3D-printing Sims3 lot
Hello, EA Customer support.
I am Sims 3 owner and a Sims fan from very long time ago.
Today's technologies are so advanced that I even get impressed. The question and support I need is related to 3D printing.
Most 3D printing services work with normal 3D model / scene formats, like Wavefront OBJ, 3Ds, Blender, Collada and so on. Even Minecraft fans already made mods for Minecraft to export meshes for 3D printing, which is cool.
But The Sims 3 remains is the best tool for digital household modeling, despite being a "game". I like it more than AutoCad by the way 🙂 But getting AutoCad arch being 3D printed is straight-forward, while getting the lot content out of Sims 3 is very hard and requires too much work.
Programs like 3D Ripper DX do good job at extracting the house lot geometry, and in The Sims 2, I was able to dump the textures as well with a single click. Some touching in 3D Studio Max is then required to make the lot printable by a 3D Printer (because 3D printers like solid-state geometry). Me and a friend managed to successfully 3D-print Sims 2 lot about 3 years ago with lots of headache.
The Sims 3 case with all these procedural shaders is very different. While I can manage to dump the household geometry and align it to terrain in 3D Studio Max, all floor, wall and object textures aren't dumped to the 3D file because of the shader complexity.
Further tinkering into the game reqires me to write too much custom code for dumping the textures.... and the only aim of all this is to make my lot a real-life model materialized by services like Shapeways.
My question is: Will Maxis / EA someday make 3D printing service or at least a tool / feature that exports the household as Collada DAE file or something like this? If no, is there any plan of supporting the Community to write such a tool? If such a tool or way already exists, can you direct me in the proper way - how to export textured lot from the Sims 3, possibly without too much pain?
If we, the community, can 3D-print our lots without so much ripping, dumping, tinkering, DirectX Hooking and other forms of unneeded reverse-engineering, then not just the value of the Sims will increase drastically, but the connumity will have the best tool for creating real-life house models. Such models can also be a perfect souvenire for a gift, and very valuable decoration object for our real-life houses and the true Sims fans.
Yes, I know that EA may care too much about Intellectual property problems, but anyway, with programs like 3D Ripper DX everybody can steal geometry if he wish, and you can always sue them if they use these in their commercial games 🙂 The aim is that the community will greatly benefit from a feature that can make our digital creation a real-life object 🙂
