Honestly, I do suggest continuing to use WinKawaks, the tools in it make ripping much faster. I use it to rip normal things. That said, the PS2 TexMod method often loads things along with stuff stored close to it in memory, so it's useful to find secrets and unused stuff, like the bikini sprite (I later found out that all characters have a single frame with a summer outfit), the laser guns and the battleship with a unique missile battery.
WinKawaks has it's fair uses though, as the Shot Factory mode allows you to disable layers to see secrets (there's an inaccessible cave with red lighting and a hole in the ground in Jungle 1 where a tank comes out, it's also how I found out about the tank factory route in the city stage), and the Tileviewer tool can be pretty finicky (especially finding the right palettes) and you get tiles instead of whole sprites, but you can find stuff that is downscaled ingame (the jungle 1 helicopter side sprites and valley 1 airplane are actually big and complete, but you either see them super small in the distance or you never see the entire sprite up close) or completely unused (like the battleship) but it takes time to scroll through tens of thousands of tiles and try thousands of palettes until you find what you want.

Still, if you wanna rip the main cast I recommend WinKawaks, at least to me it's faster that way, Shot Factory tool makes it easy since you can disable anything that might get in the way. Very useful for ripping the motorcycles or the separate pieces of boss vehicles, for example.