Can we get 3D printer plans for ship minis instead, directly through CIG?asked by Jano
TL;DR3D printer files for ship minis are an appealing idea they'd like to do, but they need a lot of work, since models need reformatting and reducing for different printers.
We've talked about that before. That's a very cool idea. It takes a lot of bandwidth, actually, because there are several types of 3D printers, and they all require the models to be formatted differently. And so there's a lot of research that goes into it, and then we'd have to hire an artist to do that and to reduce them, because you don't need 10 million polys. It's a lot of bandwidth. It's something I think we're all interested in. We all would like to do.
People will write in and ask for that stuff. It's really not as easy as pulling the file and giving it to you.
It never is. Ask Mr. Combustible, the guy who made this up there, how much work went into taking our game model and converting it into something that could actually be printed. Firespikes was his helper on that, by the way, so kudos to both of them. It was a lot of work.
In the original Wing Commander 1, Wing Commander 2, Privateer, they didn't have 3D models in the game because they had bitmaps. They had a high-res 1990 model, they would render it in every possible position, and then the actual game contains the bitmapped images and scales and moves them. So I have in my archive most, but not all, of the original high-res 1990s models for Wing Commander, from Wing Commander 2, Privateer, Strike Commander, a couple of others. And when 3D printing, Shapeways, all that became a thing, I was so excited. Oh my god, I'm going to print all the ships from Wing Commander. No, it's way more complex. They did not design those models to be 3D printed. All sorts of holes and things you never see in them. It takes days and days and days just to get one ready.