I really appreciate the fact you explained what each modifier does in blender instead of just saying to do it. I’ve used blender for a while now so now I know what the stuff does, but when I was new and learning how to use it, a lot of the tutorials were very vague about everything so it was pretty hard.
Extra trick in blender is to use the bump map texture to add surface details. After you subsurface the model, instead of loading the colourspace texture, load in the displacement map (I can't remember the exact name Bethesda give to theirs, but it will be the RGB image). You can apply another modifier using that texture instead. It offsets the vertices on the model to match how the game would interpret it. (The game doesn't use vertices for this, just fakes it with light rendering)
What about assets from something like Mass Effect. Would it work with a ship? Also, is there a good blender tutorial for someone to basically prints stuff. I'm not an artist and that's a hugely complex application.
Talking about Bethesda prints, the first video I ever saw of yours was the one where you printed the Fallout Deathclaw in a huge size in multiple parts - and got my first Up Mini not long after! How time flies! Great to see you update this 'origin story' for modern times, the most frequently requested prints I get are game file rips from Destiny 2, using 'Destiny STL Generator' - I'll definitely be using this same method for fixing up those models, as they're frequently VERY borked!
Haha! Yeah that print wasn't even that large, the UP mini was just tiny. 3D Builder has the best repair I've come across on a free program for some time, give it a go with those borked models : )
Combining Edge Split with Subdivision Surface and playing with the Edge Split angle is how I preserve sharp details. It isn't perfect, but it is much more powerful for not much more effort.
I'm a Blenbder Artist, Edge Split will damage your mesh a bit, here's what I would do. +Go in edit mode->select->sharp edges->Shift + E and input 1. This will mark out sharp edge as you like and Subdivision will not break the edge +Add in a Bevel Modifier, this will add more edges around already sharp edge to reserve it rather than splitting current edge in 2. Remember to place Bevel modifier above the subdivision modifier First method is lengthier but will produce better result and less glitches than the second one, second is quick for tests
Oh. My. God.... Thank you SO much on the displace modifier!!! I have spent weeks manually trying to bulk everything up feeling like there was a better way of doing things. You have literally saved me hundreds of hours! Realized I wasn't subscribed but I sure as hell am now!
Great video! Here's some Blender tips and tricks to help if you want to understand it more. If you're wanting to add detail with the displace method, it's better to add more polygons manually rather than using subdivision surfaces. Subdivision Surfaces smooths the model. To manually do it, go into edit mode with tab, and select all, press the W, and the S or click Subdivide. The manual method, doesn't change any of the geometry, it just splits the polygons in half. You can do it multiple times, but each time, it is exponentially more. For example if you do SS on a pyramid, you'll end up with a blob. If you do it manually, you'll just have a pyramid with a lot more polygons. In order to work with displacement, it would be best to separate the models first if possible by selecting all in edit mode, and pressing P, all loose objects. Then you can displace them separately, and then use a Boolean to rejoin them. Another way to do the wall, would be to use the Solidify modifier so that you still have just the wall shape, as well as not having to print the thing as a fully solid object. The reason the Alduin model was not viewable, was because the camera distance was not far enough to view the whole model, to fix this, on the item properties in the top right of the main window, select the view tab, and change the clip distance. This way you don't have to rescale the object. Blender's scaling is very accurate, I make non-organic size critical components with it all the time. You just have to set it up how you want it. I'm an American that loves the metric system for measurements with modeling. It's so much easier than freedom units. (for this anyway). There is a built in 3D modeling addon in blender that you can fix manifold objects with. It doesn't work all the time, but most of the time, you can fix object pretty easily. It becomes a tab in the item properties top right window. If you ever need any help with blender, feel free to ask. -Kevin ( inventimark, youtube channel).
Great video! I'll just add that there's a method to retain those sharp edges when subdividing. There's a setting called "Mean Crease" that applies per edge. It controls how th smoothing is applied: A value of 0 (default) and the edge is fully smoothed A value of 1 and the edge is sharp It allows for a much finer control of the smoothing, and it could change everything on that alduin model. It can take a bit more time to get all the edges you need to sharpen, but it's not really that more complex, just time consuming and would give a much better result
I am so shocked that the exact, perfect video that I was looking for actually exists. Thank you so much for making this tutorial, gets me even more excited for when I can finally invest in this hobby :D
As soon as I started to watch the video I noticed the new hair cut and all I thought about was you must be going to Cosplay as Zorg. Gary Oldman's character in The 5th Element
Quick tip: If a detail gets rounded over by the subdivision surface modifier and you want to bring it back, you can select the edges in edit mode that you want to restore and press Shift + E then drag the geometry to form back against the edges.
The "not loading in properly" because it is too big in blender is a clipping setting. You can also run into this working with something very large or very small. The correct fix for this behavior is in the right side view menu> "clip start" or "end" depending if it is doing it zooming in or out. This could be important if you are trying to model something at the correct size. Edit: Just noticed the right side menus are not showing on you blender. It is called the "sidebar". 'n' button will show or hide it. I always have it on on mine.
Blender has an included "3d printing" plugin that allows you to repair meshes with a single button press. You can also voxel remesh a model in sculpt mode to make it solid and manifold if that doesn't work
quick tipp from my side. if you created the bridge like in 11:23 you can select the bottom edge of the open gap. after that, hit the F key. it will fill out the next bridge and therefore will create a quad face instead of an n-gone if you will the whole edge loop. hold the F key and it will fill the whole face with the next bridges. pretty cool.
Note for the legal aspect of ripping content out of the game files. It's actually written in the terms of use. And it varies between games. In most case, it's authorized for personal use (since it can't be monitored anyway). For blender, if you want a great entry point to 3D modeling in this software, Blender Guru is your guy. Tons of content with updtated version of it's main course suiting the lastests versions of blender. Then you can go deeper with other big names in youtube that you'll probably discover during your journey.
That’s awesome, didn’t know you could print from Skyrim. I made a short tutorial on how to print from Team Fortress 2, it’s really similar, just with source engine model files. Didn’t know how to repair meshes before, this is gonna be super useful!
You know, ive been learning 3D with Zbrush and Blender for 3 years now.. i started November 2018 "Yeah, im a Geek i wrote it down when i started EARNESTLY Learning" i took 6 months off one year cause i thought "im too old to learn, i may as well just give up" at only 35 mind you.. and then i was like, no.. thats an INCREDIBLY Stupid way of thinking! ive SCULPTED all my life! literally since i was 2 with Playdoh! why would i give up on learning something ive been told is not Rocket Science.. and i went back.. and the other 6 months was just after my Mother died.. i went into a 2/3 month depressive episode, and then i had to pack for 3 entire months so i could move to my new house.. so i look at it like one of those 4 years i haven't learned anything at all.. but 3 of those years ive tried to learn at least SOMETHING every single day. and only TODAY did i finally learn what "Non Manifold" means, and how to solve it. the only issue i can come up with is how you patched it, that made an "Ngon" which Zbrush HATES Ngons. it cannot use them. but... BUT... you could easily just make the Verts connect in different places. it doesn't gotta be pretty, just no Ngons. then you can take it into Zbrush and sculpt on top of it. also im fairly sure if there is a way to extract the Textures out of other Video games, you can turn them into Normal Maps... and then have the Normal Maps shrink around the models to give them the texture they have in the video games.. ill have to do more research about that, though.
Yeah, think the first video for when I started 3D printing was that old Skyrim one. I wanted to find models from the game and make them for myself. Really cool to see it updated! Especially when so many more people are getting into 3D printing. The editing and rework done to game assets would be scary to hear about through a lawyer's letter, but damn does it seem like it'd be fine so long as personal time was put into crafting it right.
If you want highly detailed models I totally recomend getting meshes straight out Skyrim mods! For example Static Mesh Improvement Mod (SMIM) or Immersive Creatures look amazing in-game and they must look even better in real life cheers!
I love Blender. I use to use it years ago to make models for virtual worlds. I know a lot use 3dsmax and Maya but I always loved Blender. Your models look cool.
there is a pluggin called F2 or something that comes with blender. it lets you literally fill stuff like that wall in 1 face at a time simply by pressing F with 1 edge selected. i use it a lot! edge loops are your friend for preserving crisp edges with subdiv- also i think you can tell the subdiv not to touch specific points on a model.
My daughter and I made the MLP model following your video the other day and it worked great. I used the formware online repair tool and it worked well.
Ah yes, Skyrim... the one I never played... as someone else said: use a normal map for displacement as it will allow you to convert the faceted/flat shaded model into the smooth shaded model, but with actual details. Normal maps are literally generated by making a really high res model and then a low res (game usable) model then "baking" the high res detail into a 3D texture (XYZ -> RGB). When the game uses it, it applies light to it and the normal map displaces it instead of the polygon, so it looks smooth instead of "low poly". Displacement modifier can do that at a geometry level instead of a shading level, which would make it more useful for 3D printing. Edit: what I would love is for there to be either something that can turn the the texture mapped model into either separate parts for MMU printing or... because you've already gone through the process: convert the texture into a print so you can hydrodip the model. No paint, no MMU/Palette. Just a vat of liquid, a model held at a specific angle, and an image printed on some special paper... plus a mostly steady hand.
I'm so happy you did this i have found lots of files that I have issues with my resin printer that were done for fdm and it needs fixing, I will definitely give this a try ,thank you!!
If you want more geometry to play with but don't want to use subdivision to avoid smoothing you can use the multiresolution modifier. Could be useful in some scenarios. It's also less destructive because you can always revert to a different LOD.
@Maker's Muse About the model not displaying correctly on Blender because of it's size. You fix that by changing the clipping of the "camera". You do that by pressing "N" (or clicking the small arrow to the right of the XYZ gyzmo on the corner), then going to the "View" tab on that menu that opened, and then changing the "Clip Start" and "End" that are below the "Focal Length". You can play with the values but I personally use 0.01 mm and 1000 mm for start and end. Also, not sure if this is needed but, you might need to change your Blender scaling, if so you should probably check the previous setting after you change the scale because they might change because of it. That is done on the right side of the window, below your "Scene Collection", in a tab called "Scene Properties" (it has an icon with a cone and two spheres, at least it looks like that to me), then you go to "Units" and change the "Unit System" to "Metric" for example, and the "Unit Scale" to "0.001" so that the base scale is in millimeters. These are good settings if the objective is to work in blender for 3D printing since we're working on models that are, most of the time, going to be millimeters and centimeters, not really meters in size. By the way, in case you don't know, or anyone else, to keep these settings always like this, what you need to do is, open a brand new empty file, do these changes, and then go to "File" on the top left of the window, go to "Defaults" and "Save Startup File". This will make that state of Blender the default state for any new project. But take notice that if you're loading an already made file, it might load that file's configurations, even the UI, if you want to keep your configurations you need to disable "Load UI" in the Blender Preferences in "Edit" - "Preferences" - "Save & Load". Hope these help someone. Thanks for the video.
I thought about this for years but one of these days a game company is going to be smart enough to release 3D files alongside their games. It would be nothing for them to throw together and it would be a boon for their fan communities. Honestly, movies should do it too for cosplayers. Imagine a world where a new property not only supports their fandom directly by giving them assets but maybe even designs those assets to be easy for the community to replicate in the first place. It's a massive appeal for indie games and it boggles my mind that the industry hasn't realized it yet.
I want to mention a cool feature. If you apply a subdivision mdf and then bring in the textures of the mesh using a displacement mdf you will get those textures but printables
I was thinking this when he mentioned the game getting yet another "remaster" this year, like really? instead of just making a new game, they "remaster" it THREE times?
Cool video, Angus. I remember the original - watched it a mere couple years after its release when I got started in 3D printing. 😁 And awesome haircut.
@@MakersMuse I know the most functions but I am just bad at sculpting, but adding detail shouldnt be so complicated. Alpha brushes etc. arent so hard to use
That Dwarven armour bust is beautiful, going to have to try to follow Valtech's tutorial then to remake it because I absolutely have to make it and paint it! I've developed a bit of a thing for printing dwemer stuff and painting them xD
So I've been trying this method for the past few days and all those people saying you could get good results with the displacement maps either didn't try it out themselves, or know a secret method that I cannot find. Skyrim doesn't seem to store displacement maps, only normal maps. The conversion is not super difficult, but the end result in Blender leaves quite a lot to be desired. If you're expecting a result like the Dwarven bust in the video, you'll be disappointed. It adds detail, yes, but it requires an ungodly amount of polygons (frying your pc), doesn't work with the fixing that 3D builder does (because it changes the mesh) and the end result is blurry at best. If the scale you're aiming for is 28-32mm, I would just sculpt some minor details yourself and paint the rest directly on it. Next step is to actually print full models of your own player character. There is supposedly a method using the Outfit Studio program on the Nexus, but I haven't had time to try it out yet. I will report here later.
There are ways in some software (can't go into details without going through multiple programmes, so I'll leave it there) where you can tell the program: "I want these faces to be part of group A, these faces to be part of group B, etc." and that _separates_ these groups, so you don't get smoothing e.g. at the edge of the bases, where they should be crisp lines; with more advanced programs, you can even subdivide these groups distinctly from each other, giving you even greater control over smoothing.
I can't wait to try this, I have a full color printer (Da Vinci Color) and have not had much of a cause to use it. Also that skyrim has been my all time favourite game
If the game you are ripping models from has normal, or better displacement maps; you will get much better results using those with the displacement modifier. Using a colour texture with displacement is.. not going to do much. I also find the multi-res modifier produces better results than the subdivision modifier.
Just saw this after figuring out Blender had a .mdl importer first thing I had to do was all the original Quake characters so now I have a Shambler on my desk I love it! Its worth doing multiple prints because of size options and many different animation frames to pick from for posing. Trying to think of next oldschool low-poly game models that can be imported that I can do next.
I somehow became a Jack of all trades and know how to rip game assets and modify them in blender, now I just need a resin printer, wish I had some help (in person) fixing the Z wobble in my Monoprice Mini
I'm pretty sure you can use the normal texture map in blender to recreate original vertex positions. You should get the original high poly models as they were created by the developers. You can't use normal maps directly however as normal maps only store the direction of the normals at texture level and is used directly in lighting calculations to give an appearance of more complicated surface, basically it just tells dirctly in which direction the surface points at each texel, what you need is a height map which is typically not provided as it is faster to use normal maps. There are tools to convert normal maps into height maps though and I'm not sure if blender can do this natively. I think this is worth looking into.
Normal map will never give you back original high poly. It's got limited resolution so there is a limit to how much detail can be recovered, and as you say, you actually need displacement rather than just normals (even then you ewouldn't get back to the high poly because of the limited texture resolution). It's still a lot better than trying to use the color texture though. It will add details that are much better than trying to use the color texture, which is a last resort.
II a tools works for Fallout 4 &*/or 76 then it will work for SE and (probably) AE: This is because Fallout 4 was developed using the same engine that is also in Skyrim SE. Yes, there are differences, but those are in the specific addons, not in the base engine. Plus many of those tools now have a 64 bit as well as the original 32 bit version available, and, if not there are conversion tools for SE available.
IN BLENDER to lessen the tax on your CPU - Go to the render tab and set the render device to GPU so that your graphics card (IF you have one) does all the work instead of your CPU. Makes things run tons faster.
On the legality aspect: I am also not a lawyer, but I did spend a decade as a law librarian and remain interested in IP law. What follows is my opinion only and NOT legal advice. First, more than most law copyright law is all about the fine details, and those fine details vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For example, almost all copyright law protects a creation through the creator's life and for a period after their death. This latter protection is meant to allow a creators family time to transition from the lost of the "breadwinner" and dates to a time when it was assumed only one person in a home would be working, and that that person would have a wife and children. Last I checked on this, Australia's "post-death protection period" was a good 20 years shorter than the EU's and about 15 years shorter than Canada's. So investigate your local laws! My experience is in Alberta, so my knowledge is strongest on Albertan or Canadian law. Finally, I've been out of the legal arena for about 5 years now and IP law moves fast, so my knowledge might be out of date. That said, in Canada and the United States computer programs are fully protected under copyright. So are statues. I don't know if a court has ever ruled on whether or not a 3d model is a computer program or a statue or something else, but I find it hard to imagine a judge not looking at this and going "well, it's kind of a computer program of a statue, so it makes sense that it's under copyright." In my opinion, it's best to assume that all of these models are protected under copyright law. This means that doing *anything* to those models without a license is a breach of copyright. When you installed the game, the EUA will have granted you a license to run the program on your computer in order to play the game. It *probably* didn't give you a license to do anything else to it. Which means that ripping assets from the game and converting them to a different format probably is a copyright violation in most western jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions do have exemptions that allow small violations of copyright for personal and educational use, but how exactly those work tend to be very specific to the jurisdiction. Canada's "personal use" rules are radically different from the United States' "fair use" rules. And these can be very detail oriented. For example, in Canada it's legal for you to photocopy one chapter of a copyrighted book for your own personal use. It is not, however, legal for an organization like a library or a university to copy that chapter and provide to someone. During the 1990s, it was even illegal for the librarian to operated the photocopier for you - at that time, you had to do all the work yourself. (Fortunately, in the early Oughts some judge (who probably had had a librarian make lots of photocopies for him) overturned that detail, and said that it didn't matter who actually pushed the green button, the important thing is what the purpose of the copying was.) Now, I have no idea if a judge would interpret the .NIF for that dragon as a single program (in which case you've copied 100% of it and "Personal Use" clearly does not apply) of if they'd interpret it as a portion of the larger program (in which case they might treat it as analagous to a "chapter of a book" and allow the "Personal Use" exemption.) It is worth noting that in Canada, you can't copy a chapter of a book under "Personal Use" and then come back a week later and copy the next chapter; as soon as you start copying the second chapter "Personal Use" no longer applies. So ripping a bunch of models would probably not be "Personal Use" in Canada even if the judge decided they were all parts of a single, larger work. The question of whether or not one will get in *trouble* for doing this, however, is distinct from whether or not it's *legal*. Copyright can be enforced at any time, and (unlike trademarks) choosing not to enforce your copyright in one instance doesn't prevent you from enforcing it in a different instance. Which basically means that, as long as one isn't costing a company money or moral standing or potential future work, it's usually not worth their time to enforce. (Costing them money is obvious. Costing them future money is fairly clear - for example, if you ripped the models and used them to make a CGI movie and Bethesda was all "hey, we thought we might maybe make a movie in the future so you can't do that." Moral standing is less intuitive to people, but companies and people do act to enforce copyright to protect their public image. Bethesda probably wouldn't care if you used art from their games to promote a high school science fair, but they'd probably come down on you like a ton of bricks if you used that art to promote a white supremacist rally.) So here, I'd agree with Angus: use this process for your own, private activities, don't go around selling copies of it on etsy, and it's unlikely Bethesda will even notice you've done it. And there's no "copyright police." In order for copyright to be enforced, the copyright holder has to take action to do so. Finally, the bust. This is a derivative work; the bust started with Bethesda's copyrighted model and then Angus' mate added their own work to it. Most jurisdictions say that if you change something just a little, the original copyright still applies, but if you change it a *lot* or transform it to a new medium, then it's a new artwork with it's own copyright. Exactly where this but would land on that scale is going to really depend on the jurisdiction and the judge, and so this one I will just leave lie. Once again, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and copyright laws are very different in different jurisdictions. Before taking any action that may have legal consequences, one ought to consult a lawyer.
Good revisit! I sure hope it stays ..legal..ha. I sure do see a lot of for sale models that clearly were ripped and then tweaked by talent to look better for printing. That might be considered 'fan art'..idk.
The UV Map displacement, it didn't look like your texture didn't line up with your model's UV map. I think, since you used 3D Builder to fix the model, the UV map is probably all over the place and not how it originally was with the game model. You can kinda tell when looking at the lower part of the base at around 21:02. I've got an unopened Mars 2 Pro & graphics tablet waiting for me to go through CGBoost's blender basics and sculpting series and learn how to do all this myself. I'm ambitious but uber keen :)
I’d love to get a specific Transformers War For Cybertron Starscream pose screen captured like this but only have a laptop now. Pretty I’d still have the game if I could remember my steam account. Might have to try learning this if can get a computer one day. Wish I could get into this just seems like a really expensive hobby to do at good quality as I’d want to print decent sized statues.
Just wondering, would it be possible to add the original bumpmaps instead of textures in blender? Those represent actual 3D data, so will probably give a better result than textures.
@@MakersMuse A quick google gives me "The game engine automatically determines the name of the normal map by using the name of the diffuse texture and adding "_n" to it. Example: Helmet.dds --> Helmet_n.dds." So I guess all I have to do is do what you did in 20:28 but then use the _n textures instead of the normal ones? The only issue is that they don't show up in the selection. I'm not a blender expert, any idea how to make them show up?
The grammar in the title threw me for a loop. This is perfect timing, just as I'm getting back into Skyrim. Happy Skyrim Anniversary
oops haha, ill fix that
Yooo same
I really appreciate the fact you explained what each modifier does in blender instead of just saying to do it. I’ve used blender for a while now so now I know what the stuff does, but when I was new and learning how to use it, a lot of the tutorials were very vague about everything so it was pretty hard.
Extra trick in blender is to use the bump map texture to add surface details. After you subsurface the model, instead of loading the colourspace texture, load in the displacement map (I can't remember the exact name Bethesda give to theirs, but it will be the RGB image). You can apply another modifier using that texture instead. It offsets the vertices on the model to match how the game would interpret it. (The game doesn't use vertices for this, just fakes it with light rendering)
What about assets from something like Mass Effect. Would it work with a ship? Also, is there a good blender tutorial for someone to basically prints stuff. I'm not an artist and that's a hugely complex application.
Sir, when I try to do the displace mod it make the mesh like a crumpled paper. How to fix this?
I'm pretty certain that's a normal map, and turning a normal map into proper displacement requires a master's touch.
@@markdbest3244 Look up how to convert a normal map to displacement.
@@Ang3lUki thanks for that info. Actually, i just didnt scale (dont know much about blender).
Talking about Bethesda prints, the first video I ever saw of yours was the one where you printed the Fallout Deathclaw in a huge size in multiple parts - and got my first Up Mini not long after! How time flies!
Great to see you update this 'origin story' for modern times, the most frequently requested prints I get are game file rips from Destiny 2, using 'Destiny STL Generator' - I'll definitely be using this same method for fixing up those models, as they're frequently VERY borked!
Haha! Yeah that print wasn't even that large, the UP mini was just tiny. 3D Builder has the best repair I've come across on a free program for some time, give it a go with those borked models : )
@@MakersMuse I can’t get the texture load to work any advice
Combining Edge Split with Subdivision Surface and playing with the Edge Split angle is how I preserve sharp details. It isn't perfect, but it is much more powerful for not much more effort.
Nice! I'll have to play around with that.
I'm a Blenbder Artist, Edge Split will damage your mesh a bit, here's what I would do.
+Go in edit mode->select->sharp edges->Shift + E and input 1. This will mark out sharp edge as you like and Subdivision will not break the edge
+Add in a Bevel Modifier, this will add more edges around already sharp edge to reserve it rather than splitting current edge in 2. Remember to place Bevel modifier above the subdivision modifier
First method is lengthier but will produce better result and less glitches than the second one, second is quick for tests
This dudes a damn wizard
A true god-send!
Only because I suck at organic modelling 🤣
I read this as "lizard" for some reason and was so confused
@@MakersMusewhere the link to his video to learn
@@MakersMuse potato tomato, same thing
Fun fact: since the first video Angus has not aged a single day :D
LoL IKR?
This is a widely spread secret
he vampire
That's because Australia, he stands upside down the whole time 😂
@@FireN2k9 ah, so he gets younger?
Oh. My. God.... Thank you SO much on the displace modifier!!!
I have spent weeks manually trying to bulk everything up feeling like there was a better way of doing things. You have literally saved me hundreds of hours! Realized I wasn't subscribed but I sure as hell am now!
Great video! Here's some Blender tips and tricks to help if you want to understand it more.
If you're wanting to add detail with the displace method, it's better to add more polygons manually rather than using subdivision surfaces. Subdivision Surfaces smooths the model. To manually do it, go into edit mode with tab, and select all, press the W, and the S or click Subdivide. The manual method, doesn't change any of the geometry, it just splits the polygons in half. You can do it multiple times, but each time, it is exponentially more.
For example if you do SS on a pyramid, you'll end up with a blob. If you do it manually, you'll just have a pyramid with a lot more polygons.
In order to work with displacement, it would be best to separate the models first if possible by selecting all in edit mode, and pressing P, all loose objects. Then you can displace them separately, and then use a Boolean to rejoin them.
Another way to do the wall, would be to use the Solidify modifier so that you still have just the wall shape, as well as not having to print the thing as a fully solid object.
The reason the Alduin model was not viewable, was because the camera distance was not far enough to view the whole model, to fix this, on the item properties in the top right of the main window, select the view tab, and change the clip distance. This way you don't have to rescale the object.
Blender's scaling is very accurate, I make non-organic size critical components with it all the time. You just have to set it up how you want it. I'm an American that loves the metric system for measurements with modeling. It's so much easier than freedom units. (for this anyway).
There is a built in 3D modeling addon in blender that you can fix manifold objects with. It doesn't work all the time, but most of the time, you can fix object pretty easily. It becomes a tab in the item properties top right window.
If you ever need any help with blender, feel free to ask. -Kevin ( inventimark, youtube channel).
Such a clever idea. It’s wild to see how far the software had come; awesome video!
I reckon! Blender has absolutely blown me away, I need to get over my ancient hang-ups and learn to use it properly.
@@MakersMuse It’s legit! I was using daily for a while; there’s a brutal learning curve but it’s worth it!
Great video! I'll just add that there's a method to retain those sharp edges when subdividing.
There's a setting called "Mean Crease" that applies per edge. It controls how th smoothing is applied:
A value of 0 (default) and the edge is fully smoothed
A value of 1 and the edge is sharp
It allows for a much finer control of the smoothing, and it could change everything on that alduin model.
It can take a bit more time to get all the edges you need to sharpen, but it's not really that more complex, just time consuming and would give a much better result
Very handy, thanks!
That original video was one of the reasons I decided to pull the trigger and purchase my own printer like 4 years ago, thanks Angus!
I am so shocked that the exact, perfect video that I was looking for actually exists. Thank you so much for making this tutorial, gets me even more excited for when I can finally invest in this hobby :D
As soon as I started to watch the video I noticed the new hair cut and all I thought about was you must be going to Cosplay as Zorg.
Gary Oldman's character in The 5th Element
Haha! That's what my parents said. Honestly, one of my favorite antagonists!
Crazy how the universe just kinda brings me back to Skyrim
Todd Howard wills it.
Quick tip: If a detail gets rounded over by the subdivision surface modifier and you want to bring it back, you can select the edges in edit mode that you want to restore and press Shift + E then drag the geometry to form back against the edges.
The "not loading in properly" because it is too big in blender is a clipping setting. You can also run into this working with something very large or very small. The correct fix for this behavior is in the right side view menu> "clip start" or "end" depending if it is doing it zooming in or out. This could be important if you are trying to model something at the correct size.
Edit: Just noticed the right side menus are not showing on you blender. It is called the "sidebar". 'n' button will show or hide it. I always have it on on mine.
Blender has an included "3d printing" plugin that allows you to repair meshes with a single button press. You can also voxel remesh a model in sculpt mode to make it solid and manifold if that doesn't work
Now it's time to print out an entire diorama of a Skyrim town 😅
you totally could! haha
Yes....it's here! Been waiting for this upload. Thank you sooo much Angus!
Hope it helps!
I was an adventurer like you once, then I had a spanner to my thermistor.
This new haircut suit you great, and I'll deal with it :)
Nice video as I missed the original one 7 years back !
Haha ! Cheers ;)
3D printing stuff from video games really shows the crazy fact that this technology can take something digital and make it real and physical
Dude just a glimpse of your talent! I just hope you don't get tired of it all and stop sharing
It simply warms my heart to learn you use Blender. I love Blender!
quick tipp from my side.
if you created the bridge like in 11:23 you can select the bottom edge of the open gap. after that, hit the F key. it will fill out the next bridge and therefore will create a quad face instead of an n-gone if you will the whole edge loop. hold the F key and it will fill the whole face with the next bridges. pretty cool.
Note for the legal aspect of ripping content out of the game files. It's actually written in the terms of use. And it varies between games. In most case, it's authorized for personal use (since it can't be monitored anyway).
For blender, if you want a great entry point to 3D modeling in this software, Blender Guru is your guy. Tons of content with updtated version of it's main course suiting the lastests versions of blender. Then you can go deeper with other big names in youtube that you'll probably discover during your journey.
Aengus, you totally nailed the „Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg“ from 5th Element Cosplay in the picture in picture mode! Great Job! 👍
That’s awesome, didn’t know you could print from Skyrim. I made a short tutorial on how to print from Team Fortress 2, it’s really similar, just with source engine model files. Didn’t know how to repair meshes before, this is gonna be super useful!
You know, ive been learning 3D with Zbrush and Blender for 3 years now.. i started November 2018 "Yeah, im a Geek i wrote it down when i started EARNESTLY Learning" i took 6 months off one year cause i thought "im too old to learn, i may as well just give up" at only 35 mind you.. and then i was like, no.. thats an INCREDIBLY Stupid way of thinking! ive SCULPTED all my life! literally since i was 2 with Playdoh! why would i give up on learning something ive been told is not Rocket Science.. and i went back.. and the other 6 months was just after my Mother died.. i went into a 2/3 month depressive episode, and then i had to pack for 3 entire months so i could move to my new house.. so i look at it like one of those 4 years i haven't learned anything at all.. but 3 of those years ive tried to learn at least SOMETHING every single day. and only TODAY did i finally learn what "Non Manifold" means, and how to solve it.
the only issue i can come up with is how you patched it, that made an "Ngon" which Zbrush HATES Ngons. it cannot use them. but... BUT... you could easily just make the Verts connect in different places. it doesn't gotta be pretty, just no Ngons. then you can take it into Zbrush and sculpt on top of it.
also im fairly sure if there is a way to extract the Textures out of other Video games, you can turn them into Normal Maps... and then have the Normal Maps shrink around the models to give them the texture they have in the video games.. ill have to do more research about that, though.
Yeah, think the first video for when I started 3D printing was that old Skyrim one. I wanted to find models from the game and make them for myself. Really cool to see it updated! Especially when so many more people are getting into 3D printing.
The editing and rework done to game assets would be scary to hear about through a lawyer's letter, but damn does it seem like it'd be fine so long as personal time was put into crafting it right.
Thanks for this Angus, I've found it super helpful for my Wowmodelviewer escapades rather than skyrim
If I ever get a printer I will come back to this vid and take notes. Thank you.
I see after all these years in 3D printing you finally focus on making some more beautiful prints, instead of 'just prints' ;)
If you want highly detailed models I totally recomend getting meshes straight out Skyrim mods!
For example Static Mesh Improvement Mod (SMIM) or Immersive Creatures look amazing in-game and they must look even better in real life cheers!
I love Blender.
I use to use it years ago to make models for virtual worlds.
I know a lot use 3dsmax and Maya but I always loved Blender.
Your models look cool.
there is a pluggin called F2 or something that comes with blender. it lets you literally fill stuff like that wall in 1 face at a time simply by pressing F with 1 edge selected. i use it a lot!
edge loops are your friend for preserving crisp edges with subdiv- also i think you can tell the subdiv not to touch specific points on a model.
My daughter and I made the MLP model following your video the other day and it worked great. I used the formware online repair tool and it worked well.
Haha I loved the end of the video. Angus don't sweat it, your haircut looks great!
Ah yes, Skyrim... the one I never played... as someone else said: use a normal map for displacement as it will allow you to convert the faceted/flat shaded model into the smooth shaded model, but with actual details. Normal maps are literally generated by making a really high res model and then a low res (game usable) model then "baking" the high res detail into a 3D texture (XYZ -> RGB). When the game uses it, it applies light to it and the normal map displaces it instead of the polygon, so it looks smooth instead of "low poly". Displacement modifier can do that at a geometry level instead of a shading level, which would make it more useful for 3D printing.
Edit: what I would love is for there to be either something that can turn the the texture mapped model into either separate parts for MMU printing or... because you've already gone through the process: convert the texture into a print so you can hydrodip the model. No paint, no MMU/Palette. Just a vat of liquid, a model held at a specific angle, and an image printed on some special paper... plus a mostly steady hand.
Thanks, far better description of the process than I could remember!
@@davidmcglynn2765 no problem
I'm so happy you did this i have found lots of files that I have issues with my resin printer that were done for fdm and it needs fixing, I will definitely give this a try ,thank you!!
Hmm really interesting. A lot of the Daedric weapons would go well with Chaos armies.
If you want more geometry to play with but don't want to use subdivision to avoid smoothing you can use the multiresolution modifier. Could be useful in some scenarios. It's also less destructive because you can always revert to a different LOD.
@Maker's Muse About the model not displaying correctly on Blender because of it's size. You fix that by changing the clipping of the "camera".
You do that by pressing "N" (or clicking the small arrow to the right of the XYZ gyzmo on the corner), then going to the "View" tab on that menu that opened, and then changing the "Clip Start" and "End" that are below the "Focal Length". You can play with the values but I personally use 0.01 mm and 1000 mm for start and end.
Also, not sure if this is needed but, you might need to change your Blender scaling, if so you should probably check the previous setting after you change the scale because they might change because of it.
That is done on the right side of the window, below your "Scene Collection", in a tab called "Scene Properties" (it has an icon with a cone and two spheres, at least it looks like that to me), then you go to "Units" and change the "Unit System" to "Metric" for example, and the "Unit Scale" to "0.001" so that the base scale is in millimeters.
These are good settings if the objective is to work in blender for 3D printing since we're working on models that are, most of the time, going to be millimeters and centimeters, not really meters in size.
By the way, in case you don't know, or anyone else, to keep these settings always like this, what you need to do is, open a brand new empty file, do these changes, and then go to "File" on the top left of the window, go to "Defaults" and "Save Startup File". This will make that state of Blender the default state for any new project. But take notice that if you're loading an already made file, it might load that file's configurations, even the UI, if you want to keep your configurations you need to disable "Load UI" in the Blender Preferences in "Edit" - "Preferences" - "Save & Load".
Hope these help someone. Thanks for the video.
I thought about this for years but one of these days a game company is going to be smart enough to release 3D files alongside their games. It would be nothing for them to throw together and it would be a boon for their fan communities. Honestly, movies should do it too for cosplayers. Imagine a world where a new property not only supports their fandom directly by giving them assets but maybe even designs those assets to be easy for the community to replicate in the first place. It's a massive appeal for indie games and it boggles my mind that the industry hasn't realized it yet.
I want to mention a cool feature. If you apply a subdivision mdf and then bring in the textures of the mesh using a displacement mdf you will get those textures but printables
When using the subsurf modifier you can select the bottom faces, hit the n key and set the mean crease to 1. Blender is amazing.
They've been reheating that game in the microwave for 10 years..
It's more like a stockpot, they keep adding community content and packaging it up as their own 😂
That game isnt microwaved, it was put in a cardboard solar oven you would make with your kida to make smores.
I was thinking this when he mentioned the game getting yet another "remaster" this year, like really? instead of just making a new game, they "remaster" it THREE times?
Your prints are so smooth for FDM... i thought it was resin
Cool video, Angus. I remember the original - watched it a mere couple years after its release when I got started in 3D printing. 😁
And awesome haircut.
Haircut looks great!
Good that I learned blender, now I can use it for 3d printing :)
It's honestly a really valuable skill!
@@MakersMuse I know the most functions but I am just bad at sculpting, but adding detail shouldnt be so complicated. Alpha brushes etc. arent so hard to use
I can open and close the app. That’s about it. How to learn this tool easier way
Finally I can make a ring of namaira with details!
Seven years? My goodness, seven years!
That Dwarven armour bust is beautiful, going to have to try to follow Valtech's tutorial then to remake it because I absolutely have to make it and paint it! I've developed a bit of a thing for printing dwemer stuff and painting them xD
Yesturday i printed the logo! Glad to see that you are a fan tho
The hair cut looks great, man!
I was thinking the exact opposite LOL.
The rolling/flying cart bug got me so many times i stopped playing Skyrim after years of it only
So I've been trying this method for the past few days and all those people saying you could get good results with the displacement maps either didn't try it out themselves, or know a secret method that I cannot find.
Skyrim doesn't seem to store displacement maps, only normal maps. The conversion is not super difficult, but the end result in Blender leaves quite a lot to be desired. If you're expecting a result like the Dwarven bust in the video, you'll be disappointed. It adds detail, yes, but it requires an ungodly amount of polygons (frying your pc), doesn't work with the fixing that 3D builder does (because it changes the mesh) and the end result is blurry at best. If the scale you're aiming for is 28-32mm, I would just sculpt some minor details yourself and paint the rest directly on it.
Next step is to actually print full models of your own player character. There is supposedly a method using the Outfit Studio program on the Nexus, but I haven't had time to try it out yet. I will report here later.
Great walkthrough video 👍
Thanks for sharing your experience with all of us 👍😀
Damn, I am getting old... I was in high school when this came out, skipped a couple of days of school to play it.
There are ways in some software (can't go into details without going through multiple programmes, so I'll leave it there) where you can tell the program: "I want these faces to be part of group A, these faces to be part of group B, etc." and that _separates_ these groups, so you don't get smoothing e.g. at the edge of the bases, where they should be crisp lines; with more advanced programs, you can even subdivide these groups distinctly from each other, giving you even greater control over smoothing.
I can't wait to try this, I have a full color printer (Da Vinci Color) and have not had much of a cause to use it.
Also that skyrim has been my all time favourite game
I actually love your haircut!
Nice. My favourite helmet
If the game you are ripping models from has normal, or better displacement maps; you will get much better results using those with the displacement modifier. Using a colour texture with displacement is.. not going to do much. I also find the multi-res modifier produces better results than the subdivision modifier.
You have to try the VR version :O it is so awesome to play
Thanks for the video, and love the hair cut!
VERY Nice Work!
Just saw this after figuring out Blender had a .mdl importer first thing I had to do was all the original Quake characters so now I have a Shambler on my desk I love it! Its worth doing multiple prints because of size options and many different animation frames to pick from for posing. Trying to think of next oldschool low-poly game models that can be imported that I can do next.
I'd assume unreal tournament could have some cool stuff but I have no idea how the process works so that's just a random suggestion
Angus has the best DIY haircut after the great DIY hairdresser & wizard Thomas Sanladerer :)
The Mace is btw the Mace of Malog Baal and the story to get it is hilarious.
Oh yeah! I remember now, great quest.
dude you have the coolest fruit tshirts ever. You need to make some Maker's Muse Fruit based shirts.
In nifscopes settings you can set the texture path so all models will render with their textures.
Angus “raider haircut edition”
Thanks Friend! Doing some Fallout 4 models, but seems to work the same! Thank you!
Your hair looks great man!
I somehow became a Jack of all trades and know how to rip game assets and modify them in blender, now I just need a resin printer, wish I had some help (in person) fixing the Z wobble in my Monoprice Mini
I'm pretty sure you can use the normal texture map in blender to recreate original vertex positions. You should get the original high poly models as they were created by the developers.
You can't use normal maps directly however as normal maps only store the direction of the normals at texture level and is used directly in lighting calculations to give an appearance of more complicated surface, basically it just tells dirctly in which direction the surface points at each texel, what you need is a height map which is typically not provided as it is faster to use normal maps. There are tools to convert normal maps into height maps though and I'm not sure if blender can do this natively. I think this is worth looking into.
Normal map will never give you back original high poly. It's got limited resolution so there is a limit to how much detail can be recovered, and as you say, you actually need displacement rather than just normals (even then you ewouldn't get back to the high poly because of the limited texture resolution). It's still a lot better than trying to use the color texture though. It will add details that are much better than trying to use the color texture, which is a last resort.
That "not all loading in" thing is a blender setting, you can change it.
Awesome video! Thanks for such an informative review👍👍👍
Very cool. That's a very Jo Jo Rabbit haircut though :P
II a tools works for Fallout 4 &*/or 76 then it will work for SE and (probably) AE: This is because Fallout 4 was developed using the same engine that is also in Skyrim SE. Yes, there are differences, but those are in the specific addons, not in the base engine. Plus many of those tools now have a 64 bit as well as the original 32 bit version available, and, if not there are conversion tools for SE available.
IN BLENDER to lessen the tax on your CPU - Go to the render tab and set the render device to GPU so that your graphics card (IF you have one) does all the work instead of your CPU. Makes things run tons faster.
The best universal 3D assets available here are Angus and the cutty cockatoos
On the legality aspect: I am also not a lawyer, but I did spend a decade as a law librarian and remain interested in IP law. What follows is my opinion only and NOT legal advice.
First, more than most law copyright law is all about the fine details, and those fine details vary significantly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For example, almost all copyright law protects a creation through the creator's life and for a period after their death. This latter protection is meant to allow a creators family time to transition from the lost of the "breadwinner" and dates to a time when it was assumed only one person in a home would be working, and that that person would have a wife and children. Last I checked on this, Australia's "post-death protection period" was a good 20 years shorter than the EU's and about 15 years shorter than Canada's. So investigate your local laws! My experience is in Alberta, so my knowledge is strongest on Albertan or Canadian law. Finally, I've been out of the legal arena for about 5 years now and IP law moves fast, so my knowledge might be out of date.
That said, in Canada and the United States computer programs are fully protected under copyright. So are statues. I don't know if a court has ever ruled on whether or not a 3d model is a computer program or a statue or something else, but I find it hard to imagine a judge not looking at this and going "well, it's kind of a computer program of a statue, so it makes sense that it's under copyright." In my opinion, it's best to assume that all of these models are protected under copyright law.
This means that doing *anything* to those models without a license is a breach of copyright. When you installed the game, the EUA will have granted you a license to run the program on your computer in order to play the game. It *probably* didn't give you a license to do anything else to it. Which means that ripping assets from the game and converting them to a different format probably is a copyright violation in most western jurisdictions.
Most jurisdictions do have exemptions that allow small violations of copyright for personal and educational use, but how exactly those work tend to be very specific to the jurisdiction. Canada's "personal use" rules are radically different from the United States' "fair use" rules. And these can be very detail oriented. For example, in Canada it's legal for you to photocopy one chapter of a copyrighted book for your own personal use. It is not, however, legal for an organization like a library or a university to copy that chapter and provide to someone. During the 1990s, it was even illegal for the librarian to operated the photocopier for you - at that time, you had to do all the work yourself. (Fortunately, in the early Oughts some judge (who probably had had a librarian make lots of photocopies for him) overturned that detail, and said that it didn't matter who actually pushed the green button, the important thing is what the purpose of the copying was.) Now, I have no idea if a judge would interpret the .NIF for that dragon as a single program (in which case you've copied 100% of it and "Personal Use" clearly does not apply) of if they'd interpret it as a portion of the larger program (in which case they might treat it as analagous to a "chapter of a book" and allow the "Personal Use" exemption.) It is worth noting that in Canada, you can't copy a chapter of a book under "Personal Use" and then come back a week later and copy the next chapter; as soon as you start copying the second chapter "Personal Use" no longer applies. So ripping a bunch of models would probably not be "Personal Use" in Canada even if the judge decided they were all parts of a single, larger work.
The question of whether or not one will get in *trouble* for doing this, however, is distinct from whether or not it's *legal*. Copyright can be enforced at any time, and (unlike trademarks) choosing not to enforce your copyright in one instance doesn't prevent you from enforcing it in a different instance. Which basically means that, as long as one isn't costing a company money or moral standing or potential future work, it's usually not worth their time to enforce. (Costing them money is obvious. Costing them future money is fairly clear - for example, if you ripped the models and used them to make a CGI movie and Bethesda was all "hey, we thought we might maybe make a movie in the future so you can't do that." Moral standing is less intuitive to people, but companies and people do act to enforce copyright to protect their public image. Bethesda probably wouldn't care if you used art from their games to promote a high school science fair, but they'd probably come down on you like a ton of bricks if you used that art to promote a white supremacist rally.) So here, I'd agree with Angus: use this process for your own, private activities, don't go around selling copies of it on etsy, and it's unlikely Bethesda will even notice you've done it. And there's no "copyright police." In order for copyright to be enforced, the copyright holder has to take action to do so.
Finally, the bust. This is a derivative work; the bust started with Bethesda's copyrighted model and then Angus' mate added their own work to it. Most jurisdictions say that if you change something just a little, the original copyright still applies, but if you change it a *lot* or transform it to a new medium, then it's a new artwork with it's own copyright. Exactly where this but would land on that scale is going to really depend on the jurisdiction and the judge, and so this one I will just leave lie.
Once again, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and copyright laws are very different in different jurisdictions. Before taking any action that may have legal consequences, one ought to consult a lawyer.
Amazing, now I can print a set of dwemer armor
Cool T-Shirt!
Good revisit! I sure hope it stays ..legal..ha. I sure do see a lot of for sale models that clearly were ripped and then tweaked by talent to look better for printing. That might be considered 'fan art'..idk.
Watching this while playing Skyrim.
cool hair cut they let you out over there Angus
nice video
Great video, many thanks man
Cheers! Hope it helps.
can confirm it still works on the legendary edition,
The UV Map displacement, it didn't look like your texture didn't line up with your model's UV map. I think, since you used 3D Builder to fix the model, the UV map is probably all over the place and not how it originally was with the game model. You can kinda tell when looking at the lower part of the base at around 21:02.
I've got an unopened Mars 2 Pro & graphics tablet waiting for me to go through CGBoost's blender basics and sculpting series and learn how to do all this myself. I'm ambitious but uber keen :)
I'm going to try this with Elden Ring models (using other tutorials to export) once I get a pc
I’d love to get a specific Transformers War For Cybertron Starscream pose screen captured like this but only have a laptop now. Pretty I’d still have the game if I could remember my steam account. Might have to try learning this if can get a computer one day.
Wish I could get into this just seems like a really expensive hobby to do at good quality as I’d want to print decent sized statues.
23:02 am I the only one who recognized this eall just by knowing it from jumping over it hundreds of times to kill a giant with the companions?
Thank you for the video! I'm planning to turn one of my daughter's barbie into a Skyrim viking :)
I've been waiting for an updated how-to on game assets. I will try this on Fallout 4. I never got into Skyrim. 😬
Just wondering, would it be possible to add the original bumpmaps instead of textures in blender? Those represent actual 3D data, so will probably give a better result than textures.
absolutely if you're able to source them. I'm honestly not sure how.
@@MakersMuse A quick google gives me "The game engine automatically determines the name of the normal map by using the name of the diffuse texture and adding "_n" to it. Example: Helmet.dds --> Helmet_n.dds." So I guess all I have to do is do what you did in 20:28 but then use the _n textures instead of the normal ones? The only issue is that they don't show up in the selection. I'm not a blender expert, any idea how to make them show up?
@@interficiam You could modify the MTL file so all the textures have _n before you import the OBJ into Blender.