3D printing of Wow Characters

Community General Discussion
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Would really love to be able to 3D print my wow character. I’ve played this character for 15+ years now and would LOVE to have a replica of her in the physical form. But I see no option to do this. I found some 3rd party options, but most are out dated.

Blizzard this would be a GREAT store option to sell the STL files…your still getting a profit. :wink: just saying.

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At one time several years ago Blizzard offered this service to have your own chara. But not sure what happen to this.

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You can sort of accomplish this with hero forge. Though i think it would be amazing if Blizzard, and other gaming companies, work with them to male the process better.

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I’ll do it. Pay me instead! :3
https://ibb.co/2t3xDMG my current project

Also, you can’t really just extract the obj’s and 3D print them. WoW models are all textures and you’d need a true colour printer unless you hard model in the details and resculpt them manually like I’m currently doing.

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Game models aren’t the same as printer capable models. It takes many hours to make a wow model printable.

A quick google explains better;

What I mean is that by default videogame character models are not meant to be 3D printed. They are not watertight meshes (meaning that the mesh does not fully enclose an area) and often have single-layer parts (usually hair, armor, or ornamentation).

In order to make them 3D printer ready, you must clean up the mesh.

  • Hair must be given a thickness or removed. Doll shops can easily provide the hair you need for smaller figures (my 14" statue/poseables line) or a wig (the giant Sylvanas).
  • “Floater” parts that aren’t physically connected must either be anchored to or separated entirely from the model.
  • Meshes must be closed/watertight. You can easily see errors resulting from open meshes in most slicers.
  • Anything that intersects another part must either be joined or separated away. Some parts are best attached; others are best separated. Unfortunately there is no hard-and-fast rule about this and the best teacher here is experience.
  • It is often better to print in pieces, then assemble rather than trying to build the entire character at once. This depends heavily on character shape and model level-of-detail, however. Kirby? Sure, one-shot. Overwatch Reinhardt? Probably better done in pieces.
  • Some videogame characters will look “blocky” when 3D printed. Much of this is hidden with clever texturing tricks, but a 3D printer doesn’t use those. Therefore, using smoothing techniques is highly recommended unless you’re deliberately going for a blocky look.
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There used to be a company called Figure Prints that would print your character based on its Armory entry. I should have bought a couple while they existed.

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Honestly, a simple Zbrush Dynamesh fixes alot of the problems half the time.
But more than that, you’d need to rig the model, and pose it, unless you want a super exciting tpose.
And cloaks are also just a simple planar mesh that uses transparency maps, so a lot of this stuff would require modelling by hand.

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All of it takes lots of work, even if simple, and lots of work, is lots of time, and lots of time is lots of money.

My friend won’t do it for any less than 500 euros.

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https://ibb.co/HYhhZnC

Just got my own 3D printer :3

(shame I lost ears and a hand but I’m actually surprised it even more or less worked in one go, except the swords)

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I’ve seen some people print out models in several pieces. Kind of like the warhammer tabletop minis and such.

Maybe that could be interesting to look into for you!

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Yeah you’re definitely better off if you break them down first. Was just curious to see what it could pull off, and honestly I’m very pleasantly surprised!
The 3D printer I used in work would’ve turned something much simpler than that into spaghetti if I tried to do it one go.

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I’m bumping this cause this really needs to happen. I also want to 3D print my Characters. I don’t have a 3D printer but would like to pay for someone to print my characters would like my characters to be figurines for memory sake. Parden my small necro but this is important.

I wish Blizzard would do this.

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It’s not quite the same, but on Christmas, my husband had the log in screen of my character laser etched into a block of glass. It’s pretty cool looking.

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There use to be a company that would make statues of your character. Different races, poses, armor & Weapons. Kinda like the wowhead dressing room. But I think they either stopped doing this or just stopped in general a number of years ago. Havent heard a peep about them in a long time.

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Probably because WoW doesn’t allow .obj downloads any more and WoW model viewer hasn’t been updated in a long time.

Your best bet now is using WoW-Export but you’d have to download all the parts, put them together like lego, and then you’d have to manually model, rig and pose them before you’ve even printed and airbrushed them.

Seriously though, if people are interested enough, I might even consider getting into this msyelf. As long as people understand how work actually goes into this because it wouldn’t be as cheap as people might think.

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I got mine printed of my DK tauren back in wrath. So glad I got it when they offered the service.

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Hmm. I knew this used to be a thing. I guess I’m glad I’m not attached to individual characters enough to want this, with how its apparently no longer a thing, which means going through individuals with 3D printers instead, which means potentially questionable quality.

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I’d prefer to have a tshirt with my main printed on the back heh

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I guess you could always use a high quality screenshot, crop as desired and send it to any photo printing company that also does t-shirts, posters, mugs, and whatnot. Kind of a fun idea really.

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It was stupidly expensive