This article is more disinformation than the initial comparisons were.
The author clearly has no 3D experience. OF COURSE they had to fucking scale the models, 3D assets from different games and engines are not going to automatically share the same coordinate space. The point is that a lot of geometry that make up various pals is similar enough to pokemon parts that it has almost definitely been either traced or retopologized from the Pokemon originals. Multiple pals are just kitbashed together from random recreated bits of existing pokemon.
I don't care about any vague AI accusations. I don't care or know if what they've done is legal, I'm not a lawyer. I haven't played a pokemon game since Red.
But it should be clear that Palworld is at best creatively bankrupt, and they used their similarity to existing IP to gain viral success.
I'm not saying it's a mechanically bad game. I'm not saying you should feel bad for playing it.
But this stuff is definitely ethically questionable and deserves to be discussed, and that is not helped by some idiots who do not understand 3D modeling weighing in about how "all the similarities were faked".
Because they were not.
The claim is a bit more credible than "the wolf looks like a wolf." If a lot of the geometry does line up perfectly after only scaling, then that pretty much confirms that one of them was directly exported and then slightly changed. It's not like Byo is warping individual parts of the models to fit with the Pokemon, they're scaling the whole thing. It's statistically impossible to make a 3d model that perfectly follows geometry the way Byo is claiming on models as complex as these.
You'll be sad to know, steamship Mickey is now in the public domain. Why can't people just continue to give companies that have already made billions their money forever!? Don't they realize that they are never allowed to base themselves off of the culture they've grown surrounded by!? Vague accusations should be enough to take these guys down on the ethics scale.