I don’t know how these asset packs work. Could I get .stl files from them?
Short answer: no
Long answer: game assets are absolutely possible to print but will look nothing like the model you see on screen.
Rendering techniques used for real time mean you want fewer polygons and will be faking a bunch of shit, like hair or thatched roofs for instance, and none of those faked parts will show up correctly on a print since they are actually just textures on planes.
In addition, even the base mesh of many game assets aren’t manifold (watertight) meaning they are more akin to papercraft than 3D printable objects.
True, I didn’t even think of that, buildings you’re not meant to walk into usually don’t even have a floor!
10-4, thanks for the detailed response!
I actually managed to extract the 3D assets from Star Craft 2 and print them, specifically the Baneling and the Ultralisk. I had to remesh them to make them manifold and subdivide to smooth the triangles, but they looked great in the end.
The only problem of the Baneling is that the center of gravity is nowhere near the feet, so it always tips over. Hollowing its body would probably help.
As i said, it’s possible, but it’s not guaranteed to look anything like the original model. I’m unfamiliar with the baneling as a model but I’m assuming it’s probably not hairy, right?
Star Craft 2 models aren’t hairy at all, because they’re really low poly. The engine has to be able to display hundreds of them on a single screen.
Some have some thorn-like protrusions, but I intentionally didn’t try to print them, since they’re way harder to get working.
Yeah this is exactly the kind of model you would want to use to print, my take is that this is indeed possible but there are a lot of selection criteria for the models to work, which you can’t expect a newbie to catch and that will still require a lot of postprocessing before they’re actually printable.
You were able to get them to work with extensive post processing. Models ripped from a game won’t print right unless they are reworked.
That’s not extensive, that’s a five minute process in Blender. I didn’t have to touch a single vertex, it’s all global operations.
There are a few videos on this. It’s not about those assets specifically, it talks about how to do it in general. 3D Print Video Game Models (2021 Updated Tutorial) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aTyIt081l8
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=_aTyIt081l8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Other comments already touched on this, but without a lot of work into each model, they won’t print well. Assets for digital games are meant to be viewed on-screen, they aren’t designed to actually fill out 3D space.
