Palworld Players Are Ripping Apart Pal Models To Prove They're Not Stolen

thegamer.com:

If you've been paying attention to the Palworld discourse over the past few days, you'll be aware that fans of both Palworld and Pokemon have been embroiled in a debate about whether developer Pocketpair has plagiarized certain designs. Pokemon fans have been gathering new evidence almost every day to support their theories, with one such person having taken the in-game models of Palworld and Pokemon creatures and compared them, discovering that they're actually extremely similar.

While that was enough for some people to prove that Pocketpair had committed plagiarism, just like everything else in this convoluted debate, the models weren't quite what they seemed. Earlier today, the person that made the model comparisons on Twitter has been accused of fabricating the entire situation, as they admitted they scaled down the models to fit better, and another user called MajoraZ has noticed that the "topology of the triangles" in the Palworld models are very different to the Pokemon models.

For all you non-developers out there that don't speak the language, 3D models are essentially made up of two layers of polygons, one inside the model and one outside. The "topology" that MajoraZ speaks of is the layer inside the model, and it's very possible for two models to look pretty much identical, but have completely different topology.

But the topology of triangles is different. I don't think they just edited existing models: they still seemingly made their own, just to have v. close proportions

While it's still possible that the developer of Palworld could have taken Pokemon models and edited them to their liking whilst also changing the topology, MajoraZ explains that it would be "more work than changing the overall look of the model". They go on to explain that while they haven't really got their hands on more modern 3D software, it's unlikely that the Palworld devs just ripped models from Pokemon and used them in Palworld.

Of course, none of this is letting Palworld off of