You could probably just do the render call yourself in one of forges render events. Looking at why the player isn’t rendering (where the code is that disables it) would be a good start to deciding where to do the render call from.
Personally I don’t think that Pixelmon is a good source, I would look at the vanilla code to understand what is going on, then at the pixelmon code to see what they do and then I would write my own implementation.