3D Print Video Game Models (2021 Updated Tutorial)

on this day 10 years ago the elder scrolls 5 skyrim was released i played the heck out of that game and revisited it several times in the years after and it's actually getting a revisit this year with a brand new anniversary edition but beyond the game just being really fun to play it actually holds a special place in my heart as one of the sort of catalysts for makers muse as a youtube channel you see i got my first break on youtube sharing my technique for ripping game assets from video games like skyrim and 3d printing them and way back in 2014 seven years ago yeah time flies i made a tutorial video on how to do just that with skyrim so i thought it'd be really really fun to go back to my roots and share with you guys my brand new and updated method for ripping game assets from skyrim for 3d printing and how you can add detail back into those assets to create some absolutely incredible 3d printable models let's get started hey you are finally awake okay so what are you going to need well first things first you're going to need skyrim um obviously so uh the original version is the best one to use for this sort of thing because all of the tools that i know of work with it there's been various versions across the years since like special edition and now the latest anniversary edition but i can't promise that the tools i'm going to show will work for that because all of them haven't been developed for years uh but i do know that they will work for like fallout 4 fallout 3 new vegas and that sort of thing because those are quite old games based on the same game engine as skyrim anyway so if you don't have the original version you can actually get it really cheaply uh by getting a steam key from another market like i've used fanatical before and you can get it quite cheap i actually have the game in my steam library from years ago anyway but to follow this tutorial with its current tools and their current state you need the special edition or below and it might work on the anniversary edition i'm just not too sure but for full compatibility the original game is really what you're after then we need nif scopes so nifsco made by niftools is awesome i use it my original tutorial and that lets you go into the game archive and pull out the nifs which are the 3d models the format that the game uses and you can explore them as an obj to then be modified and then repaired for 3d printing i also have a blender plugin but this only works with the original skyrim and i don't find it super useful because what i just do with the objs if i want the textures is i'll go in and get the textures from the texture archive and then combine them myself and blender takes it in with no problem so you might have better better luck than me uh but yeah you can get the nif plug-in but basically nifscope is what we want windows 10 3d builder so yes you do need windows 10 to get windows 10 3d builder but it is hugely powerful for repairing meshes and it's replaced what i used to use which was the netfab cloud service that's no longer available because if you go to it says autodesk has it built into fusion360 and unfortunately it's also replaced mesh mixer which used to be my favorite program of all time because that also got gobbled up by uh autodesk and its features stripped off into fusion 360 and there's been no developments since on meshmixer either i still use meshmixer now and then but for repairing meshes 3d builder is the way to go it repairs them much cleaner and much better than meshmixer ever could and again it's free you just need a copy of windows 10. if you're just going to pull out the files repair them and send them to the printer then that's all you need but if you want to do any sort of additional work to them then you're going to also need the bethesda archive extractor that lets you open up the archives beyond just the meshes because nifsco will open the mesh folder the mesh archive but it won't let you open the texture archive so you need the archive extractor for that and then blender i am a blender neophyte but it has come along so far in recent years and it's such an incredibly powerful program for free it's crazy so it's worth learning and if you have just an ounce of skill when it comes to organic 3d modeling pick up blender and give it a go because it now has a dedicated sculpting workflow next to the dedicated modeling workflow you can render it you can animate in it you can do so much in it and i'm just gonna do some really basic stuff in it but yeah you can take these assets into blender and like i'll show you later on one of my mates did turn it into a fully detailed sculpt based on the original game asset you're almost using it like a 3d image and reference with the original game textures this is all the software you need let's move on to the first stage which is nifscope alrighty so here we have nifscope and you want to use nifscope to navigate the archives and pull out the meshes you want and convert them from a nif into an obj which and then you can do all sorts of things fix them for 3d printing or take them further with 3d modelling in blender so when you do file browse archive and you'll find your mesh archive file in your steam folder under steam apps common and then navigate down to skyrim and then data and then under that you'll find the bsa archive files and we want meshes so uh the later versions like special edition that will have a set several uh archives for meshes but the original game only has one so just you can navigate through them one by one finding the stuff you want pulling it out and then you can go through them later so there's heaps of things in here here's some meshes some of them are useful some of them are less useful um but basically where i recommend starting is the load screen art so these are interesting pose 3d objects that show when the game's loading in uh so for example like brown bear uh or my one of my favorites this one with alduin sitting on the wall so i will save that off so file export obj and it pops up this little message that's fine and then i'm going to save that off there's quite a lot of interesting models under architecture so you can go to architecture and then for example like farmhouse uh and i look for the models that have the higher file size that means more polygons so that means they're more detailed as more stuff to work with so like for example farmhouse um yeah that's pretty interesting uh what about this one that's another farmhouse and farmhouse destroyed but you can also navigate to notable buildings so for example whiterun you can go here white run buildings and you can look through here like for example the white run breeze home i want that so i'm going to file i'm going to export that one and your vascular is massive and um clearly you'll need some repair work but pretty cool you can pull that out as well and then of course we have weapons so if you're interested in cosplay this is a great place to start so i really like the daedric stuff so there's different like grades of models there's ones that are like designed for the first person view and ones that are designed for other views and they'll be different quality um so make sure again choose the ones with a higher file size although they're still very low polygons so you've got like a battlelax here uh daedric dagger pretty cool um war hammer all these are really funky but i really like the dagger um it's really like i printed the dagger originally in my original tutorial so i'm gonna file and save that one as well and that's going to be a good example to show you the quick and easy method of repairing it in 3d builder so navigate to the folder you've saved your objs to and you'll notice there's also a material file for each one we'll get to that in a little bit but right click and then open with 3d builder so it does complain if it can't find all the textures that it needs and that's okay because we're just going to be fixing it for 3d printing so we don't care about textures so just click ignore um and then there's scales so with with uh the game files the game assets it's just an arbitrary sex scale doesn't really make sense for the real world so i import as millimeters but you might want to play around with that it doesn't matter you'll have to scale in your in your slicing software to get it to the size you want anyway but here so you notice there's a there's a red bounding box around it and it says down here one of my objects are invalidly defined click to repair so it identified that this object is not ready for 3d printing and it needs to be repaired that means it's not manifold there's going to be intersecting faces gaps shells and stuff so when you want a 3d print object it needs to be manifold imagine you're filling it with water and needs to fill the inside of the shape that's what the slice is kind of trying to do it's trying to figure out what parts of this basically zero thickness surfaces should actually encompass a object a volume and then it's going to print that so what you just need to do is click that pop-up box and as quick as that it's fixed this model and that's because it's very low poly and it's not too broken but this is ready to print now so you can just basically go okay i'll save that off you can save this as a 3mf but i still generally save as an stl and here it is brought into prusa slicer um so again the scale it's tiny but we can just like scale it to whatever you want to fit your print volume and then you can do whatever you want to it you could slice it up for printing in parts to print larger or print it better or you could then add support material do some modifications and then yeah print this out and you have a real world replication of the in-game object now and then you'll come across models that don't auto repair well so for example i have this wall here this is completely zero thickness and non-manifold these these meshes have the triangles have no thickness so it needs to be repaired to be printed but if i try to repair it in windows builder it doesn't do a good job it's got these weird gaps here and like the triangles all look crap it's not not not right so i'll show you how to do some basic repair work in blender for stuff like this when you want to just cap off areas really quickly and easily so here we have the same wall in blender and what i want to do is i'm going to use the modeling workspace you hit a to select all the triangles and everything but i don't want to do that actually i want to just select the edges so on on your keyboard one is the vertexes two is the edges and three are the faces so hit two and that's going to be your edges and if you hold down alt while you click an edge it will select a edge loop and the whole purpose of this is you want to patch off these areas but if we try to patch this off because it's actually selected the entire open edge loop by pressing f it does exactly the same thing that 3d builder did it doesn't patch it very well at all so in that case we can kind of help it along by doing a like a bridge in one area and then patching off two different areas so i'm going to select this edge here hold down shift and just select this edge and then press f and then hold down alt and then select this edge which selects the edge loop in this area now so it's been like walled off press f and we get a really nice flat surface there and then finally for the bottom hold down alt select this edge press f now what we've done is we've made this object manifold so it's going to be watertight and it's perfect for 3d printing but it looks much much better than what the auto repair did and here in pressure slicer you can see the results so the wall that we didn't do anything to still not very suitable for printing and the wall that we've patched off and made manifold for 3d printing and if you slice them it's pretty obvious which one works so you can do that really quickly once you get the hot keys and the workflow down you can patch a lot of things really really fast if they're simple like that and the auto repair just isn't doing it for you all right so the low poly look is okay for some models but let's say you just really want to have a bit of smoothness and detail to your prints well you can do it two ways one is really easy and the other is incredibly difficult and needs 3d modelling skill so i'm just going to show you the easy one first because that's what most people are going to do and here i have that algebra model from the loading screen art i've got it in 3d builder and the reason i have it here is i'm going to fix it before i do anything to the mesh because what i've found is if i don't fix it first the fixing afterwards gets really difficult so i've brought it into 3d builder and it's going to click repair and it's going to repair my low poly mesh very quickly by basically capping the bottom off and then joining it all together making it manifold so i'm going to save this i just save as an stl that's fine and then i'm going to open it up in blender so i'm going to go import stl and i'm going to grab my recently saved stl which i've fixed the first thing you'll notice is it's massive and like not loading in properly you can't view it right that's fine you can change the scale so just click it and then click scale and then here on the right hand side let's do it's going to make 0.2 it doesn't really matter but that way it can manage it a bit easier so if you see this mesh looking like this right don't get excited and think it's magically high detail this is just a viewing rendering mode which is smooth rendering but you actually want to shade it flat to work on it properly because that's how it will be reproduced in the real world so again smooth that's not actually what it is shade flat that's actually the triangles that's actually the low poly mesh but we can add a bit of smoothness to it using subdivision so you want to click the blue gear on the right hand side and we want to add a modifier so we're adding a subdivision surface modifier and this is just from one pass of subdividing and it's already so much better so we can add more to it if we want the higher you go the more load it puts on your cpu and the more triangles it produces so there's definitely a diminishing returns but already there at two i think it looks great so the thing about subdivision is you will lose sharp edge definition so here for example it's going to start rounding that over these details here it's going to start rounding them over which is not fantastic and the base as well it will start sort of rounding that over if you don't repair the model before going in you can avoid some of that but then it takes ages to try to repair it afterwards because you let you have these like weird gaps and stuff left after the subdivision so up to you but i prefer to repair before going into blender so now i've done that you'll notice that there's a lot of details that are really thin like the teeth and the wings for example are super thin too so i want to add some thickness to it i'm going to do that using a displaced modifier so add modifier displace and all this is doing is simply taking the mesh and pushing it out or in if you want by a certain amount so that's one let's see what two looks like looks pretty good what about what about three three is pretty chunky but if you're printing it on a 3d printer you need to make it actually physically reproducible but two looks okay so i think two is pretty good and with just those steps we've gotten away with adding a lot of detail to this mesh making it look really cool with only a few interesting weird artifacts like the wings are a bit odd um there's a few weird three weird things going on here but overall not too bad and as an example of that here i have pressure slicer with the resin work flow and this is the file we just made brought in and from here you can you know hollow it out you can add supports change the orientation and prepare it for 3d printing on your preferably resin 3d printer because it's quite high detail i don't think you could reproduce this easily on a filament 3d printer unfortunately but what if you really want to add detail to these models like make them look as good as the real thing well unfortunately you need some organic 3d modelling talent to do it you can use the textures in the game to displace into the mesh after subdivision and fixing but you will have to go in manually and model in detail because it's just not good enough to bring them from the game to reproduce in the real world but i'll kind of show what to expect and i'm going to defer to my friend over at valtec vr who is an incredibly talented 3d modeler on his process of converting these game files into incredible 3d sculpts using a full combination of these techniques but before you start you need the textures to go with your exported obj so when you export the obj out of nif scope you have a materials file so what i'm going to do is right click i'm going to do open it up with notepad plus plus and what this does is just show me what textures it's expecting when it wants to open up so you can see that the alduin from the loading screen wants this rigged stone uh seven load screen ruin door load screen uh door dragon room alphabet blah blah blah blah we need to go and find these textures and that's why we need the bethesda archive extractor because that will open up the texture archive where we can go and navigate and find these textures so with the archive extractor just go to file open file and you want to navigate again to your steam apps folder and then you want to open up your textures archive but this will open up any of the archives so you can find like the dialogue and the sound effects and things in here it's really really cool gonna play around with them but yeah just for this just want the textures archive and then if we go back to the materials file we want to find out where these are stored you can export all of the textures but it's a lot but it can make finding them easier if you want to do this sort of thing a lot but for example i just paste it in it finds them here because there's a few different variations i'm just going to export all of them so you go to extract and it'll just export them out under these uh folders exactly what we want so you see here it's calling for the texture under textures dungeons and then the uh the name of the texture then we go back to blender and go to file import obj and then make sure everything is in the correct folders so i've got here and i've got the texture folder there and then import and if you print to the appropriate skyrim god then it should work if i click texture there you go just like that uh the scaling again is completely off it's way too big so i'm just gonna scale it all down again but again don't forget this doesn't magically have more detail suddenly it's still low poly it's just got the textures on it now so what we can do again is we can do a subdivision but then we can use these textures to actually add real texture real 3d data onto the model it's very hacky and you do need to do a lot of cleanup normally to the mesh to make it work better but i'm just going to do it really quickly here to show you kind of an idea of what to expect so i'm just going to go to the modifier i'm going to do a subdivision and i'm going to do four levels of subdivision which is going to be very intensive on the cpu but adds so much triangles so many so much detail that hopefully when we do the displace it should look a little bit cleaner now you've done that you can go to deform and displace uh and the idea is to get one of the textures that's been uv mapped to the the geometry and then displace that to add detail into the model so down here texture properties we're going to go to uh new and then we're going to do image or movie and the image will be one of the textures that we've got the economies i'm not sure which one to use i'm going to go with this one probably should have chosen a simpler model to start with it actually looks pretty cool as is but that's not correctly mapped you want to go back to displace and the coordinates will be uv now it has done something but it's not really obvious so the strength i might increase that maybe three and it is doing something but it doesn't look fantastic maybe small it'll look okay but it kind of looks like pixelated but it does add a lot of interesting texture to a fairly bland geometry so you what the whole idea of this is you take this and then you model in the detail further and that's why you should go watch my french tutorial right here because he is a genius when it comes to this i don't like doing organic modelling myself so i can't personally take this sort of thing any further because i just don't have the talent for it um but he can so if you want to do this sort of thing if you want to push your models even further and you want them to look absolutely insane go watch his video so here are some of the things i've printed out of skyrim starting with this daedric sword so i originally printed this on the cr30 for that review it's a belt 3d printer so it works in a really interesting way the the gantry's at an angle and it has a belt which feeds the print forward layer by layer so it's actually printed only in two halves stuck together to create this humongous sword which is way bigger than any normal 3d print it could produce unfortunately i did drop it and broke the end of the the pummel off the sword but if you're into cosplay on that you can rip game assets like the weapons straight from the game and produce them large or if you like small so these tiny little weapons were printed on the prusa sl1s again i reviewed that very recently and these again were just ripped from the game and fixed using 3d builder out of windows 10. didn't do any subdivision i didn't do any 3d modeling to get detail back up because at this scale they don't really need it they are they look really good as is and some of them are quite complicated like you know this mace morrigs mace i think i believe and then some of them are quite simple but just quite elegant like this tiny mehrunes razor which is more like mehrunes toothpick so these can be really really fun scaling them down for your scale model adventures now sort of thought to myself well if i'm doing that sort of thing scaling them down for like d and d then what about the architecture in skyrim what about those assets what do they look like when you rip them and 3d print them so that's what these walls are they're just ripped from the the bsa archive in the architecture folder and i think these are the ones from around whiterun i believe so again these are fairly low poly like all the models in the game but instead of subdividing it i just left it as is and i used blender to cap it off to seal it for 3d printing so it's fully manifold and when these are scaled down they have a really nice look to them i reckon if you're interested in dnd and that getting these little assets and then using them to form a sort of playing field like a map could be really really cool because even though they're low poly they look quite good and you can have your little figurines like this around and it really adds depth and detail to whatever campaign you're running then of course i just had to print myself a breeze home as well because i'm not going to pay 5 000 gold for that again this is just the original mesh it hasn't been added to subdivided or modelled any further than what it was so it is low poly but when you print it small like this it actually suits the fdm fff 3d printing process quite well if you're going to print in resin yes you might want to add detail back in because resin's capable of reproducing it but for fdm like this it actually has a really nice little look to it and i think a lot of those assets are really useful to be reused in game design for your dungeons and dragons campaigns and that sort of thing one of the biggest issues with the models that you rip is they're not posed so what you'll often get is if you get a character they'll be in a t-pose like this and that's designed to be rigged and then animated in the game itself but i found out early on that the loading screen meshes were posed in interesting dynamic ways and then they were saved like that so what i have here is the the alduin dragon from the loading screen and it's a really really good model to then rip and print because everyone knows the dragons from skyrim especially alduin and i just really wanted to create this for myself because you know i've always wanted it from the game however if you are skilled at organic 3d modelling you can take these meshes and then add detail back in using the uv maps to for example display some areas and then model in detail yourself manually if you're skilled at that you can turn these meshes into incredible 3d prints this is a dwarven bust that one of my mates did so he took the mesh from the game and then fixed it up in blender and then modeled in detail himself within blender and then i just printed it out on the frozen sonic mega 8k the detail is phenomenal it looks so so good and it's like using the original meshes as a very strong reference like a 3d reference that you then add detail in because again the original game assets aren't designed to do this they're designed to be light on your system so then you can sort of artificially make them look curvy and have texture using bump maps and the uv maps and all sorts of fancy trickery which i don't really quite fully understand but that's why the game assets are low poly by default if you want stuff like this it is a quite a lot of extra work to get it to this point he spent several days adding detail back in manually but if you want to do this and that sort of thing excites you it's a really good starting point to know how to pull the assets out of games and then use that to create your own versions of those models i do find a little bit odd that even now like seven years after making that original tutorial and ripping files from skyrim there hasn't really been much progress in the field they sort of seem to run separate to each other the modding community 3d printing community doesn't seem to collide very often and one of the questions that was brought up back then which i still don't really have an answer for is is this legal so you buy a computer game right of course like you can play that computer game but the licensing does it cover printing out the models from the computer game i'm not too sure my default's always been and again i'm not a lawyer but my default's always been i don't think it's okay to sell these models so i don't think it's okay to sell the game assets that you've printed and ripped but i think it's probably okay to print them for your own personal use if you're not making money off it then you know what does it matter who's it hurting so again i don't know the full detail to that there hasn't really been any development in that space i certainly didn't get contacted after making those videos so who knows but please do be careful and don't do this to try to profit off game assets because they're big companies they have a lot more money than you and even if they don't really have a case you don't really want to get on their bad side by trying to sell assets that aren't really yours the only thing that's a little bit muddy to me is stuff like this where the game assets are being used as a like almost like a reference photo and then it's been heavily modified and this is this is detail it's been added in manually um and that takes skill and artist artistry to do but it is based on a design from a game so that's very muddy to me i don't know if that's okay to sell or not uh but there it is i'd love to hear your thoughts and comments in the description below and thanks for watching i really love doing this sort of thing again it's where i first got my start on youtube it's sharing really unconventional tutorials again ripping files from the game if you search that online you still find those old videos seven eight years later because there hasn't been much stuff in this space so it's something i really enjoy doing and i hope you will find some value in it too because here i'm making some use my aim to empower your creativity through technology and yes if you haven't noticed i got a haircut and if you don't like it then deal with it thanks for watching guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 139,092

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: _aTyIt081l8

Length: 28min 27sec (1707 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021