Convert any 3D Game mesh to OBJ for use in blender

Question

There are few games that deliver it's own Development Kit so you can decompile and modify the game assets in this case the geometry of the models by converting them to a general geometry file format that almost every 3D modeling software can use like Wavefront OBJ.

However, there are lots of games that don't deliver tools for unpacking the assets and some games even restrict it by encrypting the packages that contain the assets with proprietary encryption tools which you can't find anywhere on the internet to decrypt the packages.

My idea: Every 3D Game, no matter what engine it runs on and how well the asset encryption is, have one thing in common: they use geometry, meshes that has to be rendered by the graphics card.

Is there a way you can get in between the game and the graphics card to take the geometry that has been sent by the game to the graphics card and convert it into a obj file so you can use it in blender?

Answer 1

Nevermind! I just found a program that lets you get the geometry of any 3D game.

It's called NinjaRipper made by blackninja. It simply takes all meshes that are currently loaded in the system memory or the graphics memory (I don't really know where the model files go when a game is loading) and saves them.

However, it doesn't output the meshes directly .obj files, but it comes with a Blender add-on (along with add-ons for other 3D modeling software) that lets you import the .rip files. It also takes the textures of the models and saves them as .dds files.

So far NinjaRipper is the only program that is capable of "snapshotting" meshes along with their textures in almost every game. I haven't found a competitive program on the entire internet yet that does the same. I hope that the development of this awesome program continues in the future.