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Games Entertainment Technology

3D Rendering of Gaming Graphics 42

Posted by Zonk from the i-want-a-tiny-dwarf-paladin-toy dept.
Raph Koster's ever-entertaining blog had a post yesterday about using OGLE to print 3D graphics, and other entertaining but questionable uses of technology. From the post: "OGLE: The OpenGLExtractor is a tool that lets you grab 3d data out of an OpenGL application and output it as models again. What does that mean? It means that someone with a 3d printer can get 3d statuettes of their Second Life character. They can send it off to be manufactured, if they like. It means that you can snag any 3d model you like out of someone else's game data, and insert it into your own 3d scene. So much for stealing textures... ;)"
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3D Rendering of Gaming Graphics More

3D Rendering of Gaming Graphics

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  • Welcome to the world of FOSS (Score:4, Informative)

    by caffeination ( 947825 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:00PM (#14558984)
    For those of you who aren't "into" FOSS culture and all that, all us Linux users already know ogle as The first opensource DVD player to support DVD menus! [chalmers.se]. Another example of a developer not thinking twice about the basic tenets of picking a name for your software, including:
    • Is it shit?
    • Is it already in use?
    • Is it also a word with negative connotations?
    • Will it get me shut down by the trademark police?
    There are many examples of FOSS software breaking these rule. I don't care enough about this incredibly niche piece of software to check if it's Free though (it's a fairly irrelevant detail anyway).

    • OGLE vs. Ogle (Score:2, Insightful)

      by xitshsif ( 909565 )
      OGLE: Acronym, all caps Ogle: Name, proper caps No ambiguity there. Definitely different pieces of software we're talking about.
      • But, how will I install both the OpenGL Extractor and the DVD player with menu support on my Apple II?! It doesn't support mixed case files!!! Please help, sombody - it's quite irgent that I do this.

        Thank you.

      • OGLE: Acronym, all caps Ogle: Name, proper caps No ambiguity there.

        The trademark registry operated by USPTO is case-insensitive, and word marks are put into the file system after strupr(). This is a good thing, as there would be possibility of confusion between OGLE (OpenGL model ripper) and Ogle (media player) among less-informed users.

  • Seems like a nice tool (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:07PM (#14559099)
    I did not know 3D printers were around yet on consumer level: I really like the idea of some MMORPG-er being able to print his/her favorite char.

    People will use this to learn from the models they output, but it also makes stealing/copying of objects/characters much easier.

    • Re:Seems like a nice tool (Score:4, Informative)

      by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:09PM (#14559118)
      In reply to my own "I did not know 3D printers were around yet on consumer level" :

      Judging from this site [dimensionprinting.com], they apparently aren't yet... at $18.900 :)

      • Oh, they're quite "consumer" level. It's just that the "consumer" are industrial designers. The price is quite reasonable for what they do.
        • I had a great tour of a aerospace plant where they had some 3-d printers they used for rapid prototyping of aircraft parts. While there, they demoed for us the making of some chess pieces that would be impossible to carve as they had internal structure (e.g. a Rook with a staircase on the inside. The resin was translucent so you could see it... cool...

    • Re:Seems like a nice tool (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tlosk ( 761023 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:46PM (#14559645)
      Depends I suppose on your precise defintion. Up until about 10 years ago or so would you consider photo development equipment to be consumer level? More expensive than most people would pay to buy one themselves, but almost everyone had no problem dropping their film off at a developers and paying a few bucks for the "use" of the equipment.

      Same here, lots of fabrication shops out there that you can send your data and they send you the object (most are not exclusive to this, just one of their many tools).

      And 10-15 years from now it wouldn't surprise me to be able to pick one of these up for a hundred bucks, just as you can now with digital photography and photo printers.
      • How about Blizzard itself contracts a fabrication firm with 3D printer service and charges $20 (heck, $50-$75) to send you a stereolithograph of your personal character. You could paint it yourself or maybe have it hand painted for an extra charge. Of course, they already own the models, but I imagine it's easier to personalize them by simply grabbing the fully equipped character model straight out of the engine.

        Sounds like $$$ to me.
    • but it also makes stealing/copying of objects/characters much easier

      If you have a car and I use a machine to make an exact copy of it. How am I stealing from you? You still have your car.

      However, I am probaly infrigining some patent or breaking IP law in the process of some company, but lets not call it stealing because that has a legal definition of depriving use of.

      If I stole the car, I would have deprived use of that car from you. (Whether that was taking it for my own personal use or selling it to a cho

  • Be boon for first person shooter... (Score:4, Funny)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:11PM (#14559141)
    After my opponent splatters my guts in a first person shooter, he can pull out my splattered remains to create a 3D trophy. Actually, that might be cool. I can now have a trophy of my boss after I killed him three consecutive times in Counter-Strike. That's better than a screenshot.

  • So... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:15PM (#14559183) Journal
    Who's going to start doing this for money?

    Looking at the sample shots of the WoW character, it's apparent that some of the gear is not translated? I wonder why? Also, I wonder how well it would translate non smooth-skinned characters (=Taurens).
    • The gear is probably a separate model that's just "bolted" on top of your player model. Most games with viewable equipment do this, probably all the way back to Quake 2 (and the vwep mods for Quake 1).

  • when it works (Score:2, Interesting)

    by grendel_x86 ( 659437 )
    Ive been playing w/ OGLE for a few days now, and i stress playing because i have yet to get it to work in the apps mentioned on their page.

    *When* i get it up and running, it will be cool though, and i will use it for generally evil purposes.

    Now to find the $$ for one of those 3D printers...
    • Been trying to get it working on the mentioned apps as well, no luck yet but will keep trying of course this is for one of my 3d monitor projects so it's a bit chreaper to work with the results.
      As for the 3d printers, there is always the CNC routers and glue guns that show up on makezine.com at regular intervals.

  • a directx version? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Uzik2 ( 679490 )
    As I understand it this is catching calls to the GL renderer and saving
    the 3d data. I don't see any reason why you couldn't do it with directx
    as well. Any gotchas there? It might be a fun project.

    • Re:a directx version? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For at least six months the DirectX SDK has included a tool called PIX that does just that... it intercepts DirectX commands to the GPU and allows you to record and replay them. Useful development tool. DirectX does let you control at compile time whether you enable this in your app or not, so game developers can prevent people from extracting their graphics data in their shipped games.
  • $100.00 to the first person who can produce a statue of my maximally-assied scrapper girl in bikini 2 briefs from City of Heroes! Ass width slider -> max, waist slider -> min, ahh, life is good.

    What? You prefer to run around for hours behind a male character so you won't seem "gay"? Interesting...veddy veddy interesting...
    • The CoH/CoV characters appear to rely mostly on texturing for their distinctive appearance, not the polygon model, at least as far as I could tell from the period where their connection lag got bad enough that I could pick a character in the selection screen and watch the polygon model, shading model, and textures load separately; aside from the shifting of some vertexes available with the sliders, there appears to be only the three human polygon models (plus the Kheldian forms), so anything OGLE extracted
  • But you probably want to use something where things are fairly unique. Most fantasy MMOs try to qualify, but are fairly lacking.
    Now City of Heroes and Villains, on the other hand have a very unique look to each character. Maybe I should give Jack Emmerett a heads up on this?
    A thought, anyways.
    • A lot of the 'look' of the characters appears to be a function of the texturing, which OGLE doesn't do. There was a period a while back where Cryptic was having communication problems from its servers to the users' client programs; besides the lag, rubberbanding, and disconnects, one of the ways this manifested was in slow loads of the character data in the character selection screen -- for some people, including me, what would happen was that the character's polygon shape would be transmitted, then an inde
  • They are grabbing opengl calls to grab model info. So why not replace model info you are grabbing with model info that you want.
    That is, instead of
    Game->GLInterceptor->OGLE->Model file
                                          ->opengl->Display

    Game->GLInterceptor->SomePlugin(substitues your model)->opengl->Display

  • another digital rights concern, this time for 3d IP

  • Recording games with this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Max Threshold ( 540114 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @04:10PM (#14561853)
    How much does hooking these OpenGL calls cost in terms of game performance, and how big is the resulting data? If this could capture textures (which it currently can't [eyebeamresearch.org]), it seems like it would be a much better way to record video from games than the ubiquitous FRAPS, which eats up about 1GB per minute with its fast but inefficient codec.

    If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even run your capture through a raytracer or something that would render it in much greater detail than your machine is capable of in real time.

  • How long is going to take you people to hack an inkjet into a 3d printer? I've been waiting for years for you guys!
  • What this REALLY means is that there is now a way to export out of 3d modeling software that doesn't have export tools! This means that crippleware that has the save function disabled now has a save function. This is WAY bigger than exporting game characters. This could actually be useful.

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