-if I may, since Brawl currently doesn't support Normal maps. Perhaps try using very dark textures + specular maps to achieve a similar effect as seen in Smash 4?

Good idea. I'm a bit worried about filesize since we'll need to have spec map versions of all the textures, but we'l experiment with it and see if we can find something that works.

Hey everyone, sorry for the lack of updates lately, but I've got an announcement to make!
No, we're not quitting.

Up to this point we've been working on making textures with the goal of making them more "Nintendo-esque," meaning reducing their designs to a more simple approach. From this point onward though, we'll be changing our project goal from "Nintendoise" to "Modernise" and focus on bringing the Smash 4 visual style to Brawl. I'll explain in detail why we've made this choice in a bit, but what does this mean for you guys? More consistent textures, as we'll actually have an established visual style to work off of. Maybe even faster releases because we'll have reference material as well.

As we've made progress, we've received feedback on a few characters that they just didn't look right (namely Ganondorf and Roy) while other characters were well recieved even though they were developed the same way. We've thought about this for a bit,and realized that though the "Nintendoise" approach works well for more simple characters, it doesn't translate well to more complex characters like Ganondorf. To illustrate this, I'll be using charcters from both extremes: Toon Link and Ganondorf.

Here's Toon Link as we have him currently. His design has a clear inspiration from his Wind Waker appearance.

Then, we have Ganondorf. We tried to imagine him as he would look between Twilight Princess and Wind Waker, a bit like how people described Skyward Sword initially.

Though they look consistent, there's just something that doesn't feel right with Ganondorf because his design called for more realistic textures.

To test this theory, we tried giving Ganondorf more realistic textures:

He looks much more fitting with darker and more detailed textures. The difference is most noticable in the hair.
But then put him beside Toon Link, and the difference in their styles is huge. They just don't look consistent, and don't look like they're part of the same game at all.

We then realized that Smash 4 is visually doing what would make sense for us to do next, so we chose to create a Smash 4-esque texture for Toon Link:

Much better! Ganondorf gets to keep his more detailed textures, and Toon Link still fits in. Keep in mind that these textures are both still WIPs, and are subject to change.

As you could probably tell, we were already drawing inspiration from Smash 4, but now to keep consistent we'll take as much as we can from Smash 4. We don't aim to replicate Smash 4 1:1, as some things can't be done as they are in Smash 4. That said, this is still a visual overhaul of Brawl rather than a complete mod.
We won't be adding Smash 4 characters.
We won't be reworking the gameplay to match Smash 4.
We won't be adding Young Link.
We will still be called Smash 3 though. We've come up with a new logo to go with our new project goal as well!

We hope to roll out these updates as soon as we can, and thank you all for your continued support!

We've also added a FAQ to the OP, you'll be happy if you read it.

I'm not sure is this has been addressed quite yet, but how come Meta Knight doesn't have a wallpaper?

Thanks for pointing it out! Here it is:

A few questions for people experiencing freezes with the HUD:
- What kinds of mods are you running? Model imports, or simply textures?
- NTSC or PAL?
- Have you modified the HUD files in any way?
- Project M, Brawl, or some other Brawl code-set?
- Are you running BrawlEx?

Thanks for any answers, it'll help us narrow down what could be causing the issues.

Well it couldn't be helped.

100% accurate.

Almost, the mask for Greninja is better, you can still see some of the lighter spots are still getting coloured though.
For ZSS, around her hair has a blue halo, and the reflections on the metal are still reflecting the blue of her suit. The very edges of her still have blue as well.

Though good, these can be even better!

So it means the artwork is a bit weird itself? And now the second pokemon tada.

I think he's talking about the way they're masked. Specifically, this area I've noticed was a bit iffy:

It looks like the light grey part where the ear bends was a result of the mask bleeding over, and there's a slight halo of red around the eye iris. I've noticed a few spots on the other ones too, which I can point out if you'd like.

Well that's just beautiful. If it's alright, I'd like to claim rendering him?

Also I downloaded the Purple Leon Costume for Falco, (even though I did like the "black lipstick" and with the headpiece missing it'll make Falco stand out alot compared to Fox and Wolf). So I can just redownload the Purple Leon Costume and not the entire pack?

Only Falco's costume files were fixed, so those would be the only ones you'd need to redownload! Though, all I did was fix the black lipstick, so if you liked that then you don't really need to update.

Are all those pac files in the Smash 3 hub download to enable it for all the different game modes? Just wondering because the "True" Smash 4 hud by Miraj that came out just recently only has the info.pac file and nothing else.

Yup, those make it work for the other modes!

Alright, we'll look into it some more, I think I have a good idea of what's causing the issues now. We'll post up when we've updated it!

And we've also done some slight updated to Falco, his default costume no longer has a head cannon (giant headpiece) and his recolours no longer have black lipstick. If you've downloaded him previously, redownload him!

Hmm, if it's alright with you, could you try extracting once with Bitzipper and once with the built-in Windows unzipper and comparing the filesizes? Everyone on our end seems to end up with this:


Kirby the Hedgie, that's odd, that's what we've been using too. It could possibly be that the SD card needs defragmenting?

That's weird. If you guys don't mind me asking, what OS are you on? For us, we've been getting files no more than 388 KB after unzipping and they work fine, I'm wondering if it's the unzipping software causing a small increase in filesize for some people?

When's Samus?

Depends if you want a rushed result or not.

Very nice. I really like the highlight on Bowser!

So what happens now? Did I beat the system?