In game to 3D model

Kuchinawa212

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Apr 23, 2009
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I'm not really sure if this is the right spot for this question but I'm hoping someone has done/or has the idea to help me with an idea. I was hoping to take a ingame 3D model of something, take it a 3D drafting program and do a little editing and print it out. Specifically I'm thinking of doing Kyle Katarn's Raven's Claw from the Jedi Outcast games. Then add a small little peg hole and use it for the Fantasy Flight's X wing miniature game. I can do the CAD work and put in the peg hole and round out some bits, but not a clue of how to take an in game model and transfer it over.

Picture of the ship in question


Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
 

Kuchinawa212

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Oh nah, thats just a good pciture I found of it. The ship does have a ingame 3D model.


Thanks for the input man. Any little bit helps
 

Brennan

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Mar 21, 2014
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Main thing I should think is the model is likely to be low res and very poorly optimized for printing. Optimization for games and optimization for printing are in many ways the exact opposite.

For example: a model for printing needs to be manifold and watertight, meaning it has to be all one contiguous "shell" with no protruding 2d faces/edges or closed off bits inside, and no gaps in the surface. A model for gaming has to be polygon efficient, which means often it's more efficient to have a complex shape be made of multiple intersecting but not contiguous mesh bits. If you look at where the engines attach to the wings: on the gaming model, the engine is likely a separate mesh locally grouped to the wing mesh (or to a common mesh or point with the wing mesh). The wing just kinda phases through the engine like Kitty Pryde, without any of the vertices or edges being connected. This allows the engine to be constructed as a simple radial shape, without having to break up large simple polygons where it meets the wing into smaller ones to form a "hole" conforming to the wing cross section (and similarly, that part of the wing doesn't have to be broken down into more polygons to conform to the curve of the engine body).

This sort of construction will probably be going on all over the mesh, necessitating lots of Boolean intersection and edge clean up work. Though in most modern programs there are built in functions or plugins to make all of that easy, it can still be tedious if it's a complex design. Some programs will enable you to "shrink wrap" a new mesh around the original one, then touch up from there, but that still has complications with the other things detailed below.

Polygon efficiency also means that the model will have lots of really ugly planar curves and simplified details in real life. Circles will be hexagons, that sort of thing. You can clearly see this in the curve of the nose and in the "round" engine bodies and intake aerospikes in the pic Kuchinawa212 posted. You'll want to isolate and subdivide all those to turn them into actual curves.

Thirdly you're going to have quite a LOT of detail which isn't "physically" present on the mesh at all, but rather is created via illusion using the diffuse and normal texture maps. All the various panel lines and depth offsets, the recessed greeblie detail areas on the sides of the engines and main fuselage, the cockpit windows, all that stuff falls under this category. A more modern game might have some of those as mesh detail, but the older the game, the more stingy the model will be.

Normal maps can sometimes be baked into mesh detail (provided you've taken care to preserve the UV mapping), after addressing the polycount on the curves, of course, and if you have the right software you can even generate normal maps from diffuse maps, but that may be getting advanced (or expensive).

TLDR: The model will likely need a lot more work than just a little tweaking to be print-ready. And depending on how the game mesh was built and optimized, building a whole new model from scratch using the game model as a reference layer could be more efficient than trying to "fix" the game model.
 

VyseRogueKing

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Yes it's possible. I've done it. Sometimes a kind of a pain to do though but luckily since it's quake things should be easy to do though. Huge modding community for that. So look on some modding sites for extraction tools and the like. They will make your life so much easier. Their also probably tutorials so brush up using those.

Some games have really hard archives to access after all it's up to the dev to choose how to compress it. So I hope this is not one of them.

A word of warning. Game models are always low-poly compared to movie quality stuff. So if you were to print it will look extremely minimalist, because game modelers like to "cheat." All detail on that model is painted on. So it is remarkably flat. As brenman said the older it is the simply it's going to looker.

It's going to take a lot of work to look good. Take it from a guy who has essentially done and is doing the same thing. Any detail you're going to want in the model like the gaps between the plating and the recess of the glass window will have to be done by hand. Luckily you shouldn't have to worry about stretched uvs if you go for minor details and rounding it out since 3d printing won't print textures anyway. BUT! Normal maps will make your life easier as some modeling programs can take the info and slightly modify the model to be mimic it. So you may have to reuv it as well as do some high-poly sculpting to get those nooks and crannys into the normal map. But at that rate you might as well sculpt the whole thing. Which would make it look phenomenal mind you.

Then there's the problem of the game texture. As far as I know you cannot paint higher quality texture maps onto a printed model yet. So you're probably better off hand-painting it on yourself. Which could be fun but the more the detail in the model the easier it's going to make your life.

Sorry if that discourages ya.
 

Kuchinawa212

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Man, I check back on this thread thinking is was dead. Thanks for all the input guys. Looks like it's going to be a tough nut to crack. My 'easy' fix is far from the truth it seems. And I don't mine painting it, I was actually planning on it. But again, every little bit helps. Thanks so much
 

Weaver

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Apr 28, 2008
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The problem is that in game models are low resolution and, typically, use normal maps to trick you into think there is detail on them.



Unless you can also extract and use the normal map in your drafting program, the model will look like the top axe.