hour marathon of food poisoning and full blown dry heaves have kept me a tad bit 'out of it'.

Teasle: Now while I never actually put my hands into the process of ripping and porting a model (my skills definitely lie elsewhere), what I do know (for the most part) is the process and routine that is taken in getting someone like Samus into GMod.

It usually begins with an emulator (obviously we don't endorse piracy) and a copy of DirectXRipper. DXRipper is a utility used to take a geometrical screenshot in full 3d at any time in a game that runs off of DirectX hardware. So - let's say you want to pull X character from GAME TITLE...

Note: not everything has to come from emulation. You can pull directly from most PC games with this AND if you can somehow get the model extracted by other means (like finding a cool 3d model online somewhere that you want to port) then this step isn't even warranted.

All that needs to be done (for the most part) is to boot up the game and get your desired character to pose as close as possible to a standard A or T pose, then snap a 'screenshot' of the 3d world.

Now the process gets a little tricky, but from what I've gathered you take said 'screenshot' and import it into a 3d modeling program such as Blender, Milkshape or 3dStudioMax. This allows you to then go in and literally just cut the model out of the 3d environment. You then take this model and throw it into whatever program you use for modeling and build a rig (virtual skeleton) and get them as close as possible to T-Pose status (this is usually the real time consuming part).

After that you'll need to reapply all the textures (and luckily the program ripped them correctly, so you don't have to spend countless hours fixing them and going through a ton of internal drama) and you should be good to go.

The end of the process revolves around weighting the restraints/hitboxes of the model's body, making sure you don't go over on any prerequisites of the Valve engine (this engine only allows models up to around 24k polys and you can only have 24 bones in place), and then building all of the face, finger, and eye posing options (this is also a massively time consuming aspect). After that it's basically "hit the compile button" and your model is in GMod (barring any extra work such as fixing UV Maps, adding/subtracting certain visual filters, etc).

However, with the link you referenced - it's a perfect example to see what happens when two people release a model at around the same time. Everyone has their own artistic 'hook' when working on stuff like this, and in some cases a model may end up looking better than the original due to extra modifications/care taken into the port (the Candy Cane port from Rumble Roses had an entire skin/face/texture reworking, for example), or it could look actually far different from the original (this could be due to many things, such as lighting, which bone rig they used to build the skeleton, etc) - BUT, for the most part a port looks exactly like the original it is based on.

In the case of NMH it looks to be that without the cel shading the character models actually take on a far more 'next gen' appearance (not in texture quality, but just how the model actually looks). In essence, by not knowing/being able to get the cel shading filter/overlay to apply correctly we stumbled upon something completely unexpected and I really hope that people enjoy this glimpse at something that we were never EVER supposed to see as it is truly fascinating.